James Horan: The danger with tackle counts 

James McGrath tries to break through the tackle of Westmeath's Luke Loughlin. Pic: Leah Scholes/Inpho

Numbers and statistics without context are misleading for any team, according to former Mayo manager James Horan.

The recent All-Stars selection has prompted a fresh discussion about how Gaelic football measures defensive play. 

The ways of analysing attacking output are obvious: assists, shots and scores. When it comes to defending, the metrics are less clear-cut.

Even teams themselves always have to keep context at the heart of their analysis. Speaking on the Irish Examiner’s Gaelic football show, Horan warned against taking raw numbers at face value.

“Data, information and stats, it can tell you so much but if you are not careful, the word context springs to mind, at taking into context those stats, it can bring you the wrong way,” he said.

“Tackles, a fella can have a great game at corner-back and he might make no tackles. He is bottom of the table but his way of identifying risk and slowing down an opposition or two players coming at him and how he dealt with it could be brilliant, even though he didn’t get a tackle in or pressure the ball so he might not come up with any stat, but he was absolutely right in his decision-making.” 

Beware Goodhart’s Law. 

There are certain games when a team doesn’t want to make a huge number of tackles. In the 2025 All-Ireland final, Kerry had fewer than 20 tackles. 

Donegal didn’t carry into contact or shoot from the outside, so Kerry sat deep and stayed compact.

“There are a lot of situations like that,” said Horan.

“Information at first was all about numbers run, 13km and high-speed metres and all this stuff. I think there is a lot of information generated by a lot of teams that is never used. It is just noise. What is it you are looking for? What is the information driving?”

The former Mayo manager visited various professional sports teams during his two terms to see how they integrated performance analysis.

“I went into Connacht, Leinster; each year we’d go for a few days and learn what they are doing. We went to teams in England as well to see what they did. 

"We went to Pat Lam and these guys, sure they had loads (of data). They were generating information for years and was five per cent of it ever used?

“50, 60 hours a week and someone might look at it and go, what is this telling us or helping? It didn’t drive improvement at an individual level or key things as a general piece of information; it wasn’t specific enough. 

"There are these templates on the internet; I am not dismissing anyone, standard templates that everyone generates. 

"But how many teams actually use that to design training, to build in into the team they want and to use it for individual improvement, which for me is where the biggest gain is. You can use it that way as opposed to this team that has loads of cool data, but how useful is it?”