For years I could explain formations and pressing triggers to other coaches for as long as they’d listen. That was never the problem. The problem was what happened when I was actually stood on the touchline and something went wrong in real time.
I could see it. I just could not always do anything useful about it fast enough to matter.
The Book That Named The Gap
Doug Lemov’s The Coach’s Guide To Teaching is one of three books I’d point to as having genuinely changed how I coach. Before I read it, my sessions were mostly me talking. I’d explain a shape, explain a principle, explain it again when it didn’t stick, and wonder why players still looked blank in matches.
The book’s argument, in short: telling someone the answer is not the same as teaching them to find it. My sessions started to spiral and scaffold instead of just repeat. I stopped ranting at training and started asking questions instead of giving instructions.
That single shift, questions instead of telling, is still the biggest change I’ve made to how I coach tactically.
What “Recognising” Actually Means
Spotting a problem in a match is genuinely useful, but it’s a lower bar than most coaches think. You watch your winger get isolated, you watch a full-back get overloaded, you can see it happening. Naming the problem out loud on the touchline doesn’t fix it.
The players are the ones who need to recognise it, and then decide what to do about it, without waiting for you to shout an instruction across a pitch they can barely hear you over.
That’s the gap. Not between coaches who understand tactics and coaches who don’t. Between coaches who solve every problem for their players and coaches who build players who can solve problems themselves.
A Simple Framework For Watching Anything
I built my How To Analyse A Match course inside the Football Coaching Academy around one idea: turn casual watching into systematic observation. Most coaches, myself included for years, watch a match and just react to whatever catches their eye.
A simple structure changes that. For any moment that matters, ask six questions: who was involved, what happened, when in the game, where on the pitch, why it happened, and how the mechanism actually worked (which pass, which run, which body shape created it).
Run a genuine clip through those six questions with your assistant or a fellow coach and you’ll notice things you’d normally miss entirely. I’ve posted match clips into the community and asked coaches to vote on what they’d do in a specific moment before I reveal what actually happened. It’s a good habit to build even without an audience: pause the moment, decide out loud, then watch what the players actually did.
Questions Before Answers
The practical version of Lemov’s idea, on a training pitch, is small. Before you tell a player what went wrong, ask them what they saw.
“What were you looking at there?” “What options did you have?” “What would you try next time?”
It’s slower. Some sessions I still catch myself giving the answer because it’s faster and I’m tired and it’s cold. But every time I default to telling instead of asking, I’m doing the thinking for the player instead of building their ability to do it without me.
Steve, one of the coaches in our community, put it well after a run of matches where his team started dominating territory: “You can tell Steve coaches this lot,” a supporter told him, because of how his team held the ball under pressure. That’s not something you get by telling players what to do in every moment. It’s built session by session, question by question, until it’s theirs.
Ross shared a line from sports scientist Bene Schneiderbauer in the community that’s stuck with a lot of our members: assume the player is at 100% today, your job is to get them to 101%, and over a season that compounds into something real. Tactical understanding works the same way. You are not trying to turn a nine-year-old into a analyst overnight. You’re trying to get them 1% better at reading the game than they were last week.
What I’d Actually Suggest You Try
Pick one match, yours or one you’re watching for fun, and run five moments through the six-question framework properly, out loud, with someone else if you can. Then, at your next session, catch yourself the first time you’re about to tell a player what they should have done, and ask them what they saw instead.
Neither of those things will make you a tactical genius by Saturday. But they’re the actual mechanism behind the shift Lemov’s book made in my own coaching, and it’s the one change from that whole reading list I’d tell any coach to make first.
If you want the full course, with real match clips broken down using this framework, it’s inside the Football Coaching Academy alongside nearly 1,600 other coaches working through the same material.