What can we learn about life and football from adolescents’ unfiltered and non-conditioned perspectives?
If you’ve ever spend enough time with adolescents/teenagers/millennials (in general young kids between the ages of 10–17), then, you know they’re these amazing, full of ironies, paradoxical, and most unfiltered human beings. They don’t care about things that don’t matter to them and the things that matter to them keep changing on a regular basis. Chances are you’ve come across this phenomenon and might have even called it irrationality and being typical pre-teen or scoffed it off as ‘teenagers, right!’
Fact is, no matter which era they are born in, they all go through the same process that we went through when we were at that age. The difference is with the information-availability and how much that affects them.
They don’t consume information the way we do mainly because most of them have not undergone the conditioning that we have. I’m not talking about this from a purely football context, but about everything in life. Their minds work differently and a lot of it is down to a process called neural pruning which makes them see things in a way that our old (adult)neural wiring does not.
This is one of the crucial points in their lives where they’ll most likely make life-altering choices or even form beliefs and values which will stick with them for most of their life.
In most cases, these choices are factored by their environment, the stage of physio-biological development they are in, and the people that matter to them the most.
It’s not that they don’t have filters, but they have fewer filters that are formed by exploratory means. Despite being exposed to the information pool called internet, which offers them almost everything they need to know — it is still prescriptive knowledge and not procedural knowledge (and they know this too).
How does this connect to football?
Since COVID-19, schools have remained closed and I’ve managed to stay in touch with my kids (players) through weekly digital sessions where we attempt to connect over various things from discussing 17th and 18th century art to moments of the game and from performing original rap songs to tactical decision making. This month we decided to attempt match analysis.
Let me put a disclaimer that there is never a right way (in fact there are no right or wrongs in football) to analyse a match and even at the top level there will always be more than one way of looking at a match situation.
Check this website if you want to know more about match analysis and get a really good dose of analysis from some really young and talented people working in football.
Football analysts know this and they understand that they work with endless streams of data and then use coding, excel sheets, and other tools for hours and hours of analysis (it’s usually a thankless job but if you meet a data analyst be kind to them). They know how to pick their context and will then filter the data based on that context which is both specifically unique and general.
So we decided to do a different kind of match analysis where every player was shown the first half of the Liverpool Vs Leeds Premier League Match.
Each player was assigned a player from the match (we have 20 players in a team so 10 were assigned Leeds, 10 were assigned Liverpool) whom they have to follow for the entire first half.
The kids had to make their observations from for each minute and follow the player regardless of whether the player was in ball possession or not.
While most of the kids will be working on this for this month — I was lucky enough to get a few entries that just baffled me. These are really young kids who rarely get to watch live matches or even watch matches regularly on their TVs or phones.
What those entries showed me was just so many amazing things that I felt overwhelmed to share them here. Most of the entries have spelling errors but the way they are watching and learning behaviors and actions of players from the match is just brilliant.
Some of the points in their analysis might be very simple which is what makes them even more interesting.
Do we sometimes over analyse things when there are some very simple ways to analyse matches? Do we use too much football-specific lexicon that just makes it harder for an average fan or football person to understand the game?
Do we as humans over complicate things about our lives on a daily basis because of the many filters (or lenses) we’ve formed with years of the conditioning we went through? A good thing to ponder on during this time.
Thank you for your time.
You can find more pages of the entire 45 min (first half) analysis of the kids here: https://vimeo.com/476045446, https://vimeo.com/476045777, and https://vimeo.com/476046024
