//: under faaq 1 — how to log

//: the contract

Logging takes time.
It's a little boring. It's real work. You do it anyway for three reasons: to see your own progress in black and white, to understand what scanning actually does to your game, and to teach your brain to recognise the situations while you're still on the pitch. The best players in the world watch themselves on video.
This is you doing the same thing.

//: what counts as an involvement

An involvement is one moment where you are directly involved in play with the live ball.

It counts when: you receive a pass (successful or not), you shoot (on target or off), you dribble past an opponent, you give a pass (received or not), you get tackled or lose the ball in a duel. And the one that matters most — a teammate plays you a reachable pass, you don’t meet it in time, and an opponent snaps it.
Log that. It’s almost always a scanning failure: you thought you had more time than you had.

It does not count when: you run without the ball, you stand in a defensive position without touching the ball, an opponent dribbles past you without a duel, you wait for play to come to you.

It also does not count when you take a throw-in, a free kick or a penalty yourself. Putting a dead ball into play isn't suitable for analysing scanning — there's no incoming live ball to read in the seconds before.
Only receiving and acting on a live ball counts.

The definition follows the Wyscout/Opta standard used in professional football research. That’s what lets your numbers be compared against published work.

//: the boundary — a bad pass from a teammate

This is the line that decides whether something is your involvement or not, and it matters.

The pass was too bad to receive → don’t log it. Not your involvement. A long ball metres over your head, a pass snapped by an opponent ten metres from you. Logging that against your scanning would poison the data — your scanning might have been perfect.

The pass was reachable, but you didn’t meet it → log it as Lost the Ball. You were the target. You chose not to work for it, or you stood wrong, or you thought you had more time than you had. This is the classic youth-football scanning error: you didn’t have enough information about the pressure around you, so you assumed the ball was safe.
It wasn’t.

The rule, short: if a teammate sent you a reachable pass, it’s your involvement whatever the outcome. If the pass wasn’t reachable, it’s not your fault and not your involvement.

//: scan vs critical scan

A scan is a turn of the head away from the ball, to read teammates, opponents, space — anything that shapes your next action. Measured in the 10-second window before you receive the ball.

A critical scan is a scan taken while the ball is travelling toward you — after a teammate has played it, before you receive it. The ball has stable direction and speed in that phase, so you can pull fresh information about the space around you before you have to act. It’s the last, most up-to-date read you get before reception. You can have 0, 1 or 2 critical scans per involvement.
The concept is inspired by the research of Pelzl (2024) and Phatak & Gruber (2019).

//: set plays — throw-ins, free kicks, five-metre kicks

If you receive the ball from a dead-ball situation and do something with it, that’s an involvement. Log it normally, with the outcome of what you did.

Scanning here works differently. At a dead ball you scan in the seconds before the ball is put into play — about 2 seconds before — not across a full 10-second window like open play. You get fewer, calmer scans. That’s correct and expected, not a shortfall.
The narrower window follows Aksum and Jordet’s own set-play rule (Aksum 2021, Jordet 2020).

The exception: if you take the throw-in, free kick or corner yourself, it is not an involvement. Only receiving counts.

//: a blocked or intercepted pass — does it count as complete?

No. A pass is complete only if it reaches your teammate without an opponent interfering. If an opponent gets a foot or body on the ball before it arrives — even if your team wins it back on the throw-in afterwards — you log it as Incomplete Pass.

Why: the research defines a successful pass as one that reaches the intended teammate without opponent interference (Aksum 2021, Pokolm 2022). Your team winning the ball back is a new, separate situation.
The pass itself did not arrive.

Note: Lost the Ball is not right here. You use that when you lose the ball in your own control — a bad touch, dispossessed in a duel — not when a pass is blocked.

//: you had the ball and got fouled

Different again. If you’re in control of the ball and an opponent fouls you — kicks you down, and your team gets the free kick or throw — that is not a loss. You didn’t lose the ball in your own control; you were stopped illegally, and your team keeps possession.
Log the outcome as Complete / successful, not Lost the Ball.

Lost the Ball stays reserved for losing the ball in your own control with no foul: a bad touch, beaten in a duel, dispossessed clean. A foul that hands your team the ball back is a positive outcome for you — log it as one.

//: a recovery — winning the ball from an opponent

When you win the ball from an opponent — an interception, a tackle, a recovery — that’s an involvement too, but a defensive one, and it’s logged differently.

Scans work differently here. When you go into a tackle you don’t scan the same way — you read the ball and commit. You log scans in the 2-second window before you win the ball, same as a set play, and never a critical scan — there’s no pass travelling toward you to read. These scans are stored as part of your match, but they stay out of your Scan Frequency: the research only validates attacking scanning, so we don’t invent anything.

But the outcome counts in full. Win the ball and play a forward pass, an assist, or score — log that outcome exactly as normal. A recovery that becomes an assist is worth as much as any other assist. Short version: a defensive involvement has no scan expectation, but full outcome. Only the scan part is different.

