Soft-Assembled Multilevel Dynamics of Tactical Behaviors in Soccer

Abstract

This study aimed to identify the tactical patterns and the timescales of variables during a soccer match, allowing understanding the multilevel organization of tactical behaviors, and to determine the similarity of patterns performed by different groups of teammates during the first and second halves. Positional data from 20 professional male soccer players from the same team were collected using high frequency global positioning systems (5 Hz). Twenty-nine categories of tactical behaviors were determined from eight positioning-derived variables creating multivariate binary (Boolean) time-series matrices. Hierarchical principal component analysis (PCA) was used to identify the multilevel structure of tactical behaviors. The sequential reduction of each set level of principal components revealed a sole principal component as the slowest collective variable, forming the global basin of attraction of tactical patterns during each half of the match. In addition, the mean dwell time of each positioning-derived variable helped to understand the multilevel organization of collective tactical behavior during a soccer match. This approach warrants further investigations to analyze the influence of task constraints on the emergence of tactical behavior. Furthermore, PCA can help coaches to design representative training tasks according to those tactical patterns captured during match competitions and to compare them depending on situational variables.

Comparative analysis of the top six and bottom six teams’ corner kick strategies in the 2015/2016 English Premier League

“…These findings demonstrate how movements in space by one element (dynamic attacking organisation) of a coordinative system (i.e., attackers and defenders), increase the chances of goal scoring (Vilar, Araújo, Davids, & Button, 2012). Applying theoretical principles of system organisation and pattern formation to learning design in soccer, this characteristic may be seen as a process of soft assembly in which emergent decisions and movements in one versus one situations (player movements within the box) are tailored to the immediate performance context to satisfy some general goal (produce a goal from the corner kick) (Ric et al, 2016).…”

Mental Fatigue and Spatial References Impair Soccer Players' Physical and Tactical Performances

“…The positional data of the players were used to determine the team's width and length (Folgado et al, 2014b ), the speed of team contraction and dispersion (Ric et al, 2016b ), the spatial exploration index (Gonçalves et al, 2016a ), and the time that teammates dyads spent synchronized in both longitudinal and lateral directions. These two last variables were calculated with the relative phase with Hilbert transform (Palut and Zanone, 2005 ; Folgado et al, 2015 ) and applied for all possible dyads for the six outfield teammates (i.e.…”

Sport Practitioners as Sport Ecology Designers: How Ecological Dynamics Has Progressively Changed Perceptions of Skill “Acquisition” in the Sporting Habitat

“…The initial implications of these theoretical ideas for sport practitioners were raised by Handford et al (1997) in a discussion of coordination and its acquisition. Gradually over the years, several lines of research began to reveal how these applied scientific insights had radical implications for the work of sport practitioners interested in how athletes coordinated their actions in sport collectives at a mesoscopic level, for example, in synchronized swimming and diving, cycling in a group, and especially in team sports (e.g., Passos et al, 2009;Duarte et al, 2012Duarte et al, , 2013Vilar et al, 2012;Silva et al, 2014;Passos and Davids, 2015;Ric et al, 2016). Over the following two decades, key insights on processes of co-adaptation were raised for understanding the functioning of 1v1 dyadic systems in team sports like basketball (Bourbousson et al, 2010a,b), association football, rugby union, and small sub-groups of athletes in subphases of play (e.g., 4v2 in rugby union, 6v6 in association football, 5v5 in futsal) (for empirical examples, see Araújo et al, 2006;Araujo et al, 2014;Passos et al, 2009).…”