About
Why Pressing Matters exists
Most of what decides a football match happens away from the ball. We draw it out, one idea at a time.
Watch a match on television and you mostly see the ball. The camera follows it, the commentary follows it, and the highlights show what happened at the end of each move. What you rarely see is why the move worked: the run that dragged a centre-back out of position, or the full-back who stepped up a second too late.
Pressing Matters is an attempt to show that side of the game. Each guide takes a single idea, such as a pressing trigger, a way of building from the goalkeeper or a corner routine, and explains it in plain English with diagrams you can follow without a coaching badge.
Who it is for
We write for two groups of people. The first is fans who have a feeling something tactical is going on and want to put words to it. The second is grassroots coaches who want to take an idea from Saturday’s match and turn it into Tuesday night’s session.
If you have ever wondered why your team keeps losing the ball in the same place, or how to explain “stay compact” to a group of eleven-year-olds, you are in the right place.
How we work
Every tactical claim we make about a real match is backed by match footage or published data, and we cite it with the match and the date so you can go and check. If a number is only there to illustrate a method, we say so.
Opinion is labelled as opinion. We have views, and we think they are worth sharing, but you should always be able to tell the difference between what happened and what we think about it.
When we get something wrong, we fix it and say so. Corrections are listed at the end of the article with the date we made them. If you spot an error, please get in touch.
Reading the diagrams
All our diagrams are drawn from above, on the same muted pitch, so you can compare one guide with another. The key is the same every time:
- Light stone discs are the team with the ball, or the team we are focusing on.
- Charcoal discs are the other side, usually the team defending or pressing.
- Solid gold arrows show players running.
- Dashed white lines show the ball travelling: a pass, a cross or a shot.
- Shaded orange areas highlight the space that matters in that moment.
Every diagram is referred to in the text around it, so you are never left guessing what it is meant to show.
The writers
Pressing Matters is written by three people who look at the same ninety minutes in different ways.
- Callum Rees: A former youth-team coach from Cardiff with a UEFA B licence, Callum spent eight years running sessions before he started writing about them.
- Niamh Doherty: A Belfast data analyst who builds her own expected-goals models at weekends and checks every number twice.
- Ade Okafor: Ade manages a Sunday-league side in south London and watches more Women's Super League and National League football than is healthy.
When we publish
New guides go up four times a week, early on Monday, Thursday and Sunday mornings. Each one runs to between 1,300 and 2,000 words: long enough to explain an idea properly, short enough to read with a cup of tea. You can follow along with our RSS feed.
Independence
We are not affiliated with any club, league or governing body, and nobody pays us to cover a team or a product. We do not run advertising trackers. The only analytics we use are the anonymous visit counts our web host provides.
Questions, ideas or corrections go to [email protected].