Coaches don’t just watch the ball. They watch who stops running when it isn’t coming to them.

The ball is where attention naturally goes and it is the least informative part of the field. What tells you about a player is what they do in the twenty seconds when nothing is asked of them: the run that opens space, the jog back, the giving up. That is invisible to the crowd and completely visible to anybody looking for it.

Assume somebody is watching your off-ball minutes this week, because they are. The warm-up, the drill nobody checks, the part of the shift when the manager is out back. Pick one and do it properly. It is the cheapest way to be noticed by people who decide things.