The Surprising Playbook Footballers Use to Master Writing—And How You Can Too

It is no secret that footballers earn ridiculous salaries. Christiano Ronaldo, the highest paid footballer in the world, makes £173 million a year from Al Nassr. Even the highest paid writers in the world cannot come close to that. Writers are the definition of starving artists.

As such, it’s a good idea to emulate some football practices in our craft.

Specifically, note how footballers train. Every week, they play one match, two maximum. The rest of the time they spend on training and recovery.

A striker in a top football club might train for five hours in a day: a morning gym session, some drills, cardio, and a solo training session to end the day. If they train for five days, then that makes twenty-five hours in a week. Maybe more. Contrast that to his playing time. 180 minutes. Three hours.

He trains eight times harder.

Writers, on the other hand, are always in game mode. We are always writing the end product — an article, a book, an ad copy. We rarely practice.

Now, you could make the argument that reading is writing practice. And we are always reading. In fact, most of us fell into this craft after we read Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner or some other brilliant book. And so, you finish the argument, we do in fact practice more than we write.

Well, not so fast. Reading is to writing what video analysis is to football: helpful, but not practice. Watching/observing someone else at work (even if that someone is yourself) does not a skill strengthen. You might ‘learn’ a thing or two, but if you are going to incorporate it, you need to practice it.

Practice is experiential. You gain nothing by watching and everything by doing. Reading is, by definition, not writing. It is also not practicing. Lamine Yamal might watch Neymar jr. perform a skill move, but for him to replicate it, he would probably need to do it badly a couple of times before he perfects it, adds to it, and makes it distinctly his.

How then can we practice? Well, there are several ways, the best of which being how footballers do it.