Seeing Bad Luck: Player Participation to Tactical Video Analysis in Amateur Football

This paper focuses on the skills involved in gaining insight from visual evidence in tactical video analysis. Using multimodal analysis of video recordings of tactical video analysis in a case from amateur football, our findings re-specify existing scholarship into video-based coaching by giving content to the idea of seeing as a scaffold for player engagement. We identify four methods in which participants use video data in interaction: the first involves using still images to give a label to the episode; the second is about making apparent what is seen on video through bodily re-enactment; the third entails zooming out from specific aspects of play to consider a larger spatial configuration while the fourth consists in considering the event within the extended temporal development of the action. Contrary to accounts of video-sessions whereby talk is dominated by the coach, the polyphony of voices and multiple ways of seeing captured by these methods concur to suggest a view of tactical video analysis as a complex social system of which the coach is but one member.