About
About me & this project.
Who I am
I am Umir, and this is the public archive of my football thinking.
I wanted one place where all of my football thoughts could live together: raw or polished, short or in-depth, immediate or long in development. This site is that place.
Some entries are tight pieces of analysis. Some are projections, suggestions, or early notes that may later grow into fuller arguments. The value of the archive is in seeing those ideas accumulate, sharpen, and connect over time.
Background
The work is shaped first by tactical and club-side experience, then widened by study and public analysis.
I currently work as BBC Sport's Football Tactics Correspondent.
I have also worked as a football consultant, professional football analyst, and scout for clubs in England and Italy, and with players in the T5 leagues.
Outside football, my background is in Medicine as a qualified doctor. It shaped the way I think, strengthened my interpersonal skills, and improved my ability to absorb complex information before communicating it clearly to a wider audience.
I am especially interested in cross-domain and cross-sport methods, often drawing on frameworks from behavioural economics, anthropology, and human psychology. I often describe myself as a football anthropologist.
Publicly, that work has also carried into broader media: more than 92,000 followers on X, previous pundit work for The Overlap, and live TV punditry for DAZN during the Club World Cup.
Why this site exists
Not every useful football thought belongs in a timeline, commission, or one-off appearance.
I wanted a place where passing observations could sit next to more finished pieces, and where small ideas could eventually become frameworks with real practical use. The archive is meant to preserve the process as well as the output.
That means the site is part portfolio and part open-sourcing of how I think about football. It should read as a body of work, but also as a record of how football ideas form, develop, and become more precise.
How to read it
The archive is organised by the kind of thinking each piece is doing.
Atomic Thoughts are for shorter ideas that can stand on their own.
Concepts & Frameworks are for ideas that need their own structure, language, and internal logic.
Coach Analysis focuses on coaching ideas, tactical identities, and the wider implications of their decisions.
Match Notes follow individual games and the questions they raised.
Essays are for longer arguments, deeper interpretation, and pieces that need more room to unfold.
Reflections hold the pieces that are more personal, evaluative, or shaped by hindsight.
Search and the subject pages are there to help you move through the archive by question, team, player, coach, or match.
Elsewhere
This archive sits alongside my wider published and broadcast work.
I currently work as BBC Sport's Football Tactics Correspondent, and my earlier work has also appeared across writing, audio, and video projects including GQ, The Coaches' Voice, FourFourTwo, and other football media spaces.
If you are new here, the best place to start is the archive itself: browse by section, search by subject, and follow the entries that feel closest to the football questions you care about.
For all enquiries, email contactumirf1@gmail.com.