Football Coaching Video Analysis: Garry Monk on Clarity and Time

Garry Monk spent 18 years as a professional player, working his way from League Two to the Premier League. He then spent 13 years as a manager at the same levels. He has used video analysis across that entire coaching career and has clear views on what it is for, where it fails, and what comes next.

When Garry Monk started coaching, video analysis meant receiving a full match recording and a written scout report. There were no tactical cameras, no AI tagging, no individual player clips. If you wanted to find a specific moment in the second half, you rewound the tape.

Thirteen years later, he runs The Coaches Hub, an education and resource platform for coaches at every level, and works with Veo to help bridge the gap between what the footage shows and what a coach does with it on the training pitch. His perspective on football coaching video analysis is built on experience at the highest levels of the English game, and it starts with a simple idea: the tool is only as useful as the clarity it produces.

How football coaching video analysis has changed

The acceleration has been significant. What changed first was the camera technology. Then came the analytical tools. Then came AI.

"When I think of my first coaching, we relied on the long format: you'd get the whole game recorded. There wasn't tactical cams and stuff like that, the wide lenses. It was more just a camera operator following the game manually. And then you'd have like opposition scout reports, which still happen today, but they were purely written reports back then," Monk says.

The shift that matters most to him is not the volume of data but the time it saves. Coaching is not only about analysis. It is planning, designing sessions, communicating with players, managing staff, preparing for matches. The hours in a week do not expand to accommodate more analytical work. What changes is how much you can extract from the hours available.

"Time efficiency. With everything that goes on with coaching nowadays, it's not just about analysis; it's about everything that we have to do. Time is not always our friend. So the efficiency we need when viewing video analysis is crucial. Getting to the heart of things much quicker, things that we thought we remembered and we can see them now right in front of us," Monk says.

What the sideline gives you that video does not

Monk is direct about the limitations of footage. The camera cannot capture everything, and a coach who forgets that will misread their own analysis.

"The biggest thing that video doesn't pick up is the emotion. The emotion of situations, how the atmosphere was at that time, how players were thinking, the emotions they were feeling, the body language. Even though you can see that and have an idea in your head as a coach, it's much more difficult to see that on screen," Monk says.

But the reverse is also true. Emotion on the touchline distorts judgment. Monk describes driving home after matches convinced a particular period of the game was a disaster, then sitting down with the footage later and finding it wasn't as bad as he felt in the moment.

"I've stood on the sideline where emotionally I thought we were rubbish. I've come off a game, and I thought, 'Oh, that period of the game, we were rubbish.' I've then gone back to the video analysis, and it's actually not as bad as I thought. So maybe it was to do with more me personally, my emotions overriding my decision-making or my view of that particular moment. Video works both ways," Monk says.

That recalibration, between what you felt and what actually happened, changes what you do the following day. What you planned to say to the players, what you planned to work on in training, what you decided was the most urgent problem: all of it can shift when you sit with the footage in a calm environment.

The coach needs to know how to use it themselves

As analysis became more sophisticated, professional clubs added more analysts. Set piece analysts, out-of-possession analysts, in-possession analysts. The analytical staff at a top club today is significantly larger than it was when Monk started managing.

But Monk's advice to coaches is not to rely entirely on that infrastructure. The moments that matter most are often the moments when no analyst is available.

"There are times when you'll be at home as a coach, or after a game you're traveling home, you get back home, you're thinking about something, you want to see it, if you haven't got the analyst there to help you, you need to be able to know how to do it yourself. So I think that education is really important; how to use it and how to do it yourself," Monk says.

This is particularly relevant at the youth and grassroots level, where the entire analytical process sits with the head coach. There is no analyst. The camera, the platform, and the time to use them are all that is available. Read how Camden United used video analysis to win the cup to see what that looks like in practice.

"These are young people that we're dealing with, and these young people are used to analysis, they're used to understanding how it works, they're used to understanding the need for it, and they also want it. They want that individual feedback, they want the team feedback, they want the analysis, they want the data," Monk says.

Monk sees this not as a limitation but as an opportunity. See how elite youth football coaches are putting video analysis into practice.

Closing the loop: from footage to training

Monk comes back to the question of what happens after the analysis session. You have the footage. You have the data. You have identified problems and patterns. What do you do next?

This is where he sees the most significant gap in coaching practice, and why The Coaches Hub was built the way it was.

"Often as coaches, we have this fantastic video analysis, we have the data, and sometimes it can be a little bit overwhelming: 'Okay, this is brilliant information, but what do I show, and when do I show it, and how do I show it, and how do I use it?' That's where we've tried to close that loop," Monk says.

His practical framework starts with ranking. After a match, he generates a list of everything that could be worked on. Then he ranks by importance. Then he filters by what is a recurring theme versus a one-off. Then he applies the time constraint: how many sessions are available before the next match, and how much of each session is realistic to dedicate to a specific topic?

"I always do it on a ranking system. I might have 10 things, but generally in a training session I'm probably working on two to four things maximum. And generally that'll be two things defensively and two things offensively if I'm training once a week," Monk says, adding that increasing training frequency changes the ratio but not the principle.

Read our guide to the 20-minute post-match video review session that actually works for a practical framework you can apply straight away.

Clarity: the one thing players always need

Monk has a single organizing principle that runs through everything he does as a coach: analysis sessions, team meetings, the training pitch, and half-time. It is the piece of advice he returns to when asked what has shaped his approach most.

"Our job is to give clarity. I look back to myself as a player, as a young player coming through and working in my youth teams, of course into the professional world, at any given moment I just wanted to know where I stood, whether that was bad or good or indifferent. That just gave me the power of knowing what I have to do next," Monk says.

Clarity is not just about what the coach says. It is about how the analysis is presented, which clips are chosen, how many are shown, and what the player walks away thinking about. Monk describes watching players leave training sessions as a diagnostic exercise in itself.

"When you finish a session, I always watch players walk off, and I'm always thinking to myself: are they walking off remembering what I wanted them to remember from this training session? If two, three, four of them are walking off and discussing the session as they're walking off, or talking about it in the changing room afterwards, you're being successful, you're winning, you're going in the right direction. I think that's down to clarity," Monk says.

The same principle applies to individual feedback from video. Players see their clips. The coach says something. The goal is not to cover every aspect of the player's performance. The goal is that the player leaves the session knowing one or two things clearly, and understanding what they need to do about them.

How Veo supports football coaching video analysis

Veo is an AI-powered camera system that records matches and training sessions automatically, without a dedicated camera operator. The camera is positioned on a tripod at the centerline and uses computer vision to track the ball and follow the action across the full pitch.

After a session, footage uploads automatically to the Veo platform, where coaches can review clips, access individual Player Spotlight sequences for every player on the pitch, and use Veo Analytics 2 for data including pass completion, distance covered, sprint speed, and shot maps. Coach Assist allows coaches to ask specific analytical questions and receive answers drawn directly from the match data.

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