WHY WE’RE USING TACTICS ALL WRONG: Control & Creativity
I: Introduction
If you scroll enough on any social media platform, you’ll find headlines such as (all real headlines): “Are Tactics Ruining Football?”, “Guardiola’s Tactics Have Killed Football”, “Football is Ruined”, “Did Guardiola Really Ruin Football?”, or “The Death of Football As We Speak.”
At the heart of all of these articles and videos is the sentiment that football is no longer what it used to be. Whether it's nostalgia for a simpler game, genuine discontent with what football has become, or a feeling that footballers are no longer creative, the blame usually lands on the same culprit: tactics.
This led me down a rabbit hole. I started with one simple question: What are tactics, really? That question triggered several follow-up questions: What is the role of a coach? What are the origins of the game? How can we develop football further? Ultimately, these are questions that must be collectively understood if we want to continue developing the game.
To answer those questions, we need to trace three sets of origins: the origins of tactics, the origins of football, and the origins of the coach. Where these three paths converge, we’ll find a new way forward: a vision of coaching that doesn’t choose between structure and freedom—but uses one to serve the other.
II: Origins: Tactics, Football, and the Coach
1. The Origins of Tactics: Order, War, and Chess
The word tactics originates from the Greek taxis, meaning order, arrangement, or disposition. This term was commonly used for military purposes. The Greek military leader Xenophon defined Tactica as the art of drawing up formations of soldiers.
War tactics were studied meticulously, as they were the main method to grow and maintain one’s kingdom. Tactics weren’t just a tool—they were the key to survival, conquest, and control, and tacticians were highly regarded and sought after.
So, it’s no surprise that eventually we invented a game that reflected our romanticized version of war. Chess great Garry Kasparov explains in his book My Great Predecessors: Part 1:
“According to official legend, a slow war game not unlike chess originated nearly two thousand years ago in India, undergoing slight changes. Only one thing can be stated with certainty: modern chess originated as an intellectual game, modelling psychological warfare.”
Chess—a game of warfare—involves two players who imagine themselves in charge of an army complete with bishops, knights, and rooks, attempting to make their opponent surrender by capturing their king. In chess, the player is the omnipotent commander, controlling every unit on the board. Victory comes not from chaos, but from calculated control.
As in warfare, tactics in chess are about subordination to a single mind. One brain. One plan. One hierarchy. From their origins, tactics were never designed for shared authorship. They were meant to be executed—not co-created.
2. The Origins of Football: Emergence from the Crowd
Football’s roots couldn’t be more different. Where tactics were born in strategy rooms and war camps, football was born in the street.
It emerged from town squares—the gathering place of many people interacting without a clear ruler or leader. When enough people played, the game would spill over into large meadows or emptier streets.
Early versions of the game didn’t look much like what we know today. There were no limits on players. Hands were allowed. Rules were loose. But what was clear, even then, was the magic of a ball and a group.
In general, ball games have existed since the 3rd or 2nd century BC, such as a Chinese game called Cuju. There is something special when humans interact with a round object—we are drawn to it. So it’s not at all surprising that a similar ball game emerged 15 centuries later in Great Britain.
With football’s increased popularity, groups formalized where and how it was played. Social clubs emerged, allowing players to organize and compete in more developed teams. Nonetheless, it was still recreational, maintaining its grassroots character.
From the beginning, football wasn’t about control. It was about connection.
3. The Origins of the Coach: From Guide to God
The idea of a “coach” traces back to ancient Greece, where the sports coach was defined as someone who had strong knowledge of anatomy and nutrition, similar to a medical doctor. The word itself comes from the concept of a carriage—someone who “carries” another from one point to another. Later, in 1800s Oxford slang, it became a term for a tutor—someone who guides learning.
The concept of having someone with more experience guiding others through a sport or subject was not new, and it seems necessary and appropriate. Where things go awry, from my point of view, is when the ‘coach’ or ‘manager’ becomes the ‘player’ of the sport.
In football, coaching roles slowly evolved. As the sport professionalized, clubs looked to formalize leadership. George Ramsay became the first official “manager” in 1886 after retiring from playing for Aston Villa. His job included organizing matches, recruiting players, and—most importantly—“teaching players how to play beautiful football.”
This marked a significant shift. Leadership was no longer just on the pitch. The coach became something new: the external player, trying to extend their will onto the game from the sideline.
