The Science of Tactical Ability
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When we think of tactics in soccer, most of us likely imagine someone like Pep Guardiola scribbling aspects of his strategy of positional play on a white board in front of his treble-winning team. Or maybe Roberto de Zerbi enthusiastically instructing his team during a training session on when to slow the game down vs speed the game up. Does a team want to play out from the back? Or do they play a more direct, vertical style? How does our back line shift as the opposition switches the ball from one side of the pitch to the other? What about team shape when we have the ball approaching the opposition’s goal?
Coaches at every level, from professional down to youth, often spend immense amounts of time and energy trying to explain and implement these types of strategies and styles of play within their team in an effort to get them to come together seamlessly during a game.
From very young ages we hear coaches and parents screaming at 5-year-olds, telling them to "Spread Out!" By about 12 years old, as kids transition into 11-vs-11 game formats for the first time, adults are trying to teach kids intricate pieces of Guardiola-esque positional play.
We then get frustrated when players don't make the exact decisions during games they were prescribed during training.
This type of tactics is geared toward optimizing team cohesion (teamwork) and is critical to the success of sports teams.
After all, soccer is a team sport in which individual players must learn to work together with teammates toward a common goal. At it’s most fundamental level, this means winning the game. These team-based goals can also be broken down into smaller objectives during a game, such as defending the space around your own goal to stop the other team from scoring, and attacking the space around the opposition’s goal to score.
However, there is a difference between team strategies and individual tactical ability that must be acknowledged if we are to optimize long-term player development.
Team strategies are geared toward enhancing what’s called team cognition - verbal and non-verbal communication and coordination between teammates to achieve a common goal.
Strategies put forth by coaches act like blueprints, prescribing players clear expectations for how they are supposed to act in certain situations, and in certain areas of the field.
On the other hand, individual tactical ability is the player's ability to perceive what is occurring in their environment, such as open spaces, teammates, defenders, the ball, position on the field, and so on. Players must then make meaningful connections in their brain, and then decide how to act (execute) to achieve their desired outcome, based on their current abilities and cues they've learned from past experiences.
Tactical decisions are about the why behind the player's actions.
This process is largely driven by our cognition, referring to the processes humans use to perceive, analyze, think, interpret, judge, decide, remember, learn, concentrate, prioritize, and make sense of the world around us.
In other words, our tactical ability in soccer is what connects our bodies to the game (i.e., our environment), giving meaning to the movements we perform.
Physical and technical actions during a game are the execution of our tactical decisions.
Perhaps this is what Italian maestro, Andrea Pirlo, meant when he poetically said that "Football is played with the head - your feet are just tools."
From the way we move off of the ball to the decisions we make with it at our feet, every action performed during a soccer game has a strong tactical underpinning.
A quality movement performed in the wrong place and at the wrong time that does not achieve the desired outcome can hardly be labeled as 'skill.' In the words of current analyst and Liverpool legend, Jamie Carragher, "It’s getting the decisions right which is key in football.”
Being able to perceive more of the field accurately in real-time will aid in the player's quality and speed of decision-making.
The more a player scans the field, the better they will be able to create what authors Leonard Zaichkowsky and Daniel Peterson describe in their book The Playmaker's Advantage as a cognitive map of the entire pitch - "the best players are able to create very complex models of the entire game with all the players in space and then time-advance that now and over time" (Zaichkowsky & Peterson, 2018, p. 108).
Nelson Falcão Rodrigues, Brazilian playwright, journalist, and novelist was quoted saying that, "In football, the worst blindness is only seeing the ball."
When players get caught "ball-watching" for too long, they often don't perceive other things occurring in their environment, such as the movement of players and the opening and closing of spaces, all of which provide information on how they could decide to effectively act.
With this in mind, Arsène Wenger, current chief of global football development, argues that "a top player has a head like a radar."
In fact, current research in soccer performance is clearly showing that higher-level players scan the field more often during a game, allowing them to perceive the game more accurately in real-time, and, therefore, make more effective decisions.
Higher scanning frequency also increases the likelihood of successful technical actions, such as successful passing and dribbling, depending largely on the player possessing the technical capacity to perform that action.
The importance of tactical ability and scanning has been expertly summarized by Arsène Wenger:
"The problem in football is that you learn how to play the wrong way round - first execution, then decision-making, and perception last.
I have lost many top players because their head was on the ball and they were not seeing what was around them.
As a player, whenever I get the ball, I have to analyze, then decide, and finally, execute.
Perception plays a huge role in this.
What is interesting is that very good players scan 6-8 times in the 10 seconds before getting the ball and normal ones 3-4 times.
More importantly, you have to analyze the quality of perception and decision-making. My challenge is to get my players to know what the best choice is and make the optimal decision every time."
