Football, often referred to as the beautiful game, has evolved far beyond raw athleticism and skill. In today’s competitive landscape, success on the field requires a deep understanding of tactics, where split-second decisions and strategic planning can determine the outcome of a match. The importance of tactical mastery cannot be overstated; teams that employ the most effective strategies often find themselves lifting trophies, while others are left wondering where they went wrong. In this article, we delve into the science behind football tactics, dissecting the formations, pressing techniques, and counterattacks that define modern football. From the high-octane gegenpress to the meticulous possession play of tiki-taka, we will explore how these tactics have shaped the game and contributed to the success of some of the greatest teams in football history. Whether you’re a coach, a player, or a fan looking to deepen your understanding of the game, this guide offers a comprehensive look at the strategies that can turn the tide in any match.
1. Introduction to Football Tactics
In a football game, no team will have an inherent level of technical skill and physical fitness that is sufficiently superior to the opposing team, making the outcome of a game predictable based on such factors. Hence, to emerge as a winner in a football game, teams are expected to utilize strategies that have been deliberately developed based on some rational analysis. This paper focuses on the rational analyses of football tactics in order to highlight four areas of concern in the tactics of association football in order to comprehend it. It is important to note that this paper does not and will not discuss the various ways of analysis of football tactics. In other words, this is an analysis of the analysis of football tactics, and more.
1. Football tactics: an overview. In football or association football generally, the tactics are referred to as the football playing forms. The formations can be roughly divided into two: one that includes the personal tactical characteristic and the other that summarizes the players’ positioning. We should understand the formations both ways and discuss them from those heterogeneous aspects. Football playing is a part of the football system, which includes coaches, players, system complexity and methodology, as on and on, that teaches basic principles of play that can be applied to a variety of formations and tactics in soccer. Most importantly, the coach gives the knowledge and develops a deep understanding of association football.
1.1. Brief History of Football Tactics
Four illustrative games of the last 50 years map out the development of football tactics. Evoked together, they paint five and a half decades of football history. First, Hungary master West Germany 6-3 in 1954; Brazil beat Italy 4-1 in 1970; South Korea draw with Italy 1-1 in 2002; and in 2019, Liverpool beat Tottenham Hotspur 2-0. These four games map an interesting history. They document how football tactics arise from kick and rush through the inverted winger age, followed by total football and tiki-taka, and then culminating in the gegenpress and the 4-3-3 of Jürgen Klopp.
Football tactics have a rich and varied history that can be distilled down into some basic building blocks: attacking the opponent’s weakness in wide areas, begetting the funnel, rendering it bountiful for inverted wingers (the popular attacking tactic of the 1960s and 1970s), was born of the tactical innovation of attacking options. Developing out of Hungary’s misdirection, it flourished as wingers shunned traditional wide escapades, instead forming mazy, attacking inverted runs. With the invention of the 4-4-2 by Sir Alf Ramsey, stomachs reversed, and the European Continental game gradually became the international game. Total Football was very much part and parcel of Rinus Michels’s playing style, the arch proponent of the 4-3-3. He believed in keeping width because it drew out defenders, piercing the defensive line wider, propitious for ball-carriers. His heraldry of a squad played enormously successful–viz the Dutch Euro ’88 victory Russia in on penalty–catalysing the political transition into the World Cup winner by France in 1998, catalysing the football transition into Zinedine Zidane and Roberto Carlos and the peak of the 4-4-2.
2. Key Elements of Tactical Analysis
At the very crux of football tactics, there are two elements which constitute its very axis, and which tactical analysis should ultimately be aiming to inform and improve. Let us expose and explain both of them.
Tactical awareness is a capability a player, team or manager has to read the game as it happens, and to anticipate its evolution before it plays out. It underpins the general notion of “reading the game”, “reading the play” or “knowing”—certain talks focused on in this literature review. Tactical awareness is a very complex skill that must inform both mental models of representation (how a manager/analyst sees the game) and anticipation (how a player interprets a stimulus and analyzes before making decisions). Throughout this text, it is largely implied that tactical analysis serves this element of football. That is, it supports a manager’s perception of a team’s and players’ decision-making, to understand a player’s decision-making—be that before it happens or after it happens.
