Why do football managers think fans don't understand tactics or team selections?

Johnny Vincents Motorbike said:
football message boards such as this one and the others - prove that 'fans' know next to nothing about 'football' time and time again - its laughable at what some type.

they like to 'think' they have - but in all honesty they havnt a clue - me and you inc
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Most fans can tell when players and teams are struggling. Occasionally one or two new signings can transform the fortunes of a team, but mostly teams don't play well because the manager wants the players to play in a way which they can't, or won't. We've all seen teams relegated when, with the players available, they should have done better.

The issue - in my opinion - is that most managers are ex players, and use the same motivation that was used on them, use the same tactics their manager used, see the game as it was when they played 20 or 30 years ago. It might work, but with European players and continental players, it's more likely to fail. And unfortunately, most managers are thick as castle doors, so don't think about other ways to get the job done.

There are so many stats available to managers nowadays but most managers don't use them. When a particular goalie punches away a corner, where does it end up most often? Put an attacker where it's most likely to go and maybe you can play it straight back in. Is a goalie susceptible to long shots? Is a defender regularly out of position?

The managers that succeed take a far more detailed approach to the game, on and off the field. Some players can't adapt to new ways and get moved on. Others thrive. Management now is much more than deciding you want to play 3-5-2 or 4-4-2 and tell the players to get on with it. I don't think Chris Wilder sees it any other way.
 
I kind of agree with OP. I've watched players in the warm up before they've even kicked a ball in a competitive match and made a judgement that ends up being right. I think it's much harder to see whether a player might be good, great or exceptional but it can be pretty obvious that a player is bad.

The main thing is first touch. If a player can't control a ball in the warm up when not under pressure then it doesn't give me much confidence that they will be good. If strikers can't score in the warm up or players can't keep the ball in play in that rondo drill then you know.

Some players can get away with poor technique. Jimmy had a poor first touch but his finishing was so good he could get away with it.

Similar to others, it took me very little time to make my mind up on Connolly. It was clear that he was technically inept. No first touch, couldn't strike a ball cleanly. Compare him to Balogun and event though both players were poor for us I am fairly confident that Balogun will go on to be a player at a decent level because he was technically very good. Connolly will just keep dropping.
 
To be fair, Mourinho didn’t play professional football and he’s one of the most successful managers around.
 
Johnny Vincents Motorbike said:
go to any 'boro fans' board for the Cardiff game - go on do - and show me any fan/poster who raised any concerns or made a valid point of negativity around the boro team selection V Cardiff, before the match kicked off.

plenty of groans and moans and wild accusations during the match and after the match - but, before the game when the team was announced, not a pip squeek.

last Tuesday they were hero's this Tuesday they were useless and duds - it was the same fans making the calls. we did have a knowledgeable crowd once, but thats long gone.
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Well said, we have the thickest fans anywhere.
 
I think hardcore fans like us lot are quite good judges of if a player is any good or not.

I think we haven't got a clue about the nuances of tactics though. To see stuff like pressing triggers and third man runs and that you have to have played or coached at a high level. When you watch a game with an ex pro they see stuff that I'd never notice in a million years, it's like listening to a band with a musician. Football journalists don't even see that stuff, you only get an insight into it from ex players.

Fans also don't see when players are playing to instruction, rather than their natural game.

A massive majority of fans aren't nerds like us who discuss it on messageboards though. They just want to cheer when goals go in and couldn't tell you why Harry Maguire's not a very good defender and why Mo Salah is so effective in that Liverpool system - it's just "He's good" and "He's ****", which is usually an opinion they got off Talksport - and there's nowt wrong with that to be honest, you don't have to be an expert analyst to enjoy a footy match.
 
The moans and groans and we used get around the Riverside under Karanka for keeping possession and utterly controlling the game (on our way to a record breaking home record) is a good example of fans being clueless.

The forcing out of Bamford by Tony clueless when the vast majority of fans knew he was our best striker by some distance is a good example that sometimes fans can be right and the manager wrong.

The other thing about football is that there's a lot of luck involved too. More so than most other sports I'd say. It's fairly common for the best team not to win. Luck, in the eyes of fans and even managers at times, can turn a poor performance into a good one, or a good one into a rubbish one.

It's a very emotive and subjective sport.
 
This post really has cheered me up!!

You just have to read some of our fans comments re Tav to know where the knowledge base is of the average fan.