The development of individual tactical ability is best achieved in autonomy-supportive, mastery-oriented, and developmentally appropriate game-like environments.
The term autonomy-supportive refers to the players being able to make their own decisions.
Too often in youth soccer, coaches ( and parents) adopt a prescriptive and directive style of communication, feeling the need to impart all of their knowledge to the player as it is occurring.
However, this style of coaching, whilst being effective at achieving short-term performance results, has been shown to blunt players' long-term skill development, as the decisions are being made for the player and solutions are always given by the coach/parent.
The approach a player has to competition can have important implications for skill development.
A mastery-oriented approach means that a player’s main goal is not solely results (e.g., winning), but rather the mastery of skills.
This is not to say that the player does not want to win.
The drive to win is rather an objective that motivates the player to compete, work hard, and further develop their abilities.
Mastery-oriented goal orientations, as opposed to performance or outcome-based goal orientations, have been shown to elicit more intrinsic desire in the players to compete. Goals focused on results are more likely to be extrinsically motivated, where players are driven more to please a coach or parent, or are overly tied to the score of a game.
Intrinsic motivation allows the player to come up with more creative solutions on the field (i.e., perception & decision-making), with less fear of making mistakes.
In fact, overarousal and concern about making mistakes may even directly narrow one's perception and field of vision.
The development of skills that are transferrable from training to games cannot be developed in isolated environments.
Tactical abilities, such as perception, decision-making, reaction time, and anticipation, can't be developed through mobile applications, by holding up a colored cone, or by reacting to a screen changing colors.
A player will not develop the ability to perceive, make decisions, and execute during a game, if they constantly train in an environment where the only thing to perceive is the ball and some cones, and the decision on what to do with it is already predetermined by the coach (think of passing and dribbling "patterns").
A player develops skills by strengthening the connection to the environment in which they are supposed to perform during training, not by pulling away from it.
Game-like environments include elements of a real game: attacking, defending, and the transitions between the two.
Tactical abilities are developed by learning to perceive, decide, and act against real defenders, with real teammates, and with real direction.
Players progress by learning from the consequences of their decisions and actions. How can a player experience the impact their decisions and actions can have if they are constantly training in an environment not representative of the one they are supposed to perform in?
The most game-like activity a player can participate in is a real game.
However, the average player is directly involved with the ball only 2-3%, or less than 3 minutes of a given 11-vs-11 match.
The more players on each team, the more complex, and tactically demanding, the game. Younger and less experienced players often get lost in games and activities that are cognitively overloading for their current developmental level, and do not receive sufficient amounts of repetitions for optimal development.
Sometimes this is due to training age, or a player's experience with the game itself. More often it is due to their biological (physical), cognitive (mental), and psychosocial (social/emotional) maturation - a process that cannot be forced to progress faster than human nature will allow.
This is why game formats at younger ages require smaller numbers (4-vs-4, 7-vs-7, 9-vs-9).
Coaches often come across activities and ideas implemented by professional teams, and try to emulate that with their youth team.
However, we must recognize that professional players are at different developmental levels than youth players.
The methods implemented at the pinnacle of sport are not the same methods that aid the player on the road to getting there.
Team strategies emphasized and implemented too much and too early in a player's development often over-constrains the player's autonomy (ability to make decisions freely), especially when winning a game is emphasized more than the mastery of skills and abilities.
Whereas players can be developed within certain game models, such as Barcelona's La Masia developing players "the Barca Way," according to the European Club Association (ECA), over 75% of the world's leading professional academies follow some form of periodization across a youth player's career.
This means that they set developmentally appropriate goals, informed by biological, cognitive, and psychosocial development, for different ages within their academy, and then implement methods that match these developmental markers.
One of the best tools we have to promote the development of skills, including tactical skill, is the use of small-sided games (e.g., 1-vs-1, 2-vs-2, 3-vs-3, etc.).
A general rule of thumb is this: the younger the players are in their development, the smaller numbers should be on their team during small-sided games in training. An emphasis should be placed on individual skills and abilities (including tactical ability), as opposed to larger team concepts.
Although larger numbers of players on each team may stress the development of tactical skills, young players still have to continually perceive, decide, and execute in smaller games involving fewer players, such as 1-vs-1, 2-vs-2, and 3-vs-3.
Perception and decision-making can especially be emphasized if players have multiple targets to attack towards, such as having the option to score in 2 goals instead of just 1 (this format is called Funiño, and is implemented in youth player development in both Germany and Spain, especially in pre-adolescence).
It often isn't until about the age of 16 that larger team systems and strategies become more heavily taught and emphasized, and participation in larger small-sided games in training (e.g., 8-vs-8, 9-vs-9, etc.) becomes more frequent.
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