Somewhat obvious relevance to what we do here from a New Yorker profile of Lionel Messi:

The legendary striker can often be found off the ball, strolling and dawdling and looking mildly uninterested. Here’s what he’s actually doing.

If you ask any astute observer—an experienced coach or player or tactically tuned-in analyst—how to understand the game, they will advise you to take your eyes off the ball. There may well be an analogous precept, with a German name, in philosophy or art history or mechanical physics. The idea is this: to apprehend the main thrust of the narrative, to really wrap your mind around what’s going on, you must shift your focus from the foreground to the background.

In soccer, the principle unquestionably applies. When you learn to bifurcate your brain, keeping an eye on the main action while devoting equal or greater attention to what’s happening off the ball, the game opens up to you. It is then that you begin to pick out trends and patterns: the positions that individuals are taking up in and out of possession, the shapes and formations that teams are assuming when they attack and defend, the spaces that are opening up on the pitch and the ways that the adversaries are, or aren’t, exploiting them.