Collective Tactical Behaviours in Football

This chapter presents an overview of how tactical analysis in football can be performed, based on the study of players’ collective behaviours, as analysed from their dynamic position data. This approach has gained considerable attention in the field of performance analysis, and has led to an increasing number of published studies over the past decade. This chapter then summarises the methods and findings in this growing body of research. The introduction explains why studies in tactical analysis can be framed by paradigms in system complexity, and the need to conceptualise footballers by their collective behaviours. Subsequently, the text presents various measures of tactical behaviour used in research, and shows that they can be analysed linearly and nonlinearly. Finally, some implications for coaches and analysts are presented, showing how changes to various constraints in small-sided games affect changes in collective tactical behaviours.