The formalization of this role changed everything. The structured hierarchy shifted who the ‘player’ of football was. Over time, as more clubs adopted formal ‘manager’ or ‘coach’ roles, tactics became the starting point for methods to improve play. Thus, the coach began playing the game of ‘tactics,’ like moving chess pieces.
III. Tactics on Trial: Has Football Lost Its Way?
Chess as a Metaphor for Life
At first glance, it makes sense to admire the chess player. Chess is a game of foresight, circumspection, and caution—qualities Benjamin Franklin once wrote made it a metaphor for life (The Morals of Chess, 1786). You study the board, anticipate the opponent, and choose the optimal move with precision. No randomness. No ambiguity. Just intellect, discipline, and control.
Franklin concludes his essay, “And it is therefore best that these rules should be observed, as the game becomes thereby more the image of human life.”
It’s clear why many believe chess can be an invaluable tool for developing a ‘competent mind.’ To succeed in chess, one must think deeply about the positioning of pieces in relation to what the opponent might do. It’s a game where chance plays no part in the result; therefore, the player faces accountability with every move.
Chess Thinking in Football Coaching
Chelsea’s current manager (2024), Enzo Maresca, wrote a thesis comparing chess and football. In it, he states:
“A coach can only benefit from acquiring the mind of a good chess player. The proof being the development of a number of mental skills that are excellent for the prefrontal cortex. Chess teaches you to control the initial excitement when you see something good and trains you to think objectively when you see yourself in danger.”
Maresca, like Franklin, sees the benefits of chess as ‘mental training,’ helping your brain to think better. They are not alone. Sir Alex Ferguson says in his autobiography: “If I were starting again, I would force every player to learn chess.” His reasoning is that mastering the game would ‘give them the ability to concentrate.’ Even Pep Guardiola, perhaps the most influential tactician of the modern era, is an admirer of the game.
The Limitations of the Chess-Football Comparison
Although there may be benefits for one’s general thinking from playing chess, the perceived similarities between chess and football are not all positive. They have created a situation where football is studied like chess, inherently creating a problem. The likeness of football to chess is only real when football is perceived as a game for the coach—the ever-present god-like figure controlling their subordinates.
This is not the fault of any particular individual throughout football history. It makes logical sense. With effective tactics, football can undoubtedly be simplified. As a general rule, the best coaches in history have been great tacticians. By using unique tactics in their contexts, they won more games than others, making their tactics more popular.
Up-and-coming coaches studied those tactics, like studying chess openings, and applied them in their contexts. There was a clear correlation between certain tactical approaches and increased team performances, hence more positive results.
Why wouldn’t a coach look to see what is working and try it with their team?
The Rise of Tactical Mimicry
This is also applicable to youth coaches all over the world. During the late 2000s into the early 2010s, youth coaches saw what Guardiola’s Barcelona was doing and were not just impressed by the results—they were mesmerized by the manner in which Barcelona played.
I’m not certain when or where the phrase “building out of the back” originated, but I would guess it was around this team. That expression became rampant—every youth training session and game, every club meeting, and every parent’s sideline—it was all you heard: “Build it from the back.”
This is a perfect example of how tactics are copied and pasted without truly understanding the principles behind them, or without understanding the context in which the tactics were first implemented.
Consequences for the Game
Tactical mimicry replaced context. Pattern replication replaced understanding. And when every coach starts copying the same tactical blueprints, something else happens:
Evolution slows down.
Tactical innovation becomes tactical repetition.
The game stops breathing.
IV. THE LIMITS OF TACTICS
Chess and the Roadmap to Mastery
If we circle back to chess, we may get a glimpse of the future of football.
In 1973, Laszlo Polgar started training his four-year-old daughter, Susan, to become a chess grandmaster. A few years later, Sofia, Laszlo’s second daughter, was born and soon followed in Susan’s chess-training footsteps. Their days consisted of studying over two hundred thousand game sequences clipped from chess journals.
Well, it worked. Both Susan and Sofia reached the level of chess grandmaster. Here it was: a roadmap to becoming a chess grandmaster—memorizing thousands of chess openings, middlegames, and endgames.
But this would all change.
Deep Blue and the Tactical Revolution
In 1997, IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue defeated the reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov. Deep Blue was able to evaluate two hundred million positions per second—infinitely more than any human could do.
