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Insights on football intelligence, reading the game, and player development.

How Do You Build Football Intelligence? The Same Way You Build Reading Comprehension.

The Willingham-Hirsch research on knowledge and reading lands a finding football development has been circling for years. Reading comprehension requires three things, and football is the harder version of the same problem.

Tony Nicalo April 2026

Essay

Reading the Game: What Literacy Research Reveals About Football Intelligence

When a player can't read the game, the problem is almost never a missing tactic. It's that they don't understand enough of what they're seeing. Research on reading comprehension changes how we should develop game intelligence.

Tony Nicalo March 2026