Tactical interpretation is another element of football. It starts with the coach or analyst reading the game and its evolution, to try and anticipate what could happen or the most likely outcomes that are to come. This is what Inaki Bravo (analyst at Manchester City) calls predicting, running internally likely simulations. As he put it, mentioning Guardiola’s taking manual notes during games: “We have such a powerful algorithm in our brain, and he uses the field to show his brain what is the real thing. […] While he’s making these notes on TV, he’s forcing himself to run simulations in his head, as he’s predicting what is going to happen next. Because it takes an enormous amount of mental effort to do this, that’s why it slows his writing down. However, it’s not just about predicting or seeing what is coming next.”
2.1. Formations and Systems
There is no such thing as the very best formation. All formations have an Achilles’ heel. They will have tactical weaknesses (i.e. shorter-term and easier to exploit) and strategic ones (i.e. longer-term and harder to fix). Indeed, many opponents will actually ‘like’ facing so-called ‘problematic’ formations because they will expect less attack and/or face transitions in advantageous circumstances. It could even be said that in certain match/game situations, facing a formation that lacks balance will be a reward in itself!
When investigating the 4-4-2 against 4-2-3-1 couple of years ago, I concluded that the key is not so much the “player triangle” itself, but how a defensive player is dragged out when wrongfully handling the opposing player(s). A player might end up in a “no man’s land” where he does not place adequate pressure for avoidance of passes, nor effectively covers an opposing player.
This shapes the team both defensively and offensively, creating the playing style. An example of a system creating a certain unique playing style is the so-called “allez les bleus”. This is how Italy became world champions in 2006 without performing any striking attacking play. The system is a strategy and provides a meaningful and proper strategy center for all team actions, movements, and behaviors. Further, it repeats the geographical division of the field and the roles of the players and the areas they are responsible for.
Accordingly, the three parts of the system include the defenders: central defenders (usually two) as off-side lines and as on-the-ball players, both fullbacks or wingbacks on the sides of the field and in the back outside areas, and the goalkeeper; there are more defenders than the attackers. Then there are the midfielders as five players composed of: usually the three forward defenders as on-the-ball players but also five forwards (three midfielders and the two wide midfielders) outside the danger area attempting to receive balls and progressively attack into it. Finally, the forwards are usually composed of: the two central defenders (one attacking, one usually less so) and occasionally both fullbacks, the attacker is attempting to run past the offensive side of opposing defenders from behind, at an angle, penetrating further into the dangerous area as he can manipulate the offensive and defensive positioning of the opposing defenders through use of the off-the-ball probing positional runs.
3. Offensive Tactics
In America, football changed when legendary Ohio State coach Woody Hayes began opting for his 3 yards and a pile of dust approach in the 1960s over the flashy new forward pass. Wrestle, to put it simply, lets you pursue viable strategies in an attempt to win the game or put your opponent in a winning mindset. Football has followed the Big 3 of the nation’s four best teams, and most consequential results benefit those in the know at the top of the. While the goal of Wrestle is to expand its global reach, the World Games are held to provide millions of new fans with a first glimpse of the sport. They also give us an opportunity to test new formats that could make the game more dynamic in order to attract younger audiences. We officially reached a multi-sport audience of around a billion from our base of 100,000 on the mats in 2013.
The last major topic in football is tactics, which is an important one for big picture content on the college football season. The section will attempt to determine which aspects of soccer tactics will be discussed most often in the book. The majority of our case studies are offensive game red zone games, so it makes sense to start here. The offensive strategies are likely to be discussed in great depth. It’s always better to score three points than none; a touchdown is always the goal. Defense wins games, and you hope your offense can put together an efficient, time-consuming drive to wear down your opponent’s defense. Hope that they shoot themselves in the throat once inside that the 20; don’t send the house because they almost never turn it over. Safe to say it’s a fair tactic that has the overwhelming support of fans in the room.
3.1. Possession-Based Play
Chapman devised a rudimentary form of the offside law (where a player cannot play the ball before the second defensive line) and instructed players to play in what had previously been ‘the fashion of street football roads.’ This allows players the ability to play the ball anywhere they see an advantage and the ball to be thrown where it is needed. Nonetheless, it is clear Ackerman still places a high value on playing the ball through the channels, and his players closely follow the tactics laid out by Chapman in his pre-match analysis. The general idea of the intricate tactical football revolves around building an attack from the defensive line with time and space on the ball, and then playing through the ‘channels.’ For example, a long ball played into the half space behind the central defenders is deemed dangerous.
