Complexity and Control in Team Sports is the first book to apply complex systems theory to 'soccer-like' team games (including basketball, handball and hockey) and to present a framework for understanding and managing the elite sports team as a multi-level complex system. It analyzes behaviour across five inter-connected levels: the team as a 'managed institution'; coaching staff controlling players via cybernetic flows; the team as a playing unit; the individual player as a complex dynamic system expressed through behaviour; and a player's complex physiological/biological system. Drawing these together, the book throws fascinating new light on the elite sports team and will be useful reading for all students, researchers or professionals with an interest in sport psychology, sport management, sport coaching, sport performance analysis or complex systems theory.

Complex systems in nature are those with many interacting parts, all capable of influencing global system outcomes. There is a growing body of research that has modeled sport performance from a complexity sciences perspective, studying the behavior of individual athletes and sports teams as emergent phenomena which self-organise under interacting constraints. This book is the first to bring together experts studying complex systems in the context of sport from across the world to collate core theoretical ideas, current methodologies and existing data into one comprehensive resource. It offers new methods of analysis for investigating representative complex sport movements and actions at an individual and team level, exploring the application of methodologies from the complexity sciences in the context of sports performance and the organization of sport practice. Complex Systems in Sport is important reading for any advanced student or researcher working in sport and exercise science, sports coaching, kinesiology or human movement.

This book is the first to combine principles from analytics, complex systems theory, multi-disciplinary diagnostics and sport performance analysis. It considers athletes, teams, and sport organizations in individual and team games as complex systems, and demonstrates how complexity studies can enrich analytics and give us a more sophisticated understanding of the causalities of winning and losing in sports. Part I introduces the basic categories of analytics and their uses in elite sport. Part II presents an original conception of sport analytics both as a complex of different kinds of processes and as a complexity-adapted view of human systems acting in sport performance and management. