Inside the world of opposition analysis: ‘It’s not about what they do, it’s about what we need to do’

The key thing to remember — and The Athletic only learned this by speaking to many people working in the field — is that opposition analysts are useful, but their reports form only the basis of what happens next. The magic happens when the manager adds solutions.

Take Liverpool, for example. Since arriving at Anfield this summer, head coach Arne Slot has taken a thorough approach to opposition analysis via video and live scouting. Assistant coach John Heitinga watches teams live, the performance department provides insights, and long-serving opposition analyst James French does huge amounts of prep too. It’s Slot, though, who interprets the information and delivers specific solutions to players on how to beat the opposition.

There are a couple of noteworthy aspects to the 46-year-old’s approach. First, Slot asks his analysts to ensure that most of the video clips are positive, in particular the last one, so the players leave their session feeling good about themselves. Second, the analysis doesn’t stop at kick-off.

During each match Slot continues to identify in-game changes with the help of first-team tactical analyst Roderick van der Ham, who joined from Feyenoord last month and sat next to him in the Carabao Cup win over Southampton. Slot can be heard shouting “clip” during the opening 45 minutes of games and often uses video during half-time team talks to emphasise certain points, including radical system changes the opposition may have adopted for the first time.

“So many times this season, when a team plays us, they do something different than they do in their other games,” Slot said after the recent win over Girona in the Champions League.

Opposition analysis is endless, laborious and far from foolproof, but it is also necessary in modern professional football. To find out more about how it works, The Athletic spoke to some of the field’s top experts at a host of clubs.

Aston Villa manager Unai Emery has coached in the Premier League, Ligue 1 and La Liga. He has also coached in European competition for 17 years in a row, yet is still deeply involved in the nitty-gritty of opposition analysis.

When preparing for the next opponent, Emery holds three pre-match meetings. First, he likes to look back at a recent and relevant game featuring his own side to show his players what they did well and where they came up short, and he presents his findings in a 90-minute meeting to the players usually two days before a game.

His long-time analyst Victor Manas then draws up an opposition report for the next 90-minute meeting, which Emery uses to add further information of his own. They both watch each opponent at least five times before doing so.

Then, a day before the game, Emery presents solutions to combat any strength in the opposition. This is a key meeting and leaves each individual in no doubt about their specific role and responsibility. The final meeting is all about his players.

That Emery, an elite manager with vast experience and a huge support team, still clips up some of his own presentations for these meetings is a sign of how meticulous he is. It is also worth noting that the process at Villa has never changed regardless of the opposition.

“When we are facing teams who are better than us, more favourites than us, the only way to beat them is to keep consistency with a high level,” he told The Athletic last month. “In the Premier League, you have to be more intelligent, you have to be more focused and more intense than the opponent. If not you don’t have possibilities to beat them.”

GO DEEPER

Football managers are idolised and mythologised, but are they actually important?

Rachel Hindle works as a performance analyst for Championship side Sunderland, combining her role with a part-time coaching position at Leeds United’s women’s under-23s. She provides insights on opposition set plays but has covered every area of performance analysis during two years at Sunderland and five years at Blackburn Rovers before that under Jon Dahl Tomasson and Tony Mowbray.

“There’s an increase in the type of coaches coming into the game now who can clip themselves,” she says. “Some coaches adapt for every opposition. Others want to know about individuals. It depends how long they have been in the division.

“Mowbray knew the league inside out and studied the game so much. With Regis Le Bris (current Sunderland manager), he holds a really transparent philosophy so it helps make planning a lot easier. The opposition analyst can speed up the process so the manager can then work on how our system will exploit their system.”

Sunderland manager Regis Le Bris (Clive Mason/Getty Images)

Developing an understanding with the manager is essential, especially further down the pyramid. While top clubs in the country have as many as 10 analysts, with up to three people working on the opposition, departments in the second, third and fourth tiers are much smaller. Duties are spread across fewer staff members.

One analyst working in the Championship, England’s second tier, who asked to remain anonymous to protect relationships, explained how difficult his job became when the former club he worked for regularly swapped managers, meaning a change of approach to opposition analysis.

“When a foreign manager came in, he would want to know everything,” says the unnamed analyst. “Trying to explain the eight different patterns that Russell Martin used at Swansea was interesting. To give myself a head start, I created a portfolio that included all the teams, a bit on the manager, their playing style, and some strengths and weaknesses. Then, if there was a managerial change, I’d have something already ready for the new guy. Obviously I would then go much deeper into the analysis week by week and present to him early in the week.”