It is preaching traits rapid possession, and the players are expected to hold the ball for as long as possible, as Ackerman believes, ‘when we keep the ball long enough.’ The other point to emphasize is to play the ball out the back to build an attack from the goalkeeper and centre backs. It is a trap for the opposition who may ‘swarm in packs’ (remain compact) to the ball, where they can be caught out and a pass through the channels can penetrate the lines. Possession is of significance, which is an able way to complete the first line of defenders. Possession is more critical in the final third of the field. According to Ackerman, ‘there were years missed in which the mere possession of the ball was valued in itself, no matter what had been done with it.’ With Ackerman in charge, the team says it is more realistic following the execution phase and switching the passive dominance into an active way to pursue and score.
4. Defensive Tactics
The aim of defense is to prevent the opposition from scoring, either through creating chances or turning these chances into goals. The goal of tactics, however, is not necessarily to win possession of the ball itself. Instead, the aim is to limit the opposition’s goal-scoring chances as much as possible. Although much of the principles will overlap between attacking tactics and defensive tactics, as tactics are in many ways just a series of guidelines for behavior, we can separate the two by discussing what specifically teams should do on defense, as opposed to attack.
To restrict goal-scoring chances that the opposition receive, a team must prevent them from creating them outright by thwarting breakaways or go from chances into goals by limiting long-range shots and headers from outside the box. These principles are dealt with below. Traditional tactics view the players in a back-four and the goalkeeper as the first line of defense. Every player must be difficult to play against, individually, and also work together as a team for collective defense of the goal. To do this, defenders must read the game, foresee the flow of play, and adjust their positioning accordingly. A solid unit can close down scoring opportunities and allow a goalkeeper to save any shots that find the goal, says Alex Pfeffer, a mathematician at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.
4.1. Pressing and Counterpressing
One defensive tactic is pressing, an aggressive confronting of your opponent to regain possession. However, not every team has the capability to execute pressing and that might be an issue in using it properly. The opposite of pressing is that you have to face some issues when you consider to stop pressing. If you decrease the pressure against your opponent, the opposition might find it easier to build up their possession. If this is done properly, it can lead to the build-up attack of the team executing the pressing to get neglected. This is called tactical pressing, which is the mechanism of breaking other teams out of their routines.
One main focus has been laid on the effectiveness of pressing in a specific playing zone. Rather than focusing on the pressing activities, there has been a refined study related to the effectiveness of the press depending on the number of options to which a pass is available. By this further advancement, there has been a focus on the current research on the pressure situations in the central defense and midfield. This type of advance tends to consider when and where the recoveries are made immediately with a quick transition into the attack. With such advances, there is a focus on the counterpressing recoveries which allow transition into the attack. In a recent game, in the defense, multiple players can play as a combination to regain possession of the ball. But counterpressing begins once a ball has been lost and the players are out of possession, and all the aspects have now to be taken into action.
5. Set Pieces and Special Situations
One would assume that set pieces are low-hanging fruits in the portfolio of football tactics. Practice usually involves showing a couple hundred repetitions of the same free kick play, showing that the viewers do not value these parts of the game. But tunnel-visioned set piece practice, aimed at one play repeatedly, misses the bigger picture: those with the best set piece conversion percentages often also have the best attacking moves and aim at scoring a “secondary goal,” rather than directly converting the chance. Another way of getting intriguing results in set piece strategies is to focus on the defensive aspects, disallowing the opponent to even have a chance; in practice, the field is quite large and thus this logic is not entirely transferable.
Most free kick situations share the characteristic of having one of the two teams in a very, very concentrated formation spread out in the opponent’s half, with the majority of the formation densely packed in the box or its vicinity. The only equivalents are corner kicks, throw-ins, and the three-kick situation. The offensive team’s strategy, then, is clear: create a mess for the opponents in order to clear a path for the ball to reach an attacker in a scoring position. Therefore, players will attempt to screen the goalkeeper, make themselves available as target, or move in a way that is hard to mark. The average probability of an open play shot from a scoring position directly leading to a goal is about 11%. What can be expected when having possession after a free kick or corner has been played?
6. Innovative Tactics in Modern Football
More recent additions to the library of football tactics literature include only three books centered on the most innovative tactics found in the macro (i.e. the team) or meso (i.e. units of players or sub-units thereof) layers of play within contemporary African professional-club football. Currently, there are excellent academic papers that are published annually through the Football Analytics, which is an international conference that is organized in the Netherlands, where potential readers of football tactics literature can access cutting-edge research data on the subject. Thus, the present text is possibly the most updated one-stop shop for those football enthusiasts who revel in discovering newfangled ways in which to accomplish their ‘footballing’ objectives on the field.
