Majoring the minor

How "How Football Works" works

A soccer analytics veteran once complained to me that coaches tend to “major the minor,” which I think meant they’re so obsessed with detail that they can miss the forest for the trees. A coach might be interested in whether a player was half a second late and a yard or two off on whatever build-out pattern the team worked on in training that week; a data scientist might care more about whether the build-up worked.

I don’t think this disconnect is about who does or doesn’t “know football.” It comes down to a difference in their roles. Coaches are, above all else, teachers: their job is to help players make better decisions, and that starts with scrupulous attention to mechanics and movement. Club analytics staff are evaluators: their role, which is primarily focused on recruitment, is about figuring out who gets shit done. If you’ve ever been docked points on a math quiz for getting the right answer by some method that wasn’t in the textbook, you know what I’m talking about here.

What makes soccer so endlessly fun to think about is that it doesn’t come with an answer key. It doesn’t even have a textbook.

To the extent that the game has been solved — that we believe there are right answers about how to play — it’s largely at the level of technique. Kids around the world learn the same basic stuff about how to receive and turn and shield the ball with their body and deliver a pass to the proper foot. We call these fundamentals. Everyone does them more or less the same way, in every league, at every level, because they work. Mostly.

That’s the jumping off point for today’s entry in the How Football Works series:

Different situations call for different turns, but a general rule drilled into players from a young age is to try to receive ‘across their body’, meaning they should orient themselves almost perpendicular to the direction of the pass and let the ball roll to the foot that’s farther away from the passer (this is also known as receiving “on the back foot” where “back” is relative to the origin of the pass, not the other team’s goal).

Receiving across the body makes technical and tactical sense. On a basic mechanical level, it lets the player cushion the pass with their instep for a more controlled first touch, bringing it to rest in front of them so they can take the next touch on either foot. At the same time, it opens up the receiver’s body to maximise the angle of play. Because the defence shifts to follow the ball, a player receiving from one side of the pitch is more likely to find a team-mate in space on the opposite side by taking a wide turn.

If you’ve ever had a half-decent soccer coach, this part isn’t news to you (as one old guy in the comments grouched, “Anyone with half an ounce of talent playing football does this without even noticing it”). Starting from the very bottom, the basic building blocks of soccer, is the whole point of the series.

Because the thing is, when you start to look closely at how these fundamentals are applied, you’ll find all kinds of fascinating variety among even the best players and teams. Most of today’s article on receiving across the body examines how Rodri and Declan Rice — two dudes stacked with whole pounds of talent — do it just a little bit differently, with major ramifications for how their clubs play.

Rodri, for example, is a little more comfortable turning across his body under pressure, which opens up Man City’s circulation game and helps him sneak the occasional disguised pass between the lines. Both midfielders are predominantly right-footed, but Rice is reluctant to receive a pass from the right across his body onto his left foot, and when he does he almost never plays forward. In the words of the poet, he’s not an ambi-turner.

These little technical things add up. Their new pivot’s receiving style makes Arsenal less likely to play through the middle and increasingly reliant on their right wing:

Rice’s ever-so-slightly lower risk tolerance when it comes to making certain turns under pressure can even alter the whole team’s shape:

When they’re trying to break through a deeper block, even slight discomfort playing in small midfield spaces can make a difference. Rice’s team-mates don’t look for him on the second line quite as regularly as City play to Rodri, who’s more comfortable turning under pressure. To get on the ball facing play, Rice drops farther away from the opponent, widening the space between Arsenal’s lines and making the centre-backs behind him redundant, while Odegaard wanders outside the lines to compensate. All of this makes it a little bit harder for the team to play up the middle.

This is what How Football Works is all about: connecting the minor to the major. Not all of the entries will zoom in quite as far as footwork — last week’s article was a tactical survey of how the trendy keeper-back role changes the way teams build up against different pressing schemes — but all of them try to start from the basics and show how and why variations on a simple pattern can produce very different styles of soccer.

I’m still thinking through how these articles will be put together. Writing doesn’t come with an instruction manual any more than soccer does. Turns out it’s pretty hard, when you’re covering an improvisational and context-dependent sport, to link technique to tactics to strategy to outcomes in a short-ish explanatory article, and with any luck to tie it all together with a colorful bit of theory and a couple new things to watch for next weekend. Most attempts will fall short of the goal. That’s another thing writing and soccer have in common.

But I hope How Football Works will help you think about soccer differently, whether by building a shared vocabulary for things we see on the pitch or drawing connections between the details and the big picture. I guess the idea is to lay some piece-by-piece groundwork for the textbook I wish existed on how soccer really works (and to get an education myself along the way).

You can read the developing series archive here. Let me know what you like/loathe/whatever so I can figure out how to make these better. And as always, if you enjoy the articles, do me a favor and tell people about them so The Athletic will keep letting me work on the good stuff. My job is pretty cool most days and you’re the reason I get to do it. Thanks for reading.