How To Watch Football – 52 Rules for Understanding the Beautiful Game, on and off the Pitch, by Tifo, published by Particular Books, Price: £10.99
Football is about so many things. It’s about stars, goals and glory but also about intense calculations and movements. It’s about the fans and player psychology. It’s about the coach, the club owner, the director of football. It’s about money and data, about geopolitics and architecture, and even about climate change.
Whatever your knowledge or experience of football, you will learn something new from the book. It debunks
THIS handy football primer, produced by Tifo the YouTube channel, is designed to help everyone understand what is happening both on and off the pitch.
From ‘don’t watch the ball’ and ‘why corners are less effective than you think’, to ‘how transfer fees can be mismany accepted beliefs and myths, and provides plenty of new thinking. You will learn about different styles of play, about Catenaccio, Tiki-Taka and Total Football.
You will learn about some of the greatest players and coaches, some well-known such as Herbert Chapman, Johan Cruyff and George Weah and some less so, such as Jimmy Hogan, Valeriy Lobanovskyi and Amr Fahmy.
You will discover the half-space, that pass completion doesn’t matter and that more defenders don’t necessarilyleading’ and ‘how to spot sportswashing’, these are Tifo’s 52 rules.mean more defensive. You will learn about XG – football’s expected goals metric. You will learn about Fan Ownership and the 50+1 rule.
There’s some great statistics for football fanatics to impress their friends, such as “Since 2010, only 3% of the corners taken in Europe’s top five leagues have resulted in a goal.”
And “In an average football game, an average football player will get 4.6% of the total touches on the ball. That equates to about sixty touches per game in a recent Premier League season. It follows that, for close to 86 minutes of the game, most players are without the ball.”
There are excellent illustrations which enhance the text and encourage further reading or further viewing in the case of the Tifo YouTube channel. This easy-to-read book is thoroughly recommended for existing football fans and for those wanting an introduction to the game.
Ian Aspinall Rating out of 10: 8