Since re-normalizing football formations became fashionable due to the Dutch “total football” of the 1970s, we have seen little in terms of tactical innovation that has not merely been an extreme, re-normalizing approach to the game. Even so, the infusion of technology into the sport and its exports has allowed for the widespread dissemination of coaching tutorials and the development of more sophisticated Workload and Performance Tracking Systems that could be pioneered and developed so that the scope of user-friendly tactical innovations post-engineered excellence was ‘inversely’ expanded: from performance-driven analyses towards the structuring of performance pathways in order to innovate the tactical, in other words. The tactics not of exactly how formations are dribbling positions off the park, increasing pass completion percentages, set-piece conversion rates and possession-based invaders winning matches thereafter, but of how the structural modes of playing could be changed to appear so much better than the very best of even such aforementioned.
Referees are also likely to benefit from these technological developments as we construct multi-camera tracking systems and work on players (eventually with referees) through computer vision algorithms as essential components. Such specific contexts of advantage would also spawn extraordinary areas of on-field architectural sub-fields in football, such as quantitative, qualitative, and digital spatial analysis, and tactical analytics, never before actually seen or operational in scale. Vigorous interest had spread to geometrical investigations in football because specific recent mathematical techniques now allow for it to us with ease.
6.1. Data Analytics in Tactical Decision-Making
The modern football game has been constantly evolving and getting more competitive. Nations and teams are always searching for an edge. The proper use of statistics and data analytics to assist in the decision-making task involved in team sports is becoming increasingly popular in many sport industries.
In football (soccer), specific advanced data collected about an individual, the team, or even the opposition during the match was restricted to in-house evaluation of performance. This was based on the intuition of coaches and squads. Nonetheless, football has become more valued for insightful analysis and less for mere observation or notes. This exponentially growing volume of data allows for a more comprehensive assessment of football performance, dictating a revolution in football tactics.
The correct and applicable knowledge of these numerical indicators can help to plan a game strategy. Although conventional factors such as a coach’s education and experience cannot and should not be substituted by statistics and data, data analysis could underpin decision-making processes. To date, the empirical research investigating this “match analysis” in professional football has concentrated on the season variations of playing performance, key performance indicators, and position-specific midfielder activity.
Recently, objective variables are used to describe the highest level of practice in team sport. It is interesting to see whether elite assistant coaching staff, in this instance, views and embraces “team performance analysis” as an important but independent element within the tactical knowledge-based process of elite football.
7. Case Studies of Successful Tactics
The impact of a good tactical plan has been proved to be high. Every coach would like to achieve even one of those scenarios throughout the formation of his strategy. Every year, sport analysis literature attempts to find a successful background that helps to understand the reasons for such success. This attempt will only be possible by searching the “why” attitude from coaches at a philosophy and tactical viewpoint.
Case Studies of Successful Tactics. We could have highlighted any of the 60 cases in this study, but we have limited ourselves to a minimum so that we can go deeper and give possible ideas about the root of those tactical plans. The games were chosen for two main reasons. Firstly, a team was able to prevail because of their great tactical preparation and approach, sometimes before other main skill areas, so this usually supports these specific teams, setting up a long-term strategy, while sometimes these victories are rare and unrepeatable. Secondly, we have highlighted games that have a determination impact in history, football strategy, and our current modern game (and not on a direct level). We tried to answer some objective questions. These are quite fascinating because it’s not about which tactic was the best, because modern sports tactics are very complex systems and it is impossible to organize them into a concrete, very clear, and linear strategy to follow. It is actually the connections and the series of “Got influenced through” which are actually important. Represented football is not just tactics or 4-3-3 or a 3-4-1-2, but the art, the randomness of sport, the innovative approach to creating a non-linear approach both in an offensive manner and in a defensive way that can easily be made by dozens of other ways.
7.1. Barcelona’s Tiki-Taka
While FC Barcelona assembled a once-in-a-lifetime generation of footballers to play in their team, the tactical variant that was identified with it also became known as “Barcelona’s Tiki-Taka.” At the basis, the tactics around the football were developed in the 1930s and 1940s through numerous practice games between sports academics in the schoolyard at Battersea Teacher’s College. These matches took place on pitches only twenty yards wide. As a player’s first touch could take you out of the playing area if not played accurately, the emphasis shifted to maintaining possession through an effective passing game, with the only long pass being a cross at the edge of the playing area. Besides these spatial constraints, there was another factor that players had to deal with: Every call in 11-a-side required the ball to stay within the playing area. The small facilities and the thin rosters therefore penalized the individual skills at the expense of the teams, which was clearly visible in the play. The compact lines of the 2-3-5 formation allowed for a better loss of the ball recovery and the immediate switching into a formation suitable for building up.
