ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on several issues that arose from research and applied fields in the last decades. Due to the huge amount of variables which influence players’ behaviour and also to the dynamics of these variables which mutually and reciprocally interact with each other, team sports are usually described as complex dynamic systems. This understanding of team sports takes players’ individual and collective performance away from being an explanation where linear cause-effect relationships are the rule. Instead the rules of the game, the field width and depth, the goal location, the proximity and number of the teammates and opponent players are a few examples of task constraints which create the boundaries of a perceptual-motor workspace from where player’s behaviours emerge in time and space (Araújo et al., 2004; Araújo et al., 2006; Davids et al., 2008; Glazier, 2010). The term ‘emerge’ means that it is not possible to predict (beyond a probabilistic basis) where and when each player’s next movement will occur. Moreover it is not possible to predict behaviour from the individual properties of each of the elements of the system. Team sports performance is highly influenced by the interactive behaviour among players, which means that players’ decisions and actions are constrained by the information that surrounds them, which is continuously changing. Thus ecological dynamics is an appropriate rationale for performance-related issues in team sports (Araújo et al., 2006) and sets a common ground for concepts as task representativeness, creativity and behavioural self-organisation.
