Readings
Questions about how football teams hold together, come apart and recover, looked at through the FSL lens.
What becomes visible when we look again?
We talk about:
reading a game
reading a player
reading a situation
reading what is happening
FSL proposes another way of reading football.
Each Reading is a question, a few things worth noticing, and objections that haven't been answered yet.
Some Readings concern failure directly. Others look at advantage, stability, development, substitution or individual influence because they may bear on how collective failure starts, is avoided, or is exited.
Sometimes the lens makes something clearer. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it raises a better question than the one we started with.
The Reading is the exploration.
Where relevant
Try asking:
Which Failure Pattern, if any, is in play? What direction of change would it appear to call for?
WHAT HAS THIS PLAYER NEVER NEEDED TO DO?
Could some development problems be problems of exposure to conditions rather than problems of talent?
THE FLOOR ISN’T THE CEILING
Can a player's value partly consist of the bad states the team never enters?
THE OUTLIER DOESN’T HAVE TO BECOME EXTRAORDINARY
Can an outlier succeed through relative stability rather than exceptional stability?
STABILITY MAY BE RECOVERY
Is stability better understood as the ability to recover than the ability to remain unchanged?
DON'T COUNT YEARS. WATCH WHO ABSORBS THE RISK.
Is the useful “spine” of a young team an age structure, or a behavioural one?
THE SUBSTITUTE MAY NOT BE THE INTERESTING PLAYER
Is there a kind of substitute whose value is primarily the condition they help create around themselves?