The Game Before the Game
Soccer decision making begins long before a player touches the ball. In this Letter from the Training Ground, Nicholas Serenati explores scanning, perception, Soccer IQ, and the invisible thinking that shapes what eventually becomes visible on the field.
The field is quiet now.
There was a pass tonight that bothered me.
Not because it was misplaced.
It reached exactly where the player intended.
That was the problem.
A midfielder received between two opponents with enough space to turn. A teammate had moved beyond the next line. For an instant, the field seemed to offer something.
He played backward.
The pass was clean.
Technically correct.
Safe.
The exercise continued.
But I kept thinking about it.
Not the pass.
The moment before it.
From where I stood, the forward option seemed obvious.
But obvious is a dangerous word in coaching.
It usually describes what we can see after we already know where to look.
The player had less than a second.
His body was facing one direction.
Pressure was arriving from another.
One teammate was moving.
Another defender was closing.
The ball was still traveling toward him.
And somewhere inside all of that information, he had to decide what mattered.
So perhaps the question wasn’t:
Why didn’t he play forward?
Perhaps the better question was:
What game did he see?
I find myself asking that more often now.
Because the longer I coach, the less convinced I am that football begins with the ball.
By the time the ball arrives, much of the action has already happened.
A player has looked—or hasn’t.
A defender has moved.
A space has opened.
Another has disappeared.
A picture has been formed.
A possibility has been recognized.
Or missed.
What we eventually call a decision may simply be the visible conclusion of an invisible process that began seconds earlier.
And yet we spend enormous amounts of time coaching the conclusion.
Play forward.
Turn.
Switch it.
Release the ball quicker.
You had time.
All potentially correct.
All potentially useless.
Because an instruction delivered after the picture has disappeared does not tell us whether the player understood the picture in the first place.
That distinction has become increasingly important to me.
There is a difference between a player knowing what to do and understanding why the moment allowed it.
We can teach the first surprisingly quickly.
Players are excellent at learning our preferred answers.
They learn which pass earns praise.
Which movement prevents correction.
Which solution makes the coach stop talking.
Eventually, a session can begin to look remarkably organized.
But organization can deceive us.
A player can reproduce an answer without understanding the question.
And football rarely asks the same question twice.
The field changes too quickly for that.
Move one defender two yards and the solution changes.
Alter the angle of pressure and the pass that was correct a moment ago becomes dangerous.
A teammate checks toward the ball instead of running beyond it.
The goalkeeper shifts.
The opponent’s hips turn.
The space that existed disappears.
Another appears somewhere else.
This is what makes football such a difficult game to teach.
Its problems refuse to remain still.
We draw them on whiteboards as though they do.
Arrows.
Circles.
Zones.
Passing lanes.
Everything frozen long enough for the explanation to make sense.
But the player never receives that version of the game.
The player receives movement.
Noise.
Pressure.
Partial information.
And time disappearing.
Perhaps that is why intelligent footballers can sometimes look almost slow.
They are not necessarily moving faster than everyone else.
They are arriving earlier.
The distinction matters.
Their advantage may have been created before their first touch.
A glance over the shoulder.
A recognition of pressure.
An understanding of where the next defender will have to move.
A body position that preserves two possibilities instead of one.
Then the ball arrives.
To everyone watching, the solution looks simple.
Of course it does.
The difficult work has already happened.
We often call this vision.
I’m not sure that word is sufficient.
Everyone on the field has eyes.
The difference is not simply seeing more.
It is learning what deserves attention.
That may be one of the deepest forms of expertise in any domain.
A novice and an expert can look at exactly the same environment and inhabit entirely different worlds.
One sees objects.
The other sees relationships.
One sees where players are.
The other begins to sense what their positions make possible.
One sees space.
The other sees how space is being created, removed, offered, disguised.
One watches the ball.
The other watches what the ball is doing to everyone else.
Maybe football intelligence begins there.
Not with knowing more answers.
With learning to ask better questions of the picture.
This complicates coaching.
Because if two players can occupy the same field and perceive different problems, then correcting behavior alone may not be enough.
The player who repeatedly plays backward may not lack courage.