The method of Barcelona focuses on stability and safe-ball circulation, and an attack designed around attacking the sides. The unselfish and tireless work of its players in defense includes high pressure and increased ball recovery rate. Barcelona’s history is closely linked with tiki-taka football due to the arrivals in its junior categories of players with Spanish background. The club proposed an evolution of this learning with the intention of creating the optimal player: intelligent, excellent individual technique (especially at first touch), good position control with the ball, and good vision with passes oriented toward maintaining possession. Every pass is an inch-perfect gem, as if precision can be measured in carats, while the movement of the players off the ball is just as perfect. Now, unlike at Monchengladbach, the team’s approach isn’t about speed but about patience and possession who can mask even three consecutive backwards passes before attacking with impossible vision, intelligence, and incredible speed.
8. The Role of the Manager in Tactical Development
More than delegators of power, football managers are key figures in the tactical development of football. Placing orders, making decisions, establishing plans, organizing workers, and controlling tasks have been some of the arguments used by leaders to show their influence on tactics. Therefore, this section will analyze the actions of football managers – protagonists who have to guide and organize their players on the pitch. They are visual leaders who have to provide a clear tactical vision that they want to achieve. They are individuals who are present and contextual, but also have the role of improvising, creating, and imagining a tactical future for their team. At the same time, their history has to be combined with visionary qualities, as they are responsible for providing and leading a tactical model that must be the identity of the team in the present and future. As Martí Perarnau notes in his latest book ‘Pep Guardiola. L’Évolutiu’ (2019), “Pep’s life is tactics. He lives for football. He loves it.”
The football manager was traditionally a solitary figure in the backroom, exhausted by the pressure of turning the wheels of a football transatlantic usually supported on the shoulders of their players. The change in the 21st century has led to an increase in the manpower behind the scenes. Despite significant changes in the management room, it has inherited the duties and gestures that have always been associated with the training ground and the club offices. Then a fist, now a fist pump; then talks, now talks and then the bell; then a notebook, now a tablet; press room obtains, moths room today. Football is still alive… outside. If the manager transitions from a backroom manager to the sidelines, the touchline must represent their orders and guidelines more than their gestures. In that sense, a leader has to be stubborn in their tactical conception, applying appropriate tactical strategies in training exercises. In the words of Sacchi, a manager has “to look for tactical innovation within the training sessions.”
9. Psychological Aspects of Tactics and Decision-Making
The Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde phenomenon or the mass effect – these are two terms that highlight the differences between individual and collective performances. So, which individual ‘dysfunctions’ within a team could prevent it from performing, even if the other team members are individually gifted? Maurice Lipsedge faced this question during a conference he held at Bath University in 1969. At that time, he was the director of the Portman Clinic in London and worked as a psychiatrist for several professional football clubs. He stressed the importance of individual fear and anxiety thinking in relation to peak performance in his brief account. Reducing anxiety and fear can therefore play a key role in performance. Michael Wieser’s findings support this argument. According to him, inhibition and the resultant slowing down of cognitive and motor processes not only influence pace and the ability of judgement from a tactical point of view by limiting the range of possible and rational courses of action, but can also affect stamina and economic (in the technical performance sense) effectiveness.
As shown in the Management of Self-Talk in Football: The Influences of Instruction and Performance Outcome, thoughts shape emotions and provoke arousal that, in turn, shapes motivation, the decision-making process aimed at developing one’s activities. Two levels of self-perception interfere in the decision-making process: a semi-voluntary perception which relates to immediate awareness in action and the lower perception which initially conditions conscious tactical intentions. There is therefore a very short time gap between an objective being formed and the action carried out. A conscious tactical decision could thus set much earlier in the player’s mind. It can be problematic when this type of decision gets misused from the tactical point of view. This could happen, for instance, if the action would require instant adaptation and the previous intention from which they sprung previously interferes. Then, from here not only the direct consequences, which affect the corresponding options and victory, derive from unconscious options, but in the long term, they may lead to difficulties in the decision-making process and subsequently, implicitly, to the formation of tactics. Only on this last level does the problem become a matter for technical analysis. Since the self-talk process affects all sections of the game, a partial solution is to teach approach-inductive tactics, which can also help guide the technical and physical control system as well.