This particular analyst remembers an opposition switching to an unusual formation for the first time, and the manager then asking why there had been no pre-warning before the game.

“Sometimes we don’t have the answers,” he says, laughing. “It’s unusual because the process is thorough. I will always watch four or five games on each opponent in advance but occasionally something unexpected can happen. On this occasion, the team we came up against moved from a 4-4-2 to a diamond four midfield.  There wasn’t a way we could have foreseen this. There were no injuries and the head coach had never played that way before. Sometimes it can actually be a compliment that the opposition have changed for us, but try telling that to an angry boss.”

Chris Davies, manager of Birmingham City, admits his knowledge of the teams and players in League One was not overly sharp when he arrived this summer, having previously been the assistant to Ange Postecoglou at Tottenham Hotspur in the Premier League. However, he formed a close relationship with the club’s new head analyst Jack Kriskinans, who was hired from Midtjylland over the summer. Obsessive over details, partly because he was an opposition analyst himself for Swansea City and Liverpool under Brendan Rodgers, Davies says he cannot go into a game with full confidence unless he has watched the opposition in at least 10 matches.

“At this stage of the season, I feel like I need to map out what (each opponent) did at the start,” he tells The Athletic. “I like to know which players have been in form, who is out of form, why they’ve changed shape because of certain goals, and whether they’re marking differently at corners. I like to see the journey of the season because then you get to learn how the coach is thinking and that helps a lot.”

Coaching the most expensively assembled set of players in the history of the English third tier may give him an advantage over others, but his advance knowledge of the opposition helps him set those players up in the best way to take the three points. “I change details each game,” he says. “Opposition analysis should never be about what they do, it’s all about what we need to do. That’s where the art comes in.”

Birmingham manager Chris Davies during their 2-0 win against Stockport County this month (Dan Istitene/Getty Images)

Birmingham are building a clear identity where they press aggressively out of possession and try to dominate the ball when they have it. “For that, I need to work out how the opposition build,” Davies says. “Do they just go long? If they do, what are they trying to do and how do we stop them?

“Then I try to work out how can we attack the opponent and how can we attack the goal. So how are they set up? Are they narrow? Spread out? Are they blocking the middle? Do they always jump to press with one player? I have to work out what they do and how do we play through, around and over, and when we get to the goal how do we attack it.

“The detail always belongs to the opposition, regardless of how you want to play in possession. No matter how good your team is, if they press you high, that influences you. It impacts how you play the game. Same if they drop off. People say it doesn’t matter about the opposition but it has to. There’s two teams and that’s how you play the game.”

With such a busy schedule during the season, analysts are stretched, so forward planning is essential. Loai Mohamed, an aspiring coach and analyst who has worked with 15 head coaches, most of them in Finland but also another in the Champions League, says: “Last season I worked with five clubs at the same time, all needing the opposition analysis in before the weekend, so it’s very busy.

“The analyst needs to be a coach, not just a guy with a laptop and some editing tools. He should understand why and when things happen — why this movement, how they move, when they move, then be able to give recommendations.”

Staff at one club in the Championship told The Athletic that when they play three games in a week, their opposition analysis presentations (which are usually on a giant touchscreen in a meeting room) are shortened to keep players focused, going from around 20 minutes to 10 minutes.

That doesn’t reduce the workload for those putting together the packages, though, as individual players still want to know about the direct opponent they are coming up against, so they can plan ways to win their one-on-one battles. Some ask for the top-speed data of those they will face as it helps with positioning. Central midfielders study passing lanes and body movements in great detail. For knockout cup competitions, there is a lot of analysis sought for potential penalty shootouts.

The small wins make it all worthwhile. Fulham’s coaching and analysis team targeted the right side of Liverpool’s defence by overloading Antonee Robinson and Alex Iwobi to great success in the recent 2-2 draw at Anfield.

Until the second weekend of December, Aston Villa and Barcelona were the only teams in Europe to face more than 100 corners without conceding a goal. (They both conceded from corners that weekend in defeats against Nottingham Forest and Leganes.)

Hindle recalls one of her most pleasing moments at Sunderland this season. After extensive analysis of Hull City’s short-corner routine, the team executed a plan and subsequently scored on the counter-attack. “I can’t take the credit,” she says, “but it felt good, and that’s why we’re all involved in football and working so hard — we want to enjoy those moments.”

GO DEEPER

How mental performance coaching is transforming elite football

(Top photo: Arne Slot and Liverpool staff; by Carl Recine via Getty Images)