Analysis Corner: Match Analysis

By Dougie Wright. Twitter: @Dougie_Wright

Most weeks, I tend to analyse something within Scottish football, whether it be a match, a player or a club.

I’ll use stats, graphs, pictures – whatever I feel is needed to get the point across.

It is therefore legitimate to ask what sort of analysis is done in clubs themselves. What do they really track? How is their performance analysed?

I was fortunate enough to work at a professional Scottish club up until May of this year. I helped out with both academy teams and the first team, filming the latter at home matchdays from the stadium.

This week, rather than analyse two pretty poor Scotland performances, I thought I’d share a little bit of the analysis that goes on at most top flight Scottish clubs.

The Cameras

At my previous club, there were two “analysis cameras”. The first was from the halfway line, similar to the view you’d get if you were watching on television. The biggest difference is the scope of the lens.

While Sky and BT will generally zoom into the action, analysts and coaches will naturally require a more tactical view of proceedings. How far high up is their defensive line pushing? What does their midfield do when the striker loses the ball?

These are questions that would be quite difficult to competently answer if you’re watching a live television feed.

For example, here’s the sort of view you tend to get on television:

You can see who’s in possession, who’s putting pressure of the ball carrier and whereabouts it is on the pitch. However, eleven other players are on the pitch, not in view. You can only see what’s going on in this small area

The view an analyst takes is more like this:

In this example, the only two players not visible are the goalkeepers. You get a much better understanding of the spaces on a pitch, where players are making runs, and any bad habits from your opponents you think you could exploit.

The second camera goes behind the goals. It would look something like this:

This one is used for three main reasons. First of all, it gives you a much better view of the width of the pitch. Gaps between players are much easier to spot here, and you get a really good visualisation of whether the team is using the full width of the pitch or staying narrower.

The second reason is that it allows you to see how far the goalkeeper is coming off their line, and generally how close the centre backs are to the keeper. A large distance would indicate that you could have some luck playing balls in behind the defenders.

Finally, it’s much easier to analyse corners and set pieces through this view. You can see who is making which runs – with a traditional TV view, it can sometimes become a bit of a jumble.

So how is this used?

At my previous club, the two analysts would film the game. These cameras would be connected to two laptops in the main stand, where the analysts would sit with a coach.

One analyst is “live coding” the game. This is a bit like writing the index of a book while the author is still writing it. As events unfold in the game, the analyst is “tagging” these events to the time of the video. That means that it’s easier to go back and find exactly what happened when in the match. Some clubs will tag every pass, tackle and run made by every player but that’s simply too extensive to do in real time – to tag a full game takes around 3 hours in total. During the game, the analyst will probably just be marking who’s in possession, when it’s in a final third, when a shot’s taken and any set pieces.

The next analyst is sitting with the coach, looking at the laptop feeds for any specific tactical trends that are unfolding throughout the game. The coach will relay this analysis onto the manager, who can then make in-game adjustments. Furthermore, these clips are being “tagged” by the first analyst, to be shown either as part of the manager’s half time team talk in the dressing room, or as a part of the post-game analysis.

After the game

After the match has finished (and the analyst has spent a few hours uploading a tagging the full game), the club will theoretically have two full tapes of everything that happened in that game.

This can then be used for a variety of purposes. The main two would be opposition analysis for the next time you play against that team, and tactical analysis of how well the team have executed any particular tactical plan (and even if they did execute it, did it work?).

It can also be used by the analysts and coaches for player development purposes. Sometimes, a coach will sit down with a player and show them all the time where they’ve been one on one with a keeper, for example. They can then use the various angles to show the player any technical or tactical improvements they could make in this area.

In addition to the match tapes, there are a few companies who get film, tag and analyse match data themselves. This has saved clubs an awful lot of time and money. Where in the past, a specific club would only have tapes of their own games and whatever they could find on TV, now the St Mirren analyst can have two different views of every single game Dundee have played in the past year.

As well as being used for opposition analysis, these resources are excellent for player recruitment. Nowadays, a club has no excuse for not watching a player fifteen to twenty times before they sign him

For more analysis like this, follow Dougie on twitter: @Dougie_Wright

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