You are going to fail. You are not going to watch a soccer game one time and understand what happened over the course of 90 minutes.
There are a couple of reasons for this. Mainly, there's too much happening for your puny little brain to remember, collect and cohere into a comprehensive story. For every Premier League game, the data companies record around 4,000 events. And that's just the pure events: the pass, the tackle, the foul. They also have about 15,000 qualifiers -- field location, player tags, ball speed, scoreline, etc. -- that are used to contextualize each event. Stats Perform has two people tag each individual game (one for each team) and then a third person to oversee the other two and catch any potential mistakes. That process takes about two hours, and then there's another 30 minutes of postgame editing that smooths over any inconsistencies in the chain of events.
And that's just collecting the data, without drawing any conclusions from all of it. If you think you're capable of doing the job of at least three people in less time and with some added interpretive special sauce, then we should be putting your superpowers to some kind of better use than watching Crystal Palace and Wolverhampton on a Saturday afternoon.
On top of that, you simply cannot see everything that is happening. Each stadium has its own uniquely awful camera angle that does a fantastic job of (A) not showing all 22 players and (B) completely destroying the viewer's ability to perceive the depth of the action on the field. To rectify this issue in another sport: a few days after games, the NFL releases its All-22 film, which provides an overhead view of every snap and enables you to see the game from the point of view of the offense -- behind the ball and facing the end zone. Outside of the occasional "tactical cam" view offered by a creative broadcaster, this option is not offered to the soccer-watching public.
But please, do not despair. Instead, consider it liberating. The first step toward understanding soccer better is to accept that you're never going to truly understand it.
Step 1: Give Up
You just read all that. Now, you are probably wondering why you should keep reading. I could get all existential here, but then you actually will stop reading, so I'll let someone else do it.
Last year, the recovering productivity writer Oliver Burkeman published a book called "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals." All productivity hacks are bogus, Burkeman writes, because none of them addresses the reality of the situation: that it is impossible to achieve everything we feel like we're supposed to achieve. Instead, Burkeman argues that to be productive in any meaningful sense -- to produce valuable work, connections and experiences -- you need to accept that you're going to feel unproductive, as measured by modern society.
I, then, am arguing the same thing for a much less daunting endeavor than creating a meaningful life: watching a soccer game. You're not gonna get it all, so you shouldn't even try.
Step 2: Pick Something, Anything
My favorite tactical writing is the kind that abides by this idea: you can't tell a comprehensive story of a game, but you can tell a somewhat comprehensive story of one part of the game. Homing in on a particular facet of play is also just a more accurate way of describing how soccer works.
Ultimately, the players and their decisions and their actions are what win games. Arsenal, for example, didn't take the North London Derby because Mikel Arteta "outsmarted" Antonio Conte; they won because Thomas Partey picked out the upper-corner from 30 yards out, because William Saliba shut down multiple counter-attacks, because Bukayo Saka was constantly drawing two defenders, and a collection of other individual stories and dynamics.
- Stream on ESPN+: LaLiga, Bundesliga, MLS, more (U.S.)
So one way to better understand a game is to pick a specific thing to focus on when you watch a given match. Now, it's still hard to do that because of the problems with camera angles and replay cut-ins, but it's possible. Perhaps, in the aforementioned North London Derby or the next one, you focus on transitional moments because you know that Spurs aren't going to try to have a lot of possession and that Arsenal are.
Given that dynamic, it's safe to assume that how often the ball gets turned over and what happens immediately after those moments will play a large role in the outcome of the game. Then, once you're focused on that, you might start to pick up on how Arsenal are attacking in a way that prevents them from turning the ball over, and also how their players are positioned in a way that does or does not leave them vulnerable if the ball is turned over. On the other side, maybe you'll start to see how Tottenham try to create turnovers, where they try to create them and what they do with them as soon as they happen.
In a lot of ways, this -- creating, controlling, and reacting to the moments when neither team technically has the ball -- is the defining feature of the modern game.
Ralf Rangnick stumbled across a piece of research that suggested most goals were scored within eight seconds after a turnover -- and then Red Bull built an entire global network of successful clubs around that idea. Most open-play goals can't be disconnected from these moments of chaos; it's rare that the decisive moments of a match are determined by impeccably fine-tuned possessions against a set defense. The average uninterrupted goal-scoring possession in the Premier League this season starts 67 meters (or 73 yards) from a team's own goal and features only 3.8 passes.
So if you need one thing to focus on, for any random game, I'd pay particular attention to the moments the ball gets -- or could be -- turned over. A goal, eventually, won't be very far away.
Step 3: Follow the Midfield
One of the other problems with watching and understanding an individual game is that it's all but impossible to differentiate between clear "tactics" and a group of players just making creative, collective decisions on the fly. Frequently, the manager paints a pathetic figure on the sideline, screaming instructions, waving his hands, sitting on a coffee cup and having almost no effect on what's happening on the field. But there's still at least some preplanned strategy with which all players head into the match.
About a year ago I asked Eric Laurie, who's an opposition scout and an analyst for the United States men's national team, if there's anywhere in particular you could train your eye to get a glimpse -- however cloudy -- into what a team is trying to do.
"I do think central midfielders can often offer a good picture of the opposition's plan both in and out of possession," he said. "If we take in-possession as an example, we often see central mids now who drop into the backline during buildup and progression. This can be between the central defenders, or even between a central defender and a fullback. This will often indicate a team that wishes to build up play from the back as opposed to quickly getting up to the other end of the pitch via long balls. Out of possession, central mids may be man-marking the opposition central mid in buildup, or perhaps they are in more of a zonal-marking scheme."
The other benefits of focusing on the guys in the middle: they're always on screen, and they're always involved. While there are frequent periods of each match when attackers and defenders are mainly disengaged from the current state of the match, midfielders are always either attacking or defending or trying to win back loose balls.
As former Spain manager Vicente del Bosque once said of his deepest central midfielder, Sergio Busquets, "If you watch the game, you don't see Busquets. But if you watch Busquets, you see the whole game."
Step 4: Forget About the Ball
"When you play a match, it is statistically proven that players actually have the ball 3 minutes on average," Johan Cruyff once said. "So, the most important thing is what you do during those 87 minutes when you do not have the ball. That is what determines whether you are a good player or not."
If this is true, then we're all idiots. We're chasing the ball around, like a dog scampering after a flashlight, smashing into a door and missing almost all of the stuff that actually makes a given soccer match whatever it ultimately is.
So if you really want to get better at watching soccer, then the most important thing to do is to stop watching the ball. Instead, cast a general gaze to everything that's happening in front of it or behind it. You won't get it, necessarily, but you will start to see patterns of how players are moving and how those movements are affecting the movements of other players and how those movements are creating or destroying space.
Ultimately, soccer is just a battle for space: how do you create space in the attacking penalty area, how do you occupy it and how do you prevent your opponents from doing the same thing? This doesn't just magically happen because one player kicks a ball into the box; no, it happens because of a succession of competing movements before the ball is ever kicked that create space for the pass to happen, create space for the teammate to run into and create a receiving option for the pass to be played into.
Sure, if your eyes are always off the ball, you might miss, say, I don't know, a winger spinning around like he's about to whale on a piñata at a birthday party and then immediately passing the ball out of bounds:
New hair, same tricks.
— CBS Sports Golazo ⚽️ (@CBSSportsGolazo) October 27, 2022
Antony pulls out his signature at Old Trafford. 🇧🇷 pic.twitter.com/ZdvjHP3iQV
But that's the beauty of television. If anything worthwhile happens with the ball, you won't miss it. There's always instant replay.