Tactics Journal is a football tactics publication by Kyle Boas. It has two arms: Opinion and Research.

Start with the Key and the Research editorial practices if you are new to the site.

Opinion is the human side. Match observations, tactical arguments, editorial judgment. I watch matches. I think. I write. The focus is on the world’s most interesting players, managers, and teams, with a primary focus on the Premier League, building the case brick by brick.

The opinion side will always be me. My observations, my voice, my time. When everything can be made self-made, what becomes scarce is the thing that can’t be generated. Human time. Human attention. The proof that a real person chose to spend their limited hours on something rather than everything else they could have done.

Research is the autonomous side. A pipeline that monitors more football content than any one person could — articles, press conferences, podcasts, coaching interviews, analysis — across leagues, languages, and cultures. Every hour it pulls in new content and stores it as searchable embeddings. German tactical blogs, Portuguese analysis, press conferences where managers drop phrases weeks before anyone writes about the concept behind them.

It finds ideas that haven’t crossed over yet. Not by reading headlines. By classifying sources as frontier or mainstream, then looking for ideas circulating in smaller, independent sources before they show up in major coverage. Ideas backed by multiple sources across different football cultures score higher. Single-source weak signals get penalized.

Only candidates that pass a quality gate get written up. Each report is researched against a stored corpus and the live web, citation-checked, and revised. Every report requires counterevidence. If the evidence is thin, the report says so. The system tunes itself, experimenting on its own detection and reporting settings, keeping what works and discarding what doesn’t.

The research side is an embodiment of what I think we should be paying attention to, reviewed by me. I watch matches and write about what I see. The system reads everything I can’t and surfaces what I’d miss.