Also, that 10 minutes nonsense, I guarantee when we signed Dijksteel for example he would have been called out as terrible as, until Warnock came in, he looked like a fish up a tree.

I've watched football for as long as I can remember, numerous times a week and like to think (probably wrongly) i know more than most.

However, having been fortunate enough to watch some of the training sessions at Rockliffe with the younger age groups over the past year or so, the knowledge we fans have compared to those involved in the game at professional clubs, even at youth level as managers, coaches, scouts (not you nobby) is incomparable.
 
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I know a football manager who has managed some very high profile clubs. His view on what is going on is different to our point of view. We all watch the same game but us watching on TV or live don't have all the information.

We don't know what the players have been told to do, injuries, fatigue, dissent, what's been discussed in training, stuff going on with the player in their personal lives, how much freedom players have been given etc etc etc - the list is endless.

He can explain it very well in person to us but you can't come out with that stuff in a post match interview.

Managers are professional - they have had years of coaching and experience. To think us watching games live or on the TV comes near is laughable.
 
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Gunslinger said:
As a fan who has watched football for over 30 years, i would like to think over the thousands of minutes of watching the game, watching players, watching different tactical approaches
I have a full understanding of the game
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the answer is because as you go up every level of the game and you formally study it, you realise that fans dumb it down, and view with fan eyes, not coaches eyes.

Yes fans get some things right but they watch it superficially, in general. They can see and feel danger, but they generally don't have the skillset to think about how to solve it.
Football coaching has become a far more professionalised industry, with best practises, standards and ways of working. With knowledge shared.

Fans are still largely emotion led not intellectually. Hate to use the B word, but this starts to fall into the anti-expert argument that gave us brexit to be honest. We've had enough of experts, no point going on a course to learn something when I can figure it out myself, then everything goes bad.

I think people should have more respect for coaches and the study they put in to hone their knowledge.
 
jonny_greenings_sock said:
I think hardcore fans like us lot are quite good judges of if a player is any good or not.

I think we haven't got a clue about the nuances of tactics though. To see stuff like pressing triggers and third man runs and that you have to have played or coached at a high level. When you watch a game with an ex pro they see stuff that I'd never notice in a million years, it's like listening to a band with a musician. Football journalists don't even see that stuff, you only get an insight into it from ex players.

Fans also don't see when players are playing to instruction, rather than their natural game.

A massive majority of fans aren't nerds like us who discuss it on messageboards though. They just want to cheer when goals go in and couldn't tell you why Harry Maguire's not a very good defender and why Mo Salah is so effective in that Liverpool system - it's just "He's good" and "He's ****", which is usually an opinion they got off Talksport - and there's nowt wrong with that to be honest, you don't have to be an expert analyst to enjoy a footy match.
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I'm sure fans aren't up to date with all of the nuances but similarly I would bet that players/managers as pundits that haven't been involved directly in football for 20 years have no clue either. That doesn't mean they don't understand football, just they aren't up to date with the latest trends or jargon.

Most fans think of management as picking a formation and then picking the players to play in the team. Like they did on Champ Man in the 90s. Then tell the players to go out and do your job. I wouldn't be surprised if that is exactly how it was "back in the day" but things have moved on massively. I mentioned in a post the other day about the days of "inspirational leaders" being managers was a thing of the past. That might have worked 20+ years ago but there is so much more data now, the game is much more technical that intelligence must be crucial for a manager. Players like Woodgate who isn't very bright can parrot a few things he's learned in his coaching studies but he doesn't have the intelligence to analyse a game as it is happening and make the required changes.

I would fully agree that 90% of fans don't understand the nuances of the game and tactics but I'd say the majority of them can spot the major errors. I can see that we are conceding so many goals because we are too cavalier in our attacks, don't adequately cover at the back in case we lose possession and at the moment we aren't pressing high up the pitch as a team so we leave gaping holes to bypass. Nobody has clearly defined roles because of all the chopping and changing so nobody knows who should be marking who or who should be closing down so nobody is doing it. Communication must be non-existent. If I can see that I'd hope Wilder can and the fact we aren't rectifying it is because the players are failing to do what they've been told rather than because he thinks we're doing those things well/

I fully admit I don't know all the jargon around the detail of pressing triggers etc but I know enough to know when things look good or bad. I sometimes think Wilder is the sort of bloke who learnt something that was a bit innovative before other people, it worked but then other people learnt it too (but learnt from the mistakes made by people like Wilder) but Wilder is still doing what he was doing because it worked once so it'll work again, but it's possibly gone now. The true innovators, people like Pep, will change and adapt. The followers will always be a step behind but at least ahead of the dinosaurs that refuse to change at all. If you can't be an innovator yourself, and it's hard to do without unlimited funds, then you have to at least keep up to date with the innovators and know when to change what you are doing to fit the new meta otherwise you get left behind. This applies to almost every game/sport, not just football.
 
