Football Association of Singapore’s head analyst Satoru Okada wants to give Lions a boost

SINGAPORE – From the stadium stands, Satoru Okada casts a watchful eye over the action on the football pitch.

In his role as head analyst of the Football Association of Singapore (FAS), he at times feels even more pressure than the players or coaches, as his work impacts their performance and can influence the outcome of the match.

Hired in February, Okada’s job involves using video footage to provide national coach Tsutomu Ogura and his team with insights into performance, strategy and opponent analysis to allow them to prepare individual and team tactics. This happens even during the game, when he has to relay information and clips of passages of play to them as quickly as possible.

“I also need to understand coaches and how they think, because I can’t tell the coach things he is not thinking about and disrupt the communication,” said the 32-year-old, who was approached for the role by Ogura.

“So now, I’m learning the philosophy of the Lions and their game model because I need to know what the coaches need.”

Ogura said: “He analyses our team based on our concept and suggests to the coaches how to apply his analysis in practice. He also helps the coaches by analysing the opposing teams and suggesting how we should play.”

Born in Tokyo, Okada played football from age five and was a winger and full-back, but he realised that he was not good enough to turn professional.

At 18, he went to Canterbury to learn English before enrolling in the Southampton Solent University. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in football studies, he completed a master’s in sports performance analysis at the University of Chichester.

In England he featured for ninth division side Blackfield & Langley and played in the preliminary rounds of the FA Cup. As an analyst, he worked with the West Ham Under-18s who boasted the likes of England international Declan Rice and Under-21 player Ben Johnson.

He moved on to Austrian second-division team SV Horn and Japanese top-tier club Yokohama F. Marinos, where he assisted former managers Ange Postecoglou and Kevin Muscat, as well as former sporting director Ogura.

On the impact of football analysis, he cited an unnamed team, saying: “With a previous team, we were trying to play passing football against opponents who were really compact sitting back with a mid-block. We... couldn’t get the tempo up, and we got stretched a lot.

“During the game, the coaches and I talked over the phone and discussed how we could improve in the second half. Because they were waiting for us to pass into certain areas so they could counter-attack, we changed our style of play to put more balls behind to surprise them.

“And it worked because they got stretched and we could start playing in between the lines to get the goals. Just one change helped us become more compact in organisation and we went from losing 1-0 to winning the game.”

With a keen eye for detail, Okada noticed that while the Lions have scored 17 goals in Ogura’s 12 games in charge, misfiring only in three matches, they have kept just two clean sheets.

It is a statistic he wants to help improve ahead of the upcoming matches – a March 21 friendly against Nepal and a March 25 Asian Cup qualifier against Hong Kong – at the National Stadium.

He said: “The team need to be on the same page. If one player thinks about pressing, and another thinks about protecting the goal, that’s when the team lose their balance and become ‘uncompact’. That’s where you are going to get exploited.

“That’s where I come in to show when they can try to win the ball and when to protect the goal, so that the team’s intention is aligned.”

On a two-year contract to help the Lions improve their results, he is also looking to grow the pool of local analysts as football becomes more data and analysis-driven.

He said: “With football becoming more systematic, each player has less thinking time. Therefore it’s important that we have certain structures that allow players to quickly make good decisions and react to the situations faster... leading to higher standards.

“If we can grow the number of analysts in Singapore, hopefully it will contribute to the growth of the game here.”