Can Better Words Help Us See How Teams Fail?
Football Sense Language (FSL) explores whether what experienced practitioners sense about a team losing its way, but struggle to name, can become shared, testable knowledge.
Some things in football are hard to name.
Not just what happened. What was happening.
Football gives us goals, passes, shots, possessions and results.
But between the events and the outcome, things happen that are harder to describe.
A team begins to lose its shape before it loses the ball.
A team can see the problem and still be unable to act on it.
A player creates value partly by stopping a worse situation from appearing.
FSL proposes a vocabulary for describing them.
Failure here doesn't mean bad. It describes a team's ability to read, coordinate or act giving way, whatever the scoreline says. Sometimes that may show up before the scoreline does. That is something to test, not assume.
The same outcome may follow different kinds of failure, and the same kind of failure may lead to different outcomes. Whether that holds is part of what FSL asks.
FSL gives tacit knowledge a language, and gives data somewhere to look.
For example
“We're losing control.”
DRIFT
What might we observe?
What direction of change might it appear to call for?
The question is whether better words produce better distinctions.
Can they help us:
- notice what is changing
- tell one kind of failure from another
- communicate it to someone else
- test whether those distinctions hold
Watch a match. Look for where the team's ability to function gives way, or doesn't. Hold the words up against what you see.