In any job the skillset is learned then mastered over an extended period. I have been doing my job for 30 years then 4 years at uni prior to that. I work with junior developers every day and the level of knowledge is a small percentage of the more experienced senior guys or architects. It's just a fact in any walk of life.

You do get lazy senior guys who you cant trust to do the job properly, but they are the minority. You also get juniors who come up with great solutions to problems so it isn't as straight forward as saying the tech lead is always right, they aren't, but they are more often right than wrong.

Coaching a team sport is no different.

Here's a potentially controversial view. Any manager will go through good patches and bad patches. It isn't because their commitment or skillset is changing. It's the vagries of a team sport with 22 moving parts, 25 if you include the officials. For example, if you hover around the bottom of the prem, but manage to stay there for 4 of 5 years. Then you get relegated, and often sacked. All that happened is the law of averages evened out. The manager didn't do a worse job than the previous years, it was just his turn to get relegated.

At the very top, money is the main factor, not the manager.
 
Gunslinger said:
1.Technique
2.Mobility
3.Workrate

Those are the three key attributes of any player, prehaps i exaggerated in reference to 10 minutes, ok, but players like Saville, Assombalonga, flint etc, if you watched them even for 45 minutes
you could see the club have being totally ripped off, if your incapable of that assesment, even in that short period of time watching them, you simply do not understand football

How can scout players like Saville or Flint for that period of time and think they were worth what we paid, its embarrasing
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If you ask any football scout they tell you it's a four corner model not 3.

- Physical (I guess that covers your mobility and partly workrate)
- Psychological (which would cover the rest of your workrate, do they put the effort in even when they face the challenge of better players or losing in a match
- Technical/Tactical - do they know what to do and when to do it. Where to be, in and out of possession, and can execute the necessary skills (covers technique.....but is far more than that. Being able to do it and knowing when to do it are different skills)
- Social - How do they behave in a group, in training, how do they live their lives outside of football, do theyshow respect to coaches and thus learn

If you look at someone like say Boksic, scored moderately high on the physical scale, he was a big powerful lad, fairly quick, but fitness and inuried were negatives. Technical and tactical he was masterful. Psychological fell a little short, when everything was going well he was superb, but a tough challenge and he could wilt. Social he was a real negative, not bonding with his team, not integrating, not really listening to coaches.

He wasn't able to apply his technical and tactical ability regularly enough because he didn't have the social and psychological traits for it. Thus we saw flashes of Boksic at his prime.
 
I've watched far more games of professional football than my brother, as he's spent the years actually playing it to a decent level.

The difference in how he sees the game, sees things happening that I don't, is able to anticipate what's going to happen before it does etc shows that those with a knowledge of the game gained through playing it / or studying it (Wenger as a example) far outweighs the insight that someone gets sitting in the stands and watching a game with his mates.
 
BoroMart said:
I think people should have more respect for coaches and the study they put in to hone their knowledge.
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exactly, i can knock out a good photo on my iphone now and again, doesn't mean I'm of the same level as professionals and I can start knocking peoples weddings!

Take Woodgate, for example, played footy as kid, trained 2-3 times a week minimum since 5 years old, from 11 or 12 years old probably younger, trained in an academy level by professional trained coaches 3 times a week, Played professionally for 18 years being coached daily by legends of the game.

Retires and takes professional qualifications in his trade, learns from AK, Pulis, etc did scouting for Liverpool etc.

For fans to think they can read or understand games better than him because they've got a dodgy box so watch Brescia v Bari in Serie B on a Wednesday evening is insulting
 
I think I can sum the OP's thoughts up in three sentences:

I have watched every series of Gas Monkey Garage & Wheeler Dealers but have never had a job in the car industry.

I am now taking bookings for car repairs / upgrades and MOTs.

I'll upgrade your braking system and you'll feel super safe driving down the motorway at 70mph.
 
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