ABSTRACT
The statements of the German national coach and World Cup Winner 2014 Jogi Löw substantiated the particular importance of tactical creativity in soccer: “Creativity and playful class should be the new German virtues”. In the domain of sport or especially team sports, dissociating from the so-called best solutions (e.g., tactical intelligence, game sense), tactical creativity is understood to be the surprising, original, and flexible production of tactical response patterns (Memmert & Roth, 2007). First empirical evidence from the World Cup 2010 and 2014 and the European Cup 2016 demonstrated that the closer actions took place to the goal, the more tactically creative they were evaluated (Kempe & Memmert, in preparation). This chapter will give an overview of literature on tactical creativity in team sports. After defining and exposing the relevance of tactical creativity in team sports, the main focus is on sport activities, coaching, and training environments to foster tactical creativity in youth sports. Here, the tactical creativity approach (TCA, Memmert, 2015) will be introduced, which is based on extensive research and can be seen as the basis for the development of tactical creativity.
