Hello everyone, I'm back!

After a longer summer break, I'm back in touch. I hope you managed to switch off properly and have made a good start to the new season.

The opening league games are played, and that is always a special moment. This is where you find out what holds up from your pre-season plans and where you need to fine-tune. Fitting nicely with that, here are the topics of this issue:

At Como 1907 there is a routine that sounds like paperwork at first glance and turns out to sit at the heart of modern coaching at second. Before every match, the board receives the head coach's match plan. Cesc Fàbregas sets out in writing how he reads the opponent, what he expects to happen, and how his side will answer it. After the final whistle comes the review and the comparison.

Como president Mirwan Suwarso has explained why this is so valuable for the club. It tells the people upstairs what they should actually be watching for during the game. They stop following the ball and start watching the things the coach flagged in advance.

And that is where the real point lies. The moment a match plan is written down beforehand, it stops being a set of instructions and becomes something else: a prediction. A claim about what is going to happen, put on record before it happens. That changes everything that follows.

For a match plan to be more than guesswork, it needs a foundation. Fàbregas built his over years, some of it while he was still playing. He worked systematically through every formation and every system that exists in the game. Each one brings strengths, but each one also brings structural weaknesses. And for every one of those weaknesses he formulated an answer and wrote it down.

The result is a personal knowledge database. When the opponent lines up with a back three and a double pivot on Saturday, preparation does not start from scratch. The fundamental question has long been answered. The time goes where it belongs: into what makes this particular opponent different.

You can see that groundwork in the flexibility of the side. Como line up nominally in a 4-2-3-1, shift into a 1-4-2-1-3 in build-up, drop into a 4-4-2 out of possession, and use back-three structures depending on the fixture. That is not improvisation on the day. That is prepared answers being pulled off the shelf.

What stands out is that Fàbregas is no control freak trying to script every step. He has said repeatedly that he values structure because a well-structured team understands better what to do at each moment of the game. Structure, in his view, is not the opposite of freedom but the condition for it. The coach sets the frame, the players make the decisions inside it. At three o'clock on Saturday your hands are tied anyway.

Now to the part that really matters. Why is it so valuable to commit the plan to paper beforehand, rather than just carrying it in your head or delivering it in the dressing room?

The answer lies in a psychological mechanism none of us escape: hindsight bias. After the match you know what happened. And the brain immediately rewrites your own memory of it. I knew they were going to come down the left. Did you actually know that? Or do you only know it now, because the goal went in?

Without a written forecast the two are impossible to separate. And that makes the review worthless. It simply confirms what you already believed. You put in a lot of work, but you learn very little.

A written prediction makes your own work testable. After the match it is no longer opinion against opinion, but expectation against reality. And the gap between them is where the learning happens. Did I read the opponent correctly and the execution let us down? Or was my analysis wrong in the first place? Those are two completely different problems with completely different solutions, and you can only tell them apart if the expectation was written down.

At Como there is a second layer to this. The club also works with independent analysts who calculate a win probability before the match. That leaves two forecasts sitting side by side: the coach's tactical one and the model's statistical one. After the game, both can be checked against what actually happened.

This is why Como look so remarkably consistent. Analysts describe them as one of the sides whose results are driven by process rather than randomness. Points and expected points sit close together. Performances barely fluctuate. That is exactly what emerges when the work is systematic and the review is honest.

The same logic has taken over a second area that used to be almost pure gut feeling: squad building. Because a signing is, at its core, nothing other than a forecast. The claim that this player will produce a certain level of performance in our system and in our league.

In England, data-led recruitment is now standard at practically every club. Brentford is the best-known example. Owner Matthew Benham, a former professional gambling analyst, built a statistical model called Smartodds that holds data on more than 85,000 players worldwide. He put his money into analytics instead of marquee signings.

Brighton run a similar model under Tony Bloom, Liverpool built an analytics department under Ian Graham that was central to the signing of Mohamed Salah, and Sunderland copied the Brighton blueprint so effectively that the newly promoted side finished the 2025/26 season in twelfth. The principle is always the same. A scout watches three matches and forms a judgement. A model processes thousands of data points and filters out the noise.

But, and this is the crucial part, that forecast has limits too. At Como, Fàbregas does not only stand on the touchline. He is a shareholder and a member of the club's football board. He has a say on players, and he is allowed to overrule the numbers. That is not sentimentality, it is methodologically necessary, because data has systematic blind spots:

Context

The numbers know nothing about the system that produced them

Weak output can simply mean a player was in the wrong system. The same player in a different side generates completely different data.

Character

Mentality and willingness to learn stay invisible

Whether a player takes criticism, gives everything in training and lifts the dressing room comes out in conversation, not in a data set.

So the right question is not whether to use data, but how to weigh it. The model narrows thousands of players down to the twenty who are genuinely worth considering, and it protects you from expensive mistakes. Choosing between those twenty is done by a human being who knows the squad, the playing identity and the dressing room. Fàbregas has said more than once that he cannot understand clubs who sign players without even speaking to the coach.

The professionalisation of football is usually measured in technology: databases, models, analysis tools. But that is only the visible surface. Underneath sits an attitude, and that one is available without a budget.

The attitude goes like this: I claim something in advance, and I hold myself to it afterwards. Fàbregas did not build his database of systems because someone sold him a tool, but because he wanted to know what he was doing. The match plan goes to the board because a prediction nobody knows about is a prediction nobody can check. The tools are interchangeable. The rigour is not.

And in the end the human stays at the centre, precisely because the forecasts keep getting better. No model would have predicted a future for a young player with mediocre numbers if somebody had not seen something in him. Data protects us from our own biases. It does not make the judgement for us.

A coach does not need more data or yet another admin tool. He needs something that helps him turn his playing idea into the right decisions for training and matchday.

That is exactly what FussballCoach has been rebuilt for.

Here is how the new coaching workflow works:

1. Define your playing principles
Set out how you want your team to play with and without the ball. The AI analyses your input, gives you feedback, and helps you turn it into a clear playing identity. You decide at every step what actually fits your team.

2. Understand your squad
Build player profiles with strengths, development areas, positions and availability. Holidays and injuries are tracked centrally. Over time, a realistic picture of your squad takes shape.

3. Organise training sessions and matches
Schedule single dates or entire series. Players confirm their attendance through a simple link. Attendance and absences are laid out clearly, without you having to chase every session manually.

4. Plan your sessions
Use the drill library, create your own exercises, or let the AI suggest practice forms that fit. From there you put together a complete session plan.

5. Prepare the match
Plan your line-up, plan A and plan B, substitutions and set pieces. New: you can now draw runs, passing lines, zones and notes directly onto the pitch and capture your tactical idea visually.

6. Track the match live and learn from it
Record goals, the scoreline and key observations right from the touchline. After the final whistle, everything carries over into your post-match review. What you learn feeds into your statistics and into the next week's planning.

FussballCoach connects playing principles, squad, session planning and match preparation into one continuous process. The AI does not hand you generic, disconnected answers. It works from your idea and from what it knows about your team.

The AI makes suggestions. The coach always has the final word.

The new version is available now. I would genuinely welcome honest feedback from your day-to-day coaching work, because that is exactly what FussballCoach should keep growing from.

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