ABSTRACT
Patterns of interpersonal coordination in game competition such as football and futsal emerge under the competing and cooperating aims of the two teams. In this context, the sports behaviours that characterize these types of games are proposed to result from spontaneous, self-organizing, localized, dynamical interactions operating under a variety of individual, task, and environmental constraints (Araujo et al., 2006; Passos et al., 2008). In team sports the behavioural patterns that emerge during performance may be investigated at different levels of analysis, from interactions between individual players (Travassos et al., 2011) to interactions between teams (Frencken and Lemmink, 2008; Travassos et al. , in press). These studies reported general tendencies of synchronized displacements of players and teams in both lateral (i.e., side-to-side) and longitudinal (i.e., forward-backward) directions, particularly the latter direction. Furthermore, singular moments of the game such as changes in ball possession, or goal-scoring opportunities, revealed specific patterns between teams in terms of phase stabilities and/or phase transitions (Bourbousson et al., 2010; Frencken and Lemmink, 2008).
