ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how team sports can be modelled as complex dynamical systems at an ecological scale of analysis. It examines the key questions with regards to players' interpersonal coordination within competitive environments. Interpersonal coordination between players in team sports can emerge through spontaneous self-organization processes, under the influence of specific task constraints such as field boundaries, location of the goal and players' relative position to each other. In Players' co-adaptive behaviours are constrained by information emerging from task constraints, such as pitch locations, boundaries and rules. Thus, interpersonal coordination should be analyzed from two different perspectives: from an intrateam coordination perspective and from an interteam coordination perspective. The chapter highlights how interteam coordination can be influenced by different task constraints such as the values of player distances to the goal, the defender's distance to the nearest sideline, pitch dimensions, or the numerical differences between competing players in a sub-phase of play.
