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Self-Organization Processes in Field-Invasion Team Sports

Implications for Leadership

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Abstract

In nature, the interactions between agents in a complex system (fish schools; colonies of ants) are governed by information that is locally created. Each agent self-organizes (adjusts) its behaviour, not through a central command centre, but based on variables that emerge from the interactions with other system agents in the neighbourhood. Self-organization has been proposed as a mechanism to explain the tendencies for individual performers to interact with each other in field-invasion sports teams, displaying functional co-adaptive behaviours, without the need for central control. The relevance of self-organization as a mechanism that explains pattern-forming dynamics within attacker–defender interactions in field-invasion sports has been sustained in the literature. Nonetheless, other levels of interpersonal coordination, such as intra-team interactions, still raise important questions, particularly with reference to the role of leadership or match strategies that have been prescribed in advance by a coach. The existence of key properties of complex systems, such as system degeneracy, nonlinearity or contextual dependency, suggests that self-organization is a functional mechanism to explain the emergence of interpersonal coordination tendencies within intra-team interactions. In this opinion article we propose how leadership may act as a key constraint on the emergent, self-organizational tendencies of performers in field-invasion sports.

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Notes

  1. Phase transitions do not necessarily need the presence of critical fluctuations, although most typically they can follow the presence of this signature of dynamical systems.

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Acknowledgments

The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare that are directly relevant to the content of this article. No funding has been received to assist in the preparation of this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Human Kinetics, Technical University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    Pedro Passos & Duarte Araújo

  2. School of Human Movement Studies, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

    Keith Davids

  3. Faculdade de Motricidade Humana, Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, Estrada da Costa, Cruz Quebrada, Dafundo, 1499-002, Lisbon, Portugal

    Pedro Passos

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  1. Pedro Passos
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  2. Duarte Araújo
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  3. Keith Davids
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Correspondence to Pedro Passos.

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Passos, P., Araújo, D. & Davids, K. Self-Organization Processes in Field-Invasion Team Sports. Sports Med 43, 1–7 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-012-0001-1

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