Opposition analysis in football starts long before the team meeting - it starts with tagging the opponent's matches.

In this post I show how I do it with the Poland U-20 national team: how I split a rival's match into phases of play, how I add context to each of them and how a few hundred clips turn into 2-3 conclusions we take onto the training pitch.

The latest example: on Saturday 26 September we beat Portugal U-20 3:1. Portugal won the last two editions of the U-20 Elite League, and their squad included Mateus Mané of Wolverhampton - valued at 20 million euros by Transfermarkt, twice as much as our whole squad.

The game was even and both teams had a similar number of chances. The difference was tactical preparation and determination.

With Poland U-20 I am responsible for opposition analysis. The match plan is set by the whole staff, led by head coach Miłosz Stępiński, and I prepare the material for it.

The goals of opposition analysis

Opposition analysis has four goals:

• understand the rival's strongest team features - their shape and behaviour in each phase of play,
• understand their best individual players,
• understand their weakest team features,
• understand their weakest individual players.

Based on that, I try to predict what the game will look like and answer two questions: how can we score, and how can we concede? That gives us the match plan and 1-2 key behaviours in each phase of play that we work on with the team.

Our game model first, then the rival

Opposition analysis always happens in context. Before I start watching the rival, I know how our team plays - what our game model is. Only then do I lay the opponent's organisation on top of it: what shape they use and how they function within it.

Our game model is a set of tools. After analysing the opponent, we pick the ones that fit this particular match best.

Step 1. Tagging the rival's matches by phases of play

I tag the opponent's matches by phases of play:

• Attacking (the opponent has the ball) - goal kick / opening, low build-up, middle build-up, high build-up
• Defending (the opponent defends) - blocking the opening, high block, mid block, low block

For the players I simplify it to two parts: building up in our half and building up in the opponent's half. The staff gets the full breakdown, the players get as much as they need on the pitch.

Always add the opponent's context

The phase of play alone is not enough. To each phase I add context: what the rival's opponent is doing at that moment. I don't just look at how Portugal build up from the back.

I look at how they build up in their own half against a team that presses them man-to-man, and against a team that defends the way we do. The second one is the most valuable, because it is closest to what the rival will face against us.

That is why, when I choose matches to watch, I always look for at least one game against a team similar to us - in league position, style of play or shape.

What I tag

In a match I look for three kinds of situations:

• key - chances and situations where a goal could have been scored,
• repeated - things that come back several times, not a one-off,
• intentional - what the team clearly wants to do, even when it doesn't work. For example: a long ball to the number 9 when the rival leaves four players high up. Even when it fails, it shows what they are looking for.

For some clips I write a comment straight away, others I only tag, to capture how often something happens. I mark actions with a plus or a minus - whether they ended well from the rival's point of view. When needed, I watch the cut clips again, phase by phase.

How to watch a rival's match

• Focus on one team.
• Look for repetition.
• Watch either the team or individual and group actions - not everything at once.
• Don't watch the ball, look further.

Step 2. 2-3 conclusions from the rival analysis for each phase

From each phase I pick two, at most three things - team principles or individual behaviours - that we can train or exploit in this particular match. A database of a few hundred clips ends up as a few conclusions.

You can't implement more in a few days of a national team camp, and not in a single club microcycle either.

I only pick what we are able to implement. This is where you need to be creative: the solutions have to be possible for our players and built on their strengths.

When these conclusions reach the players during the week before the game is something I described in my post about the analysis microcycle: https://pachelski.com/en/blog/mikrocykl-analityczny-kiedy-jaka-analize-robic-w-tygodniu

Example from Poland - Portugal U-20: a cross to the far post

Portugal defend with a back four and don't mark in the box. The conclusion for us: we want to score from a cross to the far post.

In the 54th minute we created the first situation like that:

In the 84th minute it brought us a goal:

That is the path from analysis to a goal: a phase of play, the opponent's context and one concrete conclusion.

The most common mistakes in opposition analysis

• Analysis without context. The rival shown "in general", not against a team similar to us.
• Everything about the opponent. 15 things per phase instead of 2-3 - the player won't implement any of them.
• Watching the ball. The most important things happen away from it: in the box, in the rest defence, in runs from the second line.
• One-off actions instead of repeated and intentional ones.
• An observation without a conclusion. "Lots of space behind their back line" is only half of the information. The other half is: what do we do about it.

Summary

Opposition analysis starts with our own game model and ends with a few conclusions you can train. In between there is tagging by phases of play - always with the opponent's context - and selection: out of a few hundred clips, 2-3 things per phase are left.

🎯 Opposition analysis is not a list of everything the rival does. It is 2-3 things in each phase that you can train before the game.

In the next post: how I choose the rival's matches and how I turn this analysis into a presentation for the staff and a 5-minute team meeting for the players.

In 2027 I will run only two editions of Mentoring Analiza PRO (in Polish), up to 20 people each - a whole module of the programme is devoted to opposition analysis. Registration opens in December, and people on the waiting list will hear about it first: https://analiza.pachelski.com/wideo