In his book Range, David Epstein says:
“There is a saying that 99% of chess is tactics. Tactics are short combinations of moves that players use to get an immediate advantage on the board. When players study all of those patterns, they are mastering tactics. Bigger-picture planning in chess—how to manage the little battles to win the war—is called strategy.”
Computers are tactically flawless compared to humans. But Kasparov wondered: what if we combined the tactical genius of computers with humans' ability to think big-picture strategy? In 1998, Kasparov organized the first-ever computer-human cooperative tournament. Each human player was paired with a computer. This meant that years of pattern study became irrelevant. Kasparov’s years of repetition were neutralized, “and the contest would shift to one of strategy rather than tactical execution.”
“Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions, not less,” said Kasparov.
Freestyle Chess: Real-Time Strategy
In the coming years, “freestyle chess” developed, where teams of multiple humans and computers competed against one another. A duo of amateur players with three normal computers smashed the best chess supercomputer, Hydra. This duo also crushed teams of grandmasters using computers. Kasparov explained this by stating that the humans on the winning team were the best at “coaching multiple computers on what to examine, and then synthesizing that information for an overall strategy.”
One of the best freestyle chess players, Anson Williams, was asked about how he excelled in this new game. He said, “I have to consider advice from teammates and various chess programs and then very quickly direct the computers to examine particular possibilities in more depth.”
He called it ‘real-time strategy.’
What Does This Mean for Football?
It means two things.
First, tactics are a necessary part of any game but have a ceiling when all participants have studied the same tactics. The writer Sheehan Quirke once said:
“It's a simple fact of life that if you consume, you read what everyone else is reading, then the likelihood that you will write what they are writing, and worst of all, think what they are thinking increases.”
For decades, chess was studied by examining chess games of the past, meaning all grandmasters studied the same things. I believe we are in a similar cycle with football. Because we have relied on evolving our sport via tactics—studying tactics of the past—eventually, evolution will slow down and stagnate.
And just as computers blew us out of the water in chess tactics, it’s not crazy to think that computers will one day blow us out of the water in football tactics.
Second, we can apply the distinction between traditional chess and ‘freestyle chess’ to football. How Williams describes ‘freestyle chess’ is more closely related to football than traditional chess ever was—‘real-time strategy.’ Specifically, the role of a freestyle chess player resembles the role of a football coach more closely than a traditional chess player does.
The main difference is the level of input required. In traditional chess, you do not really have to take in any real-time information and synthesize it. There is no real-time input on chessboards. However, like a football coach, the freestyle chess player needs to gather real-time information from multiple sources and craft a real-time strategy to achieve the best outcome.
Because every top-flight football manager is a master tactician, or has a staff full of master tacticians, the gains from tactics are slight and often cancel out. Tactics no longer create the differences they once did. Effective tactics are now common practice for every team.
The Future: Directing Attention, Creating Clarity
Success in future football will be achieved by those who know how to operate within ‘real-time strategy.’ Football has never been like chess. Football happens. To succeed, you cannot simply study ‘the board.’ When you only study chessboards, you only apply chessboards. You do not train your brain to think in real-time strategy. You do not train your eye to observe the true happenings of football. You do not train yourself to interact with the game.
The future of football belongs to coaches who can operate like freestyle chess players—not dictating moves, but directing attention; not controlling outcomes, but creating clarity; not chasing perfection, but embracing adaptation.
This is the beginning of real-time strategy. And it’s where we begin to return freedom to the player.
V. THE COACH OF THE FUTURE
What is the Role of the Coach?
This now leads us to the final part of our journey: the practical implications of all of this on our coaching.
Naturally, the first question I believe we must answer is: What is the role of the coach? We’ve seen how the role of a coach developed as a top player attempting to pass their insights onto other players. This is a good starting point, but it’s also very limiting. This coach-player relationship is grounded in the coach viewing themselves as the keeper of knowledge, passing it down to the players.
To take that even further, the coach guides players based on what the coach would have done as a player. For example, the coach watches a player dribble and thinks to themselves, "They should have passed," based on their own subjective opinion of the situation. This is how you get “joystick coaching.”
Essentially, the coach becomes an extension of the player from the touchline. This limits the players’ potential because the coach only allows actions they personally would have done as a player. It’s a form of control over the player.
