# Telestration for coaches in sport

> Telestration for coaches in sport: Discover how involving players in video analysis can improve tactical understanding, decision-making and learning in football.

Published: 2026-10-19

Telestration in Football

If telestration is designed to improve players’ understanding of the game, why are players so often the audience rather than active participants in the analysis?

Telestration has become a familiar part of modern football analysis. Arrows illustrate runs, circles highlight spaces, and lines reveal passing options that might otherwise go unnoticed. I've even seen more than five different telestrations effects on a 7 second clip, and I had no idea where to look, but it looked cool.

Therefore I've been thinking about if we are using telestration to improve players’ understanding, or simply to make our own explanations clearer?

These are not necessarily the same thing.

Telestration works..Football is such a complex sport and requires players to constantly interpret space, recognise patterns and make decisions under pressure. Telestration can help by directing attention towards important details and making tactical relationships easier to understand.

A research brief published by the FIFA Training Centre, Telestration for coaches: Finding the right balance, by Dr John Francis, offers an interesting perspective.

The study involved 14 players from the English Football League Championship. One group analysed video clips with telestration, while another watched the same footage without visual annotations. The players who received telestrated analysis achieved 25–30% higher tactical recall scores.

These findings suggest that telestration can support the communication and recall of tactical information. However, the research also highlights the importance of balance: too much visual information can overwhelm players, and analysing unannotated footage can itself encourage tactical understanding.

The challenge is therefore not simply to use telestration more often, but to understand when, why and how it should be used.

Read the FIFA Training Centre research brief.

What if we involved the players a lot more?Despite its potential, telestration can easily become a one-way communication tool. The analyst selects the clip, identifies the relevant details, spend a few hours adding a few different effects and then the player watches and is expected to understand.

This can be effective when communicating a specific tactical instruction. But does it develop the player's ability to recognise the same situation independently during a match?

When the solution is already drawn on the screen, much of the cognitive work has been done. The relevant space has been highlighted, the movement identified and the preferred decision communicated. You as a coach might have learned something about your players, but did your players actually learn anything?

The player may understand the explanation without necessarily developing the ability to discover that solution independently.

In a match, there are no arrows or frozen images to guide the player. They must recognise the situation themselves and act within fractions of a second, so why didn't you involve your players more? I mean they are the one playing..

Perhaps telestration should become less about illustrating the coach's interpretation and more about helping players develop their own.

They can easily be involvedImagine presenting players with a video clip without any visual guidance. Instead you use the beauty of questioning. What do you see? Which spaces are available? What options does the player have, and why might one solution be more effective than another?

This is one of the reason Daniel Simacon at F.C Roskilde is still unbeaten (12 matches) in the danish 2nd Division. Instead of using video analysis with telestration the classic way, he does it through questioning.

Players possess valuable information about what they perceived, what they were trying to achieve and which cues influenced their decisions. Their involvement can help coaches distinguish between a technical execution problem, a decision-making problem and a misunderstanding of the tactical objective.

The question is no longer simply whether players understand the coach's analysis, but whether they can explain the situation, justify their decisions and recognise solutions themselves.

The real measure of telestrationThe FIFA research offers encouraging evidence that visual annotations can support tactical recall. But it also reminds us that the effectiveness of a tool depends on how it is used.

The next step may not be more sophisticated graphics or increasingly detailed presentations. It may be to reconsider who does the thinking.

When players identify relevant information, draw their own solutions and explain their decisions, telestration can become a way to investigate understanding rather than simply deliver information.

The goal is not to let players discover every answer themselves. It is to involve them deliberately, according to what they need to learn.

Ultimately, the success of telestration should not be measured by how clearly we illustrate the game, but by how effectively players learn to understand it and for that you can use tools like Taptics or other video analysis software that focus on giving the coach clarity into their players mind.

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