How Curaçao are preparing for Germany, Ecuador and Ivory Coast

Preparing for a World Cup is a different problem from preparing for a league season. Over a domestic campaign, an analyst builds familiarity over time. You face the same teams twice a year, you carry last season's footage forward, and you refine your picture of each opponent across dozens of meetings. A World Cup gives you none of that.

Curaçao drew Germany, Ecuador and Ivory Coast in December. Since then each opponent has kept playing, and a squad in June is rarely the one from a few months earlier. The footage worth building on is the most recent, because older matches can be built around players who will not be there.

Preparing the footage

So the job is to watch as many recent games as you can. The more you see, the more reliable your read on how the current team builds, presses and defends. What slows this down is preparation. Before a match can be analyzed properly, every relevant action has to be tagged, coded by hand so the staff can filter, query and clip it. That work is slow, and for a national team running a small staff, it adds up fast. You end up tagging a few games well and leaving the rest, prioritizing when you would rather cover everything.

Choosing the right matches

Choosing which games to tag is its own piece of analysis. The most useful match is often the one where the opponent came up against a team that plays the way you do. If you build out from the back against a high press, you learn the most from watching them defend a side that builds the same way. If you sit deep and counter, you want to see how they handled a team that did that to them. Games that mirror your own shape and intentions give you the closest thing to a preview of the day itself.

How we support Curaçao

We set our support up around exactly this constraint. Curaçao's video analyst, Jim Smit, chose the five matches per opponent that mattered most to his preparation, fifteen in total. We delivered every one of them as XML exports, tagged in the exact structure Jim already works in. Because the schema is his own, he imports the files straight into his analysis tool and starts working. There is no manual tagging, no rebuilding panels, no translating someone else's event definitions into his. The time that would have gone into coding goes into the analysis itself: the opponent reports, the clips for the coaches, and the detail the players take onto the pitch.

"The tagging is what eats your time, and at a World Cup you do not have much of it. Getting the games back already coded in my structure means I open them and go straight to analyzing. It lets us cover far more of each opponent than we could on our own, and spend our time where it counts, with the coaches and the players."

— Jim Smit, Video Analyst, Curaçao

Qualifying was the achievement that made the headlines. The preparation that follows is quieter work, and it is the work we are here to support.

We can automate your tagging, in exactly your structure. With auto-tagged XML files for every game ready to import. Start for free.