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THE GAME OF TWO: HOW FUTSAL INFLUENCES FOOTBALL

When you've tuned into Futsal for the first time it can feel a bit overwhelming, it is a chaotic game- the pace is frantic, the turnovers are rapid, players rotate at an almost dizzying frequency, yet in between the intensity the players find the opportunity to execute technical and tactical actions of the highest level. There's a reason why Futsal is entering coaching discussions and is undergoing a boom in global exposure, the sport which they play in a court and with a heavier ball ended up producing some of the highest quality footballers of the past 2 decades- think Neymar JR, Ronaldinho and Andres Iniesta to name a few.  Futsal is the predecessor to the street, it has a rich cultural capital, the game thrives because there is variation- across Europe a movement is gathering speed.  Following my article Big Picture vs Small Picture and discussions had on X, I've been wanting to take a deeper look at futsal's intricacies for a while, I love how the analysis is focus...
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UNDERSTANDING DYNAMISM IN FOOTBALL

''Football doesn't allow for automations or patterns to be repeated (closed systems), what matters are interactions and relations'' - Paco Seriul-lo There's a word that always seems to crop up in a lot of in possession analysis, especially for teams that  make it a little bit harder for us to identify what exactly they are doing. In the era of positional football, zone occupation and structural dependency,  these teams have become outliers, their spontaneity, autonomy and control of game momentum is what helps them navigate the game. This quality makes teams stand out from the rest, the word I'm referring to is dynamism.  What does it mean to be dynamic in a footballing context? What does it look like in the micro, macro, meso scales?  How many types of dynamics are there? I see different ones mentioned all the time- Dynamic advantage/superiority, Dynamic occupation, Dynamic affordances, Dynamic rotations/triangles, Dynamic couplings- yet I've seen littl...

THE ART OF DIAGONALS

If you've followed my account for a while you would have noticed my fascination with diagonality, a concept which is at the heart of a lot of my work. For a while I've been sharing clips and commenting on teams putting this concept into practice, occasionally sharing ideas on how to train this as well. The word itself is becoming more used in discourse but, like most terminology, can get misinterpreted or reduced. When Coach of PSG's U18 team, former Italian International and recent ex Juventus coach Thiago Motta once famously said- ''I don't see formations vertically, I see them horizontally. We play a 2-7-2*'' *the goalkeeper acts as part of the midfield 7.  For many years I didn't quite understand what Motta was referring to, that is a pretentious way of articulating something rather simplistic like verticality. What did Motta mean with these comments? Could it be that he was referring to diagonality?  I wanted to write something that speaks to th...