The player who holds the ball may not be selfish.
The winger who fails to attack the space may not lack aggression.
The midfielder who seems slow may not need to “play quicker.”
Sometimes what appears to be a technical or psychological problem is actually a perceptual one.
The player cannot act upon information that never became meaningful to them.
That possibility should make us cautious.
Labels are efficient.
Too slow.
Not brave enough.
Doesn’t understand.
Poor decision-maker.
They allow us to explain the player without investigating the problem.
But coaching should probably begin where labeling ends.
I went back to that midfielder later.
The same situation appeared again.
This time I watched him rather than the ball.
That changed everything.
Before receiving, his eyes stayed fixed ahead.
He never saw the defender approaching from his left.
He never saw the teammate moving beyond the line.
By the time the ball reached him, there wasn’t really a decision to make.
Not in the world he had constructed.
He played backward again.
And suddenly the pass that had bothered me made perfect sense.
Given the information available to him, it may have been the most intelligent decision he could make.
The error had occurred earlier.
Before the touch.
Before the pass.
Perhaps even before he knew there was a problem.
I nearly told him to turn.
Instead, I asked him what he had seen.
He paused.
That pause interested me more than the answer.
Because for a moment, he had to return mentally to a picture that no longer existed.
Not what I saw.
Not what he should have done.
What he saw.
There is something important in that distinction.
If I tell him the solution, I can correct the next action.
If I help him interrogate his perception, perhaps I can change thousands of actions I will never be present to correct.
That seems closer to teaching.
This may be one of the tensions at the heart of coaching.
We are judged by what players do.
Yet much of our most important work concerns what players learn to notice.
And noticing is difficult to measure.
There is no statistic for the glance that prevented the mistake.
No highlight clip for recognizing that the forward pass should not be played.
No applause for the midfielder who moves three yards before receiving and makes the next action ordinary.
The sophisticated parts of football often disappear precisely because they work.
Maybe that is why we overlook them.
The field is empty now.
Standing here, the game looks uncomplicated.
Two goals.
White lines.
Grass.
A ball beside the equipment bag.
Nothing is moving.
And perhaps that is why football is easiest to understand when nobody is playing it.
Once the players arrive, certainty disappears.
Every movement changes the meaning of another.
Every action alters the next problem.
Every player is seeing some things and missing others.
The coach is too.
I think about that pass again.
Earlier tonight I believed I had watched a player make the wrong decision.
Now I’m not sure I was watching the decision at all.
I was watching its consequence.
The real game had already happened.
Quietly.
Inside the seconds before the ball arrived.
And perhaps that is the game we should be learning to coach.
Field Note
No. 4
Before correcting a player’s decision, ask what information made that decision reasonable.
The action we see is often only the final sentence of a thought that began much earlier.
The Thinking Game
Soccer decision making is not simply about choosing the correct pass. Players must first gather information, interpret pressure and space, recognize relationships between teammates and opponents, and connect perception to action. Scanning, anticipation, body orientation, technical ability, and tactical understanding all influence what eventually appears to the observer as a “decision.” Developing Soccer IQ therefore requires coaches to train not only what players do with the ball, but what they learn to perceive before it arrives.
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About the Author
Nicholas Serenati, Ph.D., is a soccer coach, educator, former NCAA Division I player, and founder of Royal United FC in St. Augustine, Florida. His work explores the intersection of soccer decision making, Soccer IQ, tactical intelligence, player development, and human learning—with particular interest in how players perceive information, solve problems, and develop a deeper understanding of the game.
Drawing from his experience in both higher education and high-performance player development, Serenati approaches coaching as more than the transmission of technical or tactical knowledge. His work examines the training ground as a learning environment where perception, curiosity, decision-making, character, and identity are continually shaped.
Through Letters from the Training Ground, he writes about the quieter dimensions of coaching: the decisions made before the ball arrives, the behaviors that precede visible performance, and the often-unnoticed moments through which players—and coaches—become.
His broader work focuses on developing intelligent, technically capable, tactically adaptable, and resilient footballers prepared not simply to execute the game, but to understand it.
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