The forest through the trees: Making sense of an ecological dynamics approach to measuring and developing collective behaviour in football

In this book, we interpret the literature that has analysed football performance from a tactical standpoint using an ecological dynamics perspective.This approach focuses on the performer–environment relationship and provides a basis for understanding the dynamic nature of performance in collective team sports (1)and will be explained in detail throughout.The first section of this text will provide a brief description of associationfootball as well as commonly used methods toanalyse football performance. The nextsection will briefly introduce commontheories andpractices used tomeasure team behaviour, decision–making, and performance enhancement in team sport,which are then used to introduce the ecological dynamics framework. This framework will then be used to aid the application of these findings for tactical analysis in team sportssuch as football. Finally, we will introduce some of the scientific literature on improving team performance,particularly in reference to team coordination and decision–making. The followingsections of this bookwill dealspecifically with how small–sided games can be used to developtactical behaviour in football. A small–sidedgames approach was chosen as these modified gamesallow for the simultaneous development of players’ technical skills, conditioning,and ability to solve and overcome tactical challenges through coordinative behaviour and effective decision–making (2–5). Small–sided gamesprovide an environment that mimics the perception–action couplings of insituperformance,which should,in theory,improve thetransferability of learned behavioursto in–game performance (4, 6). As a result, small–sided games are often used by coaches and form an integral part of this text. Finally, we conclude with some recommendations for future research, and some practical considerations for coaches interested in applying the research discussed in this book.