Why you forget most of what you see at training

Try an exercise. Think back to your most recent session. Write down the names of the players you can recall a specific observation about.

Most coaches reach three to five. Out of eighteen.

That is not a sign you are a bad coach. It is a sign you are a human being who has tried to keep track of eighteen parallel things for ninety minutes, while also making substitutions, coaching, and watching in case somebody got hurt.

What you remember instead

Memory is not random. It is systematically lopsided, and the lopsidedness always hits the same players.

You remember the last thing. Whatever happened in the final ten minutes takes up disproportionate room.

You remember the dramatic. The goal, the error, the argument. Not the seventy minutes where a full back quietly did their job correctly.

You remember the ones you already notice. The best players and the loud ones. The decent, quiet player in the middle of the squad is practically invisible — and that is exactly the player for whom a single specific observation would mean the most.

The effect is that feedback ends up distributed unevenly across a season without anyone having decided it.

Why the notebook rarely works

Every coach has tried. A small book in the pocket, and you write as you go.

It survives two sessions. Not for lack of discipline, but because it requires you to take your eyes off the pitch at precisely the moment something worth noting is happening. You cannot observe and write at the same time.

The same goes for most apps that need you to type something in. Any solution that demands your attention during the session is competing with the session itself — and losing.

What actually works

Three things, in increasing order of effort:

1. A fixed routine immediately afterwards

Five minutes in the car before you drive off. Three players, one observation each. Rotate who you write about so it is not the same ones every week.

It is low-tech and works surprisingly well. The drawback is that you still only capture what you remember five minutes later.

2. Dictate instead of writing

Talking is faster than writing and does not require you to look down. A voice memo on the way to the car captures three times what a notebook does.

The drawback: a recording is not searchable, and nobody wants to listen back through forty minutes of audio.

3. Let something else listen

This is where the technology has become interesting in the last couple of years. Speech recognition is good enough that what you say at training can become text — and a language model is good enough to work out who each remark was about.

That changes the arithmetic: you do not have to remember anything, and you do not have to do anything during the session. You say the things you were going to say anyway.

We have written more about what the technology genuinely can and cannot do — including the places where it is not the answer.

Why it is worth doing something about

Not because more notes make anyone a better player.

But because the quiet full back who never gets feedback knows it. And because the development conversation in March becomes a completely different conversation if you can say "in October you waited in the press, in February you went the last few metres" instead of "I think you have developed nicely".