On October 23, Bayern Munich head coach Vincent Kompany collapsed while watching a training session and was taken to hospital. He had been fighting a viral infection for several days, and the club expects him to be out for weeks. I wish him a full and quiet recovery. His health is his and his family’s business, and this post is not about it.
It is about what other coaches said in the days that followed. Niko Kovac wrote, “We all know how exhausting a coaching job like this is.” Martin Demichelis said coaches think about improvement around the clock and that their heads “probably work far too much.” When coaches at that level speak this openly, they are telling us something about the game itself, not only about one man’s week.
A coach friend who recently moved from day-to-day coaching into an academy management role helped me see what that something is. In the academy, he said, the work is not results-based, so the pressure is different. In the first team, the next result is always three days away. The more we talked, the clearer it became that the real problem is not tiredness. The game keeps growing, and the time to understand it keeps shrinking.
No Time to Understand
Two tracks: the game, and the people who live it
Football has always evolved on two tracks. The first track is the game itself. It becomes faster, more tactical and more physical, and the calendar grows with it. A generation ago, a top club played around 45 to 50 competitive games a season. Today, the busiest players and clubs play 70 or more.
The second track is the people who live the game: players, coaches, clubs and fans. Their understanding has to grow too, and understanding grows in a particular way. It takes time to watch, try, think, and talk. Nobody understands a more complex game just by being told about it.
For a long time, the two tracks moved together
For most of football’s history, the people kept up with the game. Children learned in the street, where the game itself taught them what they needed. Later they watched a match on television, went outside and tried what they had seen. Coaches studied new ideas between seasons and tested them in training. Clubs added analysts and staff as the game demanded more. Fans watched whole matches, talked about them for days, and learned the game alongside the players. The game became more complex, but the calendar still left space between games, so everyone had time to catch up.
Now the game is pulling away
That space is disappearing. In 2023/24, almost a third of the 1,500 players monitored by FIFPRO, the world players’ union, were in more than 55 matchday squads, and one was in 83. Before the age of 21, Jude Bellingham had played 251 competitive games. At the same age, David Beckham had played 54. With a match every three days, the week becomes play, recover, travel, prepare and play again, and the day for stepping back and asking what really happened never arrives.
The same thing is happening to everyone on the second track. Young players watch highlights instead of whole games. Coaches have more data and video than ever, but less time to make sense of it. Clubs are judged on the last result. Fans can follow every game in the world, scroll through dozens of clips, and form a firm opinion before the players have left the pitch. The people are still learning, but the time to turn what they see into understanding keeps shrinking, so the second track rises more slowly while the first keeps accelerating.
The gap that keeps widening
The distance between the two tracks is the gap between how complex the game has become and how well the people inside it understand it. It widens every season.
And a second gap hides inside the first. The less time people have to understand the game, the more they believe they understand it at a glance, from a highlight, a statistic or a final score. The result decides the story: a loss means the coach got it wrong, and a win means he got it right. The story is clear and satisfying, and it is often all there is time for. But it leaves out almost everything that really happened: the plan, the opponent, the injuries, the moments that went one way and could have gone the other. And because the coach lives inside that pressure, he is pulled toward the same quick story himself.
What my research helps me see
My doctoral research looked at how professional soccer coaches handle the competing demands of the role, and three of its ideas help explain this gap.
This matters because coherence is only one part of meaning. Real meaning has three parts: coherence, knowing what is happening; purpose, knowing where it is going; and significance, knowing why it matters, to me and to others. Under a crowded calendar, coaches spend almost all their time repairing coherence, explaining the last game and preparing the next one. Purpose gets postponed until there is time, and there rarely is. Significance, the reason a coach does this work at all, gets pushed outside the game, into family or faith or the memory of why he started. A coach can keep the story together week after week and slowly lose the direction and the reason behind it.
Put together, the game asks for more understanding than ever, while the calendar, and the noise around the game, leave less time to build it. We have not lost the game, but we have lost some of our connection to it.
Losing is part of the game, and part of life
No coach can solve this alone. A coach can protect a few minutes for reflection, but if every loss is treated as a crisis, those few minutes will not survive the pressure. This is where clubs matter.
A club can support its coach by judging development as well as results, by telling one consistent story about where the team is going, and by giving the coach time to see a plan through. It can also do something that is rarely done: help its fans understand the game more deeply. Clubs speak to their supporters every day, through their channels, their media and their community work. They could use that voice to explain what the team is building, why a young player is given minutes, and what a season really looks like from the inside.
The same three parts of meaning can guide a club. A loss only answers the first question, what happened. A club that knows its purpose, where the team is going over the next seasons, can place one result inside a longer story. And a club that remembers its significance, why it matters to its players, its supporters and its community, gives fans a reason to stay connected that does not depend on the last score. Fans who share the purpose and the significance can live through a loss, because they know the result was never the whole story.
Most of all, clubs can help fans accept that losing is part of the game. Every team loses. The best teams in history lost many games on their way to becoming great. Losing is not only part of football; it is part of life, and the way a club and its supporters respond to a loss shows what they truly value. A culture that can live through a loss without panic gives its coach the one thing the calendar keeps taking away: time to understand.
What did I leave out?
I ask this question after every game, so I should ask it here. I have written as if fewer games would solve the problem, and they would not, at least not by themselves. Some players and coaches thrive on a busy calendar, and many have learned to recover well. The deeper problem is the missing time to make sense of the games, and that can be lost even with a lighter schedule.
I have also said little about the staff who help. Big clubs have analysts and assistants who watch the game again for the head coach, and that matters. But someone else’s analysis is not the same as your own understanding. Finally, this is not only a professional problem. Young players now play several games in a weekend tournament and move from one to the next with no time to think about any of them, so the gap starts early.
What coaches can still protect
You may not control the calendar, but you can protect small moments of understanding inside it. After every game, before the video and before the data, take ten minutes to write your own story of what happened. Then compare it with what the video shows, because the difference between the two is where learning happens.
You cannot review the whole game with every player, but you can choose one player and one moment and ask, “What did you see?” Every few weeks, step back from the next game and look at the last ten, because patterns appear that a single game hides. And treat your own rest as part of understanding, not a break from it. A coach who never steps away cannot see the game clearly.
After every game, I ask my players the same four questions, and they work just as well for coaches, clubs and fans:
- What happened?
- Where is it leading?
- Why does it matter, to me and to others?
- What did I leave out?
More information isn't the answer. Meaning is.
