Happy Monday! This is a long international break.

Kyle Boas Author of the Tactics Journal

In today’s email:

• How academies are using street football to unearth next Lamine Yamal
• What I learned from Tactics Journal Research

TACTICALLY INTERESTING

Teams and games I am following.

• The Guardian: Thomas Tuchel resists ‘madness’ of calls to rest England players despite longer window
  But now that Tuchel has his group, he says there is no room for compromise and certainly not to speak to club managers who might want to make deals over their players’ minutes.
• The Guardian: James Trafford’s England dream burns with No 1 spot finally up for grabs again
  James Trafford looks genuinely affronted.

How academies are using street football to unearth next Lamine Yamal

Tom Allnutt for The Times:

At Ajax, the academy timetable now includes two-v-two matches on small, concrete pitches, with one of those pitches just a tiny circle, no more than two or three metres across, enclosed by metal railings, meaning players have no option but to use dummies and flicks to score. At Feyenoord’s Varkenoord academy, they installed three small-sided pitches next to each other, one made of sand, one of concrete and another of grass, with the grass deliberately ignored by groundstaff to encourage imperfections. “The players are in charge on these pitches, not coaches,” Zeb Jacobs, Feyenoord’s head of academy, says. “Different ages play together, it’s winner stays on, and the uneven surfaces make every game different. It encourages players to adapt and find their own solutions.”

Adapting is key, given variety can be overlooked in academies, who focus on cohesion, repetition and routine. Benfica were among the early subscribers to Futsal, which is now ubiquitous in younger age groups with its focus on using all parts of the foot, and have gone a step further by introducing sessions using tennis balls, beach balls, overly pumped-up balls and flat balls. The idea is to mimic the kind of ball a child may find in the street, pushing players to think and adapt. “Kids don’t play in the streets any more,” Rodrigo Magalhães, who was the academy technical director at Benfica until last year, says. “We need to bring the street football inside.”

More of this please. Players need to learn to enjoy becoming self-taught. I like the fact that Feyenoord puts the players in charge of the pitch for that reason.

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What I learned from Tactics Journal Research

I set out this year to get you hooked on deep research in the same why I became hooked last December. I came to a few surprising realizations throughout this process and am excited to share what I am doing next.

I have not abandoned research because there is too much potential there, but I realized something important in July that gave me pause.

I came to the frustrating realization that you all prefer how I write.

That is a positive realization because thank God, you like the words that come out of my brain. The negative was that I developed this system that no one preferred reading. I didn’t like reading it. I thought it was bad.

The amount of slop writing that I have had to read was enormous. What you saw, what I posted, was a heavily hand-edited version of what I read from the agent. Luckily I am a very patient person.

There was two things our research pipeline was trying to do at once.

It surfaced ideas from blogs, articles, podcasts, press conferences, and interviews through the day in every language. It was excellent at doing that. You didn’t really see that portion though because all of that stayed internal.

It then turned those ideas into detailed research reports. It took the idea then expanded upon it with other sources.

The hard part was not doing either of those things. It was combining them into one to quickly produce reports that were readable. That process takes time though because I have to read each report. I am the bottleneck until models become better.

My goal now is to split those into two separate processes.

I built a feed that surfaces those ideas to me directly. I made a system, which I can go into greater detail later, that filters the hundreds of sources we are ingesting. Based on my taste, and how I configure the system, it will hand me the best ideas and quotes.

Then I can share those ideas with you quickly when I get them, rather than having to wait for the research report to be generated. Lowering the latency.

The next step, which I am equally excited about, is developing the research reports portion.

There will be public research and tailored research.

The other thing I realized with deep research is that the thing that makes it special is that it is answering your problem or question not a problem or question. You can look past the slop when it answers a question you have because it has the answer you need or want.

Tailored research. I want to make it so coaches can tailor research to their team. So say, some random club in Japan is trying something new or researchers in South America produced a breakthrough. I want to tailor that idea or breakthrough to a problem you have. So you input your team, your problems, and then it outputs solutions in the form of detailed reports with graphics, training programs using board.tacticsjournal.com, all that lovely stuff.

Public research will be me seeing a problem or finding something interesting, researching it, and then sharing that research with you.

That is the status of things. I will keep you updated throughout the way.

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NEWS

• The Guardian: Tony Pulis says he and Stoke were ‘cheated’ in 2011 FA Cup final after Manchester City verdict
  Pulis’s Stoke lost the 2011 Cup final 1-0 after Yaya Touré’s goal.

RECOMMENDED READING

Everything published yesterday by the writers I follow

• Training Ground Guru: Ward appointed Liverpool Sporting Director for second time
  Julian Ward has been appointed Liverpool’s Sporting Director for the second time, three weeks after Richard Hughes left for Al-Hilal.
• spielverlagerung.de: Scene analyses: Man-marking festival in Swabia and how it can be resolved – SR
  by Next Generation on 27.09.2026 in the categories Borussia Dortmund,Bundesliga,Szenenanalyse,VfB Stuttgart with 0 Kommentaren

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