ABSTRACT
In team sports, each player seeks to coordinate with his/her team players in order to achieve a common goal (McGarry et al., 2002). Thus, a team can be studied as a multi-agent action system (Saltzman and Kelso, 1987) when described by the interactions of its components — e.g., team-players. This interpersonal coordination is specific to task constraints (Araújo et al., 2004) and self-organized structures, like offensive and defensive patterns that describe the system's/team's behaviour, that can emerge from these complex interpersonal interactions of performers (McGarry et al., 2002; McGarry and Franks, 2007). Individual and collective playing behaviour in team sports can be subsumed under the term “tactics”. Teodorescu (1984) defined tactics from a traditional viewpoint as a group of collective and individual norms and behaviours aiming for a successful performance from an active and conscious contribution during the game. On the other hand, Jäger et al. (2007) outline that tactical behaviour includes both individual and team tactics in certain game situations and it usually refers to the athletes' actions. They emphasize that the position of every athlete of a team on the playing court is strongly influenced by the tactical concept of that team, adding that configurations of a team vary from one moment to another and they may thus be considered as a time dependent process. From this relation, spatial patterns emerge representing the players' behaviour. According to Garganta (2009), tactical features in team sports strongly depend on the strengths of the opponent, the cooperation within a team and the capability of technical skills in order to act efficiently in specific playing conditions. Thus, a team's playing behaviour is constrained not only by its opponent, but also by its components (players) and by their individual action capabilities. This information is extremely pertinent when creating a representative task design, that is, with constraints similar to those present in competition settings (Davids et al., 2006). For instance, some examples of relevant constraints, in association football, are the active role of opponents (Vilar et al., 2012) and the distance to goal (Headrick et al., 2012), which players typically use to organize their actions during performance.
