How to watch football
Learning through watching
While training will, obviously, have the greatest impact on your footballing skills, intelligently watching football will have an immense effect on your ability to read the game. This tactical awareness will have a tangible effect on your performance on the pitch. This post will give you some tips guiding you on how to intelligently watch football.
Shapes in formation
The first thing you should be aware of are the teams’ defensive, attacking and transitional shapes. When watching a game, try and deduce what the teams attacking and defensive shapes are. For example, as soon as Arsenal entered new leadership this season, Arsenal had a new shape in possession of the ball. The right full back, at the start of Arteta’s reign being Ainsley Maitland-Niles would invert to bolster the midfield, while Saka at left back would push up. Arsenal play a 4-2-3-1, but this is in a way misleading. In the final third you would often see a back two of, with a midfield three made up of the two deeper lying midfielders and an inverted right back (be it Bellerin or Maitland-Niles) with five attacking players ahead of them. Analysing how a team’s attacking shape differs from their cited ‘formation’ allows you to look at the game through a different lens and engage better with a team’s tactical outlook.
In a similar way looking at how a team’s defensive shape differs from their ‘formation’ is useful. For example, when Wolves lined up against an undefeated Liverpool side in December of this season, they nominated to play in a 5-3-2. Late on in the game, having gone behind and brought on Adama Traore, Wolves would alternate between a 3-4-3 in attack and a 5-4-1 in defence. Having a greater grip on how these teams transition between defence and attack and how their shape accordingly changes can help inform the decisions you yourself will make on the field.
Transitions
The different shapes that teams take will inform how effectively they manage to transition from attack to defence. For example, in the aforementioned match, Wolves would struggle to create attacking chances after changing their shape as their centre forward was isolated and would struggle to spark attacks into light. The attacking strength of Liverpool’s full backs would force Wolves’ wider midfielders to track back, and struggle to get back into position to attack. If you can watch football and try to learn from how teams successfully or unsuccessfully your footballing intelligence will improve. A coach explaining a concept to you will have a far greater grounding in your mind if you can pin it to something that you have watched. This is how watching football intelligently can positively affect your performance on the pitch.
How to use this in your own game
General shapes you see in professional football will be applied everywhere in football, and quickly being able to recognise these shapes can put you a step ahead of your opponent. Try to watch football with a tactical lens and success will follow. As well as this, watching football is of course a hobby and should remain enjoyable - don’t let over analysis affect your enjoyment of the sport. Professional footballers are drilled to make decisions at lightning speed; watching a game at full speed can make it difficult to analyse. BT Sport have been uploading extended highlights of the exceptional Champions League performances of the last few decades. Watch these and pause in moments of transition: see how the teams’ shapes change, see which players transition from a midfield role in attack into the back four in defense, deduce what a team’s shape is in attack and defense. Analyse the game and it will affect your ability on the pitch.
Through which lense do you watch football? Do you watch with a tactical lense, or a fun lense, and how might you change the way you watch football going forward?