//: minutes played vs minutes logged

Minutes Played is how long you were on the pitch. Minutes Logged is how many of those minutes you actually logged involvements from. Usually they’re equal. They differ when you log one half of a match, when you only have video for part of it, or when there was a long stoppage not on the recording. If Minutes Logged is lower than Minutes Played, we know something’s missing — and that’s fine, as long as it’s honest.

//: do I have to log the whole match? can I cherry-pick?

As a rule: yes, the whole match you were on the pitch for. If you played 70 minutes, you log all involvements in those 70 minutes.

The exception — half a match is allowed: if you had no assist and no goal, you may log one half instead of the whole match. Pick the half most interesting for you to analyse. Minutes Played logs as your full match time, Minutes Logged as the half. The data isn’t broken. Why: logging is for you to learn, not for us to collect the most data points.
If the choice is between logging half a match or quitting, half a match is far better.

If you had an assist or a goal, log the whole match. You can’t tell the story of a goal by logging only the first half.

//: the self-evaluations

Physical Load, Mental Load and Self Eval Scanning are your own read of the match on a 1–10 scale. It’s your feeling that counts here, not run data or anyone else’s opinion. Self Eval Scanning especially: be honest — there’s no point bluffing yourself. Compare it against the actual scan number that comes back in the report, and see how well your feeling matched what the video showed.

//: no video — can I still log?

Yes, but it’s the short version. You can log: minutes played, position, result, home/away, goals, assists, penalty goals, free-kick goals, cards, notes, and your self-evaluation (Physical Load, Mental Load, Self Eval Scanning) — because those are what you felt, and you know them without video. You cannot log the involvement table — scans, critical scans, passes, shots — because those need video to be accurate. Minimum 5 minutes played to log a match at all.

And remember what this is: a training diary. If you log your training — and it imports automatically from Spond or your calendar — then you should log your matches too, even the ones without video. The match result, the load, the minutes: that’s the data that lets you weigh training volume against progress, against illness, against the wear-and-tear injuries that come from too much at once.
The scanning is the edge. The diary is the product.

//: what these numbers look like in real football

Here’s the part that makes the cold numbers feel like something.

First, the units — because we won’t blur them. The research counts scans per second across the 10 seconds before a player receives the ball. Your report counts orientations per involvement: every scan before reception plus the critical scans while the ball travels, divided over your involvements. Related habit, different ruler.
The professional numbers below are the research’s ruler, not yours — read them as a ceiling story, never as your target line.

On that ruler, the best scanners ever filmed were midfielders: Geir Jordet has measured over 250 professional players across 25 years, and the peaks are Xavi at 0.83 scans per second, Cesc Fàbregas at 0.76, Ilkay Gündoğan at 0.66, Frank Lampard at 0.62. Andrea Pirlo, filmed at Juventus in 2012, averaged six scans in the last 10 seconds before receiving — and made awareness into an art. Jordet calls anything over 0.50 scans per second very high; Messi sits above it, alongside Modrić and Ibrahimović.

Notice where they cluster: the middle. The research found that for midfielders, scanning the space behind their back again and again was the foundation for seeing and acting on what was there. Play centre-mid, and this habit is yours to chase hardest. Play elsewhere, and it still pays — Cristiano Ronaldo scans at a lower frequency but times it differently, looking right after each touch from a teammate.
Different position, different rhythm, same idea: look before the ball comes.

And it isn’t fixed talent. Across 1,279 game situations, Jordet found low scanning gave a 53.7% pass-completion rate, medium 61%, and high 72.6%. More looking, more passes completed.
That’s the whole bet.

So what about you, 13 years old, logging your first match? Your numbers will be lower than Pirlo’s six. Of course it will — he’s one of the best the game ever filmed. The point was never to start at the top. The point is to log four matches and watch your own line move. That’s a number you own, and almost nobody your age has ever seen it about themselves.

//: what happens if I get it wrong?

Nothing. The report is yours. Every submission is read by hand in the anchor phase, and you’ll be contacted if something looks misunderstood. If you spot a logging error after the report is sent, say so. We can’t change a delivered report, but the next one gets better.

//: what happens if I cheat the logging?

Then you get nothing the platform promised.

Inflate your scans, log the good half and hide the bad one, score yourself a 9 on awareness when you stared at the ball all match — and the numbers will look better. But the numbers were never the point. The development was. Awareness is built by honestly seeing your own game, including the parts you’d rather not. Cheat the log and you’ve removed the one thing that makes you better: the truth about what you actually did. The data lies to you, your trend lies to you, and you’ve spent the time without buying the result.

ActiveScanning is only a system. It measures, it draws the picture, it hands you the report. It cannot scan for you, and it cannot make you honest. You do the work, or the work doesn’t get done.
There’s no one to fool here but yourself — and you’re the only one who loses.