Then there are the months of looking at detailed reports on each of your group opponents – their results, goalscorers, assists, crosses, likely line-ups, formations, video, stats, written reports.
For the "Formation" video, she found ideas in the work of Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Octavia Butler.
(Contrast this with Beyoncé's "Formation" video and its abundance of rich, meticulously deployed imagery).
When Matsoukas started working on the "Formation" video, mainstream black artists were showing unaccustomed interest in issues like police brutality.
For a moment, it recalls the final frames of Beyoncé's "Formation" video, in which she sinks into the C.G.I.
The "visual album" was released in April, two months after its politically charged Formation video was unveiled just before Beyoncé's controversial appearance at the Super Bowl.
For her Formation video, and performance at the Super Bowl, the Italian brand count was high and included Versace, Gucci and DSquared, who designed the very MJ jacket with harness that she wore on Sunday night.
But it was performed with such showmanship that I'm sure many American halftime-show viewers, those who were not paying obsessive attention to the "Formation" video, were none the wiser.
In the "Formation" video, a black man wearing a yellow T-shirt and a black Stetson rides a horse through a deserted alley, edged with shrubs and red brick walls; his white Adidas sneakers are fitted with spurs.
When she dropped her Formation video the night before her half-time performance at this year's Superbowl, she put the Black Lives Matter movement at the centre of American popular culture.
She hired a camera operator named Arthur Jafa, who had been the cinematographer of "Daughters of the Dust," an iconic 1991 film about Gullah women in South Carolina whose focus on black sisterhood echoes throughout the "Formation" video.