10. Ethical Considerations in Football Tactics
In Sepp Herberger’s time, tactics were considered a “trade secret”. Trainers took their best ideas with them to their graves, discussing them only amongst themselves. The reasoning was that those who play football at the highest level should rely on talent, creativity, and perhaps a bit of cunning to get ahead. The thought of revealing even a single strategic idea to the opposition was unthinkable. It was an attitude that exemplified the traditional German approach to football: many of the pioneering football philosophers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were Germans who spent a great deal of time discussing the theoretical basis for the game and how to achieve success. Yet the logical fruits of these deliberations were rarely borne out in subsequent practice. There was always an ethical consideration: even if a tactical breakthrough was mooted, it was almost always dismissed as unfair, because the other teams would not yet be ready to meet such intellectual challenges.
The struggle between the ethical high ground on the one hand and the benefits of ensuring either status quo or actually being ahead of the game on the other has always been discussed in football. In 1867, for example, the ‘Abingdon Schoolboy’ was wrestling with his conscience largely in the same way many football strategists do today. He wrote, “I wrote to you a hurried note the day I left Abingdon, to answer your very interesting question about how far it is right and good to discuss one’s experiences and successes with others. It is an awfully difficult question, and I have thought it over a great deal since. I have come to the conclusion that it is right, especially if one were an astronomer or a discoverer in any way. But fashioning a new and an improved system of play is not quite the same thing, for we are governed in a great measure by local customs, and we may not improve. I cannot put the matter before you as I can in my own mind, and so I do not know whether I have made it clear to you.”
11. Future Trends in Football Tactics
At the time of writing, the incredible asymmetries of football strategy in a game context represent a radical and emerging trend. Football tactics, once a prosaic form, seem set to exhibit a degree of complexity unimaginable in prior literature. Balance, another ancient strategy principle, is currently being exploited to push the boundaries of conventional football tactics, a strategy refinement discussed in the previous section of this article. By provoking major changes in football strategies, balance has caused game-breaking and game-channeling strategies to emerge at the elite level. This has, in turn, potentially made the press-resistance principle obsolete as the inevitable tactical response to man-oriented gaps.
Football is not only a long way from reaching the tactical equilibrium of closed, aggressive, pressing sides and clever, possessive, hold-up sides; it is accelerating away from it. The tactical space of football now allows sides the opportunity to compete at varying combinations of open vs. closed and aggressive vs. retentive. Tactically neutral principles—in the spirit of excursions or key turnovers—could and should be developed for such sides. More complex roles and responsibilities. In the future, variations of 4-4-2 (12 players on- and off-ball) and differentiations of W-M will continue to dominate the tactical landscape if off-field, structural conditions remain the same (vide Design and deliver football tactics). Although there seems to be increased space in front-three systems, concerns related to central density return. However, diagonals and combinations around the 4, 6, or 8 could potentially expose a lack of pins in the three lines of 4-4-2 and W-M.
12. Conclusion and Summary
In this paper, we analyzed football Match-Vec reports using machine learning models and human text analytics to quantify the relation between first-half team performance and eventual game outcome. We also conducted a large-scale Count-Vec-based content analysis of over 1,000 specific tactical instructions made by professional coaches. A variety of new insights were then drawn from this content analysis. Among other findings, the analyses suggest that strong sides make their own luck (rather than take advantage of lucky breaks), that teams act on an apparent utility of predictability (playing toward a particular goal does not enhance offensive success, but it does improve defensive output), and that the main resource that coaches have at their disposal is an opponent’s plans for the match (over 60% of coaches’ recommendations are focused on countering an opponent’s strategy).
We also propose a new network-based recommendation system for designing in-game tactical instructions. Using self-organization map (SOM) analysis, a multi-dimensional match-state-space was generated for a past season of English Premier League (EPL) matches based on a variety of in-game performance metrics. All EPL team coaches were then advised to use our new recommendation system to generate specific in-game tactical instructions for the following weekend matches. Future studies can utilize a similar “big data” approach to validate our results across a larger and more varied set of teams and leagues. Reproduction of these results—and validation of Big-5 team preference reversals—would further strengthen our primary conclusion that coaches reject expert-adjacent advice regarding the tactical advantage of different in-game strategies: they want explicit guidance on game-winning tactics, and believe that the most effective strategies directly correspond to final-match outcomes. We leave specific recommendations and implications for future studies conducted in partnership with professional teams.
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