For the past 3 months I’ve been mentoring coaches from outside of the UK – namely, Finland, Sweden and Estonia. We meet once per month via zoom, to discuss a topic that we have all recently studied.
So far we’ve discussed team tactics twice, with this past month being game insight. During the conversation all coaches shared some interesting pop up’s, that could be utilised in the future. Today, I want to discuss what game insight is and how a player develops it.

Firstly, what is game insight?

If we look at the logical order of a football action, it uses communication, decision making and an execution of a technique, for it to performed. While you can obviously break these parts into isolated events, it begs the question if football is actually being performed, if 1 or 2 of these components are absent?
Once a player participates in a game, they will possess some type of understanding, whether that be at a very young age or a senior player. There are rules that are universal (these never change) and other external factors that you can’t control. These could include the pitch surface, weather and referee for example.
The game itself, has a goal at each end of it’s pitch, with lines to highlight boundaries. There will then be a certain amount of players present, that will compete in scoring at least 1 more goal than their opponents and take victory.
This all sounds simple, but as we know, what goes on ‘during’ the game is unpredictable and as a coach, we have very minimal input on what actually happens. Some coaches decide to take it upon themselves and ‘commentate’ for the duration of the game. This doesn’t actually have any real impact on the development of the team intentions and the players that are participating on this occasion.
During the game the players will receive millions of different stimuli and then from this, they will be required to make decisions based on what THEY see or hear. The environment will communicate this to the players at every second of the game (so if you’re a coach, sit back and relax) and allow them to make their own decisions.

For the game to progress and show signs of a team working towards victory, the decision making component is now needed. The player will need to have communicated and now responds in action (to make a decision), then hopefully executes the correct technique…..

How does this happen?
What is this decision based on?
Is there such a thing as, making the right decision and executing it wrong, or making the wrong decision and pot luck playing a part?

While decision making itself is extremely complex, we know that the decisions players make are their own and they can be influenced by external factors. (Internal conflict and external influence, play a large part here). All of the stimuli that players consume has to be filtered at an extremely fast rate, to then enable them to execute a desired technique.

Making these decisions happen, is the brain. A very powerful muscle that we use in everything we do – so surely we need to ensure that our brain recognises these situations, to give us the best chance of succeeding?
How could we enhance this learning?
What situations could we create, to allow our players to recognise all these different stimuli, the game provides?

The answer is clear, train as you wish to compete on game day. By doing this, the brain will firstly experience and then store the information in the brain. These references can then be recalled upon in the future. There is of course, ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ emotions attached to these decisions and this can influence what a player will then do.

Once a player has a number of references in their brain (or library of life), we can say they have insight into a certain subject matter. Game insight???? Well, this is simply references associated with what the player has experienced previously and is now stored in the brain. It would be safe to say that a Premier League player has excellent game insight, compared to a player at non-league level. What the Premier League player has seen and experienced will influence their ability to perform, whereas the non-league player wouldn’t have been in the same situations. Both would have game insight, but one will have a quicker understanding on how to deal with it.

Do your players have a ‘bare’ brain, or do they possess the game insight you need, to execute the desired team intentions?