How to Analyze Football Match

How to analyze a football match? This is very often asked on my personal social media accounts or the editors of Pandit Football Indonesia. This is also the question that has been on the minds of loyal Panditfootball.com readers who often read the match analysis column.

Analyzing the match is usually done by a coach either when they are about to face a match or when evaluating the game of their foster children. In the era of modern football, in addition to coaches, there are scouts who also often provide analysis reports on the opponents they will face.

The increasing number of Football Manager gamers also makes analyzing matches no longer a strange thing when they are not carried out by coaches or scouts . Even with the ability to analyze, then websites, social media accounts or Youtube channels devoted to providing tactical evaluations of a match or a team were born.

Here I want to share my experience about the process of analyzing matches that I often do to fill the analysis column in Pandit Football. This is also what I often share or teach to Pandit Football writers when I was the Editor in Chief of Pandit Football in the 2016-2019 period.

Understanding the Purpose of Match Analysis

What is match analysis? Everyone who often conducts analysis may have their own answers and explanations. But in Pandit Football, as I was taught by Zen RS, Andreas Marbun, and Vetricia Wizach, match analysis is writing that should be able to explain why team A wins and team B loses, or why the match ended in a draw .

Victory in football itself is determined by who scores more goals between the two teams that compete, not who plays more beautifully. So if explained further, match analysis should be able to explain why team A is able to score more goals than team B, or why both teams are equally strong.

It is not easy to analyze the match. Likewise, I was not intensively trained in Pandit Football at the beginning. Not infrequently, when they feel they have made a ‘match analysis’, after rereading it, it turns out that it is only a ‘match report’. And those are certainly two different things.

Unlike analyzing, reporting a match we only need to tell what happened in the match. In the match report, we only need to know or retell who scored the goal, who created the assist, in what minute the goal was scored, then what happened in the match, how the goal was scored.

In analyzing, at least in Pandit, we must keep asking, “why did the goal happen?”, “why did player A create an assist?”, “why is the defense displayed by Team B like that?”. Why, why, why, we must try to answer these questions, questions that can explain why team A won and so on.

To analyze, we must also believe that there are no coincidences in football . To quote what Johan Cruyff said, “Coincidence is logical”, there is always a logical explanation for coincidence. Coincidence can happen because there is a decision made by someone. While the ability of a player to make decisions ( decision making ) is an important attribute in football, sport in general. Therefore, the Pandit writers have the principle that no team wins just by luck.

To begin with, we recommend, anyone who wants to learn to analyze, not to analyze their favorite or supported teams. When we analyze we need to neutralize the mind to avoid subjectivity to certain players and teams .

If we are beginners and analyze the team we support, we might even be carried away by the emotions of the match; hope that the team we support immediately scores goals, tense when the team we support almost concedes, or grumble when the referee harms the team we support (yes, the referee factor also needs to be ruled out in analyzing the match). These things will make us lose focus and make us forget that we are analyzing, not watching let alone supporting. You can visit baanzeanball.com for football analysis.

What to Pay Attention to in Analyzing the Match

Analyzing is clearly very different from watching. While watching, we will only focus on the rolling ball. Throughout the 90 minutes, we only pay attention to where the ball is, the players who have the ball, the struggle for the ball, and even more specifically, as spectators we are just waiting for the goal to be scored.

Because of this, many people don’t like ultra-defensive games, such as that demonstrated by Jose Mourinho’s team, for example, because it makes the chances of scoring goals smaller. The reason, the audience is looking for entertainment. In football, goals and celebrations become a show, entertainment in itself. This cannot be denied.

Meanwhile, when analyzing the game , for 90 minutes, we can’t just focus on the players who have the ball or where the ball is. We also have to pay attention to what other players do who are not in possession of the ball. This is done to read what game system is presented by the two teams, both when attacking or defending .