Hello there! Welcome to futbird, your home for a refreshing take on the game we all love. My name is Lukas. I built this blog to combine my passion for football and tactical analysis; however, I hope I can provide the reader with some new food for thought, a different opinion to consider, and a pathway to become as enthralled with football tactics as I am.
Football is art, and through the use of tactics that get the best out of their players, a manager can create a beautiful masterpiece (See: Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona). Yet, very few managers are remembered as true pioneers of the game, who advanced and developed our way of thinking about tactics. There are more reasons for this than I can list, but I believe many challenges come from the fallacy that there is one “correct” formation/tactic to use. Managers can spend years in pursuit of finding the “perfect” strategy, only to find that at another club with another group of players, the same strategy holds the team back. Below, I’ve laid out a few points outlining my philosophy when it comes to football tactics.
- There is no one “perfect” formation. The best formation to use in a game depends on many factors, including player fitness, weather conditions, opposition tactics, etc.
- Even if a “perfect” formation was to exist, it requires a deep understanding and full commitment from every player in order for it to reach expectations. In modern football, this process of convincing players to buy-in to a system can be one of the most challenging parts of managing.
- Even if the perfect team is playing the perfect formation, football is still a game of chance. Luck can go both ways, and for this reason results are not necessarily indicative of the strength of the strategy used.
With just these thoughts, we start to diverge from how many fans enjoy the game: purely from an entertainment sense, without too much additional consideration given to the how and the why of the results. Now, I am not saying everyone should enjoy football as I do, and there is nothing wrong if football holds a different place in your heart as it does mine. As soon I started hearing takes on football that seemed to be only based in emotion or opinion, I felt the need to investigate further and found myself becoming (possibly too) interested in tactics and football analysis. I personally think results-based analysis cannot tell the entire story of the game: the amount of shots on target, possession, passes completed, are only metrics that we can use to develop our understanding of a match. They cannot be used in isolation to make claims you might hear from a fan on Sunday such as, “We had 20 shots today and didn’t score one, our forwards are playing awful!” Statements like that above are a great example of what I try to avoid with my approach to analysis. My goal on this site is to always draw conclusions that have been considered thoroughly, using the appropriate statistics to back them up. My promise to you is that I will do my utmost best to provide unbiased analysis for all football fans to enjoy (for the sake of transparency though you should know I support Tottenham and Bodø/Glimt from Norway).
I hope I have been able to give you an idea of how I think about the game of football. Tactics and Analysis develop through conversations, through debates, through arguments at times. This is what I want to preserve here, and will work on creating a space where people from all backgrounds and schools of thought can express their ideas. Whether you are inspired by Alf Ramsey, Bela Guttman, Valeriy Lobanovskyi, Marcelo Bielsa, José Mourinho, or Pep Guardiola, I truly hope you will find something to spark your interest here. Welcome to futbird, we’re happy to have you. See below for the list of site pages.
-LM
Contact: I am an aspiring football scout/analyst certified by the England Professional Football Scouting Association (PFSA), open to any type of remote work including: Individual player scouting, Opposition Analysis, Tactical Analysis, and any other form of video analysis. For any inquiries, please email me at: scouting.futbird@gmail.com
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