Progressão

Last week we reopened the word education through its Latin root educere , to lead out. This week we go one step further, into enskilment . Enskilment comes from the anthropologist Tim Ingold, and it names something most...

The word education comes from the Latin educere — to lead out. Not to fill in or to pour into. To lead out. Today's episode is the first of two on a subject that is one of the most under-examined corners of the football...

Last week we split the word intensity in two. Good intensity, effort as the natural consequence of a clear read. Bad intensity, effort as decoration. This week we take that split into the training session. Because...

Everyone in football uses the word intensity. Federations put it first in their principles. Coaches demand it. Analysts measure it. But what does it mean? Today's episode is about splitting the word in two. Because...

Thirty years in football across five continents. The US, Finland, Slovakia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, including a stint in the UEFA Europa League. Mike Keeney has seen the game from enough angles to have...

A training session can be tactically representative with right distances, pressure, opponent behaviours, and still be missing something important. The feeling in the stomach before a decisive pass. The exhaustion of a...

Futsal is football's close cousin. Similar game logic, smaller space, less forgiveness. A bad angle shows up immediately, a lazy arrival is a shot on your own net. That density has forced futsal coaches to develop...

Two artists. One tied himself to the mast of a ship in a real storm because painting storms from the shore was no longer enough. The other went silent for years — already recognised, already capable — because the music...

There is a debate that runs through football coaching like a fault line. On one side: all training should be game-based. On the other: players need drills with a lot of repetition. The two camps argue past each other...

Spain just won the World Cup. A highly coordinated team that played the movement, the relation, the shared language of a group that had been feeling the game the same way since they were children. To make sense of that...

Two hundred Tuesdays of trying to understand and explain why we as humans have previously misunderstood football. Where the feeling started? In a gap between the language of football and the actual game we were...

You are eleven years old. You love football. This game is yours. Then a piece of paper somewhere, a meeting you were never in, and a word gets attached to your name. Or doesn't. That word is talent. We have used it for...

Culture, in the language of the Aboriginal researcher Tyson Yunkaporta's people, has no direct word. Instead, they use a phrase that roughly translates as "being like our place." That is the idea this episode sits with...

Data scouting. One of the most intriguing and fast-developing corners of professional football. Most people have seen a heat map. Very few know what a Lead Data Scout actually does on a Tuesday afternoon, or what the...

Game models in football are discussed constantly. Most coaches have strong opinions about them, but fewer can describe their own model with depth — or stop to ask where the underlying thinking is actually leading them...