ABSTRACT
Successful performance in Association Football is typically viewed as an expression of a purposeful collective synergy between the individual performances within each team (Duarte et al., 2012a). Indeed, the collective performance of football teams needs to be regarded as more than the sum of individual aggregated performances. Evidence is beginning to reveal that the player's motion dynamics on the field can functionally influence the spatial-temporal movement characteristics of neighbouring teammates and opponents, creating a purposeful aggregation during specific performance sub-phases (Passos et al., 2011; Duarte et al., 2012b). Some performance constraints, however, such as strategic behaviours related with the playing methods, are likely to influence the way teammates synchronise their on-field behaviours (Travassos et al., 2012). For example, the differences found on interpersonal coordination observed for lateral and longitudinal displacements between basketball (Bourbousson et al., 2010) and futsal players (Travassos et al., 2011) can be grounded on the distinct defensive playing methods used in each study.
