Picture the last team video session you ran. Twenty players squeezed into the clubhouse, the projector warming up, and you are on clip fourteen. This one is about the left back's positioning at a defensive corner. Two players need to see it. The other eighteen? One is scrolling under the table, the keeper is quietly planning dinner, and your right winger checked out somewhere around clip nine. You know the feeling. You are working hard, and most of the room has gone.
That exact frustration is where Robert Noall starts, and it is why this masterclass is worth your time. Watch the full video at the bottom 😉 It’s free for all this time.
The one-line version (TLDR)
Stop drowning your whole squad in team video, and start sending each player a couple of short, personalised clips they can watch in their own time. Some clips simply show a player every time she is on the ball. Others, the ones Robert calls "specials", carry a short written comment baked into the video. The point is not the software. It is the shift from lecturing the group to stimulating the individual, and the target is not technique, it is decision-making. Do it consistently and something lovely happens: players start asking their own questions, and they start learning from each other's clips.
Where this comes from: Robert Noall's individual video analysis masterclass on The Hockey Site. The grounding notes woven in below draw on Bunker and Thorpe's Teaching Games for Understanding, Gabriele Wulf's research on attentional focus, Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers.
Why team video loses the room
Robert is honest about the maths that most of us quietly ignore. If you show two examples per player across a squad of twenty, you have built forty clips where any given player genuinely cares about two of them. The rest of the time, in his words, "you're just sitting there waiting for your turn."
He is not throwing team video out. He is disciplined about the split: global tactics and how to beat the next opponent on a Tuesday, opponent analysis on a Thursday or Friday, and the individual clips earlier in the week. Team video keeps its job. It just stops swallowing everything.
It is about decisions, not biomechanics
This is the part experienced coaches should sit up for. Robert is explicit that individual video is "not so much as looking at the technical side like biomechanics", but about "how do you make your players better for what they're currently working on." The heart of it:
"It is really important that the player who passed it is getting better in decision making. And I think decision making makes a huge difference in the game", especially from under-16 upwards.
That lands right on top of decades of games-based coaching theory. Bunker and Thorpe's Teaching Games for Understanding argues that tactical awareness and decision-making should be developed before, or alongside, technique, with players learning through guided questioning rather than being told (Bunker & Thorpe, 1982; Australian Sports Commission, Game Sense). Gladwell draws the same line in Outliers when he separates raw ability from "practical intelligence", knowing what to do, when, and how, for effect (Gladwell, Outliers, Ch. 4). Robert's clips are, in effect, a decision-making trainer wearing a video tool's clothing.
There are no bad decisions, only different ones
When Ernst asks about the split between reinforcing good decisions and correcting poor ones, Robert reframes the whole question: "there's no poor decisions. It's just a decision that could be different." Watch how he writes a special. Not "you got this wrong", but "in this situation, maybe it is better that you drop down for an inside pass." He points at the space and the option, not the player's body.
That framing is quietly backed by motor-learning research. Gabriele Wulf's work on attentional focus shows that directing a player's attention to the effect of a movement on the environment, the ball, the target, the space, produces faster learning and more automatic execution than focusing on the body itself (Wulf, Attention and Motor Skill Learning, 2007). "Drop down for an inside pass" is an external cue. "Bend your knees, lower your hands" is not.
Stimulation, not instruction
Asked how he gets players to lead their own analysis instead of being handed the answer, Robert's reply is one word: "Stimulation. It's pure stimulation." He adds a smiley face and a line like "I'm really proud of you. Really worked on this part. I noticed a difference." Players text back to explain their choice, that they wanted to attack the left, that they felt higher up the pitch was better. As he puts it, "it's not me telling them how they should do it. It's more stimulating."
Two ideas from the coaching bookshelf sit underneath this. First, Covey's principle that people rise to the potential you reflect back to them, and that feeling genuinely understood has to come before any advice can land (Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Habits 5 and 7). "They have a feeling that they're being seen", Robert says, and that is the mechanism, not a nice-to-have. Second, Gladwell's description of meaningful work: effort feels motivating rather than punishing when it carries autonomy, complexity, and a clear link between effort and reward (Gladwell, Outliers, Ch. 5). A player choosing when to watch her own clips, and forming her own view of them, has all three.
Private, and on their own time
Delivery matters as much as content. Robert asks the question that answers itself:
"would you rather that your coach told you you did something wrong by sending a personal clip to you or saying it in a group of 20 people?"
A player can watch three minutes at the dinner table instead of sitting through forty minutes of match footage, or a team meeting about everyone else's job. And because "the video never lies, but in a positive way", it quietly settles the "I don't remember that moment" conversation without it ever feeling like an ambush.
Do not pour the whole espresso
Starting out, the warning is not to go from zero to a hundred. Do not hand a player seventeen tips at once. Pick one theme you are already working on, say tackling outside the circle rather than inside it, and only hunt for clips of that. His metaphor is worth stealing: "it should be like a big coffee machine and the coffee should drip down lower." Someone who has never drunk coffee does not want a whole espresso in one go. And consistency builds the habit. Robert ran individual clips every match early in the season, and when he eased off later, the players asked him to keep them coming.
You can lead a horse to water
Not everyone will engage, and Robert is at peace with that. "You can bring a horse to water, but you can't make it drink." Some players learn on the field, not on a screen, and that is fine. His job, in his own words: "as a coach, your job is to give them the tools they need to get better. But they have to use the tools themselves." The payoff he did not plan for: after about five weeks, players were watching each other's clips and debating what they would have done differently. That peer conversation is the culture most of us are actually chasing.
Three things to try next week
Pick one theme per player, and clip just two moments. Do not audit anyone's whole game. Take something you are already coaching, a defender's tackle selection, a midfielder's lead into space, and find two clips of it this weekend. That is the whole task.
Send one "special" that stimulates, not corrects. Add a short written comment framed as a question or an option, not a verdict: "what did you see here?" or "maybe there was an inside pass on." Point at the space and the choice, not the technique. If it was good, say so warmly and specifically, players need to feel seen.
Put the clips where players own them, then let go. Drop them in a shared folder or app they can reach on their phones, and let them watch in their own time. Do not police whether they did. Give the tools, and let them drink when they are thirsty.
Watch the full thing
Robert walks through his actual set-up in the masterclass, including the wonderfully low-tech secret weapon: a cheap keyboard covered in player-name stickers that does most of the heavy lifting. Yes, the best bit of kit here costs about fifteen euros and a sheet of stickers. If you want to see exactly how he codes a match live and exports the clips, the full session is well worth your time on The Hockey Site. Watch it before your next block of video work, then try the three steps above with a single player, and see what comes back.
Have a question? Contact Robert here.
We kept this one for free for all 🙂 But if you like what you see and want to see more from our other masterclasses ↓