Perhaps wielding that type of control over players comes from a place of fear—fear of losing, fear of failure, fear of not being enough. And when the stakes rise—money, reputation, job security—so does the temptation to control everything.
But fear can’t lead a team, and control doesn’t scale.
The first step is moving past these fears, so we can loosen our control.
Observing More than the Chess Board
To continue developing the game further, coaches must improve their ability to observe more than just the ‘chess board.’ You must train your eye to observe the people playing the game—to see them as more than chess pieces to be moved around, more than robots performing actions.
You have to see intentions. You must improve your ability to interact empathetically with players, learning to take their point of view.
A Video Game Analogy: Two Perspectives
Let me give you an analogy from my own life. When I was young, like every other teenager, I enjoyed video games. One of my favorites was a war-based strategy game called Command and Conquer. It was played from a bird’s-eye perspective, giving the player control over their army and resources. In that game, you were the commander, in control of everything—a god-like perspective.
But another game I loved was Goldeneye for Nintendo 64. This was entirely different: it placed you inside the mind of the character, in a first-person perspective. You saw and experienced exactly what your character did.
These two games highlight the differences in how coaching can be approached. You can coach from a bird’s-eye perspective, overlooking the field as your players go out and execute tactics. Or you can take the perspective of your players, attempting to understand what they might be seeing, feeling, and experiencing. Each perspective will entirely change your coaching and how you interact with your players.
Ultimately, being able to shift between these two perspectives is how you begin integrating the intentional use of tactics in coaching.
Starting with the Names on the Shirt
One of my mentors, Oscar Cano Moreno, always said, “When talking about tactics, the first thing you have to start with is the names on the back of the shirt.” Oscar is referring to the idea that who your players are and what they're capable of is the most important factor when discussing tactics. This phrase perfectly explains how you can integrate tactics into coaching in a holistic way.
When coaches shift tactics to suit their players’ strengths rather than forcing players to fit predetermined ideas, they embody this principle. I experienced this myself recently, adapting my team’s formation after recognizing that my tactical ideas were limiting their potential rather than unlocking it.
Tactics are simply tools at your disposal to help players and teams improve. I don’t believe tactics should be vilified in the way some do; rather, I believe tactics should be used responsibly. Tactics, when used with intention, don’t restrict player potential—they support it.
When using tactics, you’re not trying to move robots. You’re shaping the conditions that allow your players to play with clarity, not confusion. When you make a tactical shift, you’re not taking away freedom—you’re protecting it.
Trained Ignorance: The Power of Perception
In The Ignorant Maestro, Itay Talgam emphasizes that truly effective leadership—and artistry—comes not just from directing others, but from training one’s eye and ear to truly observe and listen. He contrasts this with the traditional idea of control, arguing that great conductors (and leaders) must learn to notice subtle cues, dynamics, and changes in the group, rather than imposing rigid structure.
Talgam draws from his experience with orchestras to show how the best conductors attune themselves to the ensemble, developing what he calls a “trained ignorance”—a willingness to hold back their own agenda in order to perceive more clearly what’s actually happening. That trained perception becomes a source of responsiveness, nuance, and shared creation.
Applying this to football, the “agenda” we must hold back is blindly applying copy-and-paste tactics. Instead, we must perceive more clearly what players are truly doing and what they’re capable of.
My Mission: Beyond Tactical Frameworks
My mission is the following: I want to develop our sport and our profession beyond what we have done in the past.
Since 2018, I have been obsessed with developing methods to help players improve through self-regulating methods—to provide them with tools so they can go beyond any insight I will ever be able to provide. I want to tap into the part of human development that requires no master, no operating system, no tactical framework. With appropriate attentional lenses, development becomes inevitable and without a ceiling.
I have made great strides, but I’m not satisfied. I want to keep going, and to do this, we have to do it together.
A Call to Action
I invite you to join me—to observe deeply, to coach empathetically, and to reclaim football as a game shaped not by tactics alone, but by the people who play it. This is the football I want to be part of.
Let’s give the game back to the players.
Together, we have the power to shape not just how football is played—but what football can become.
Are you in?
WANT TO GO DEEPER?
If you’re ready to put these ideas into practice and design sessions that truly unlock player potential, I invite you to join my three‑week virtual workshop, Unlock Player Potential.
Over six hours we’ll move from philosophy to actionable practice — no rigid drills, only purposeful, player‑centred design.
Enrollment is open at the special early rate until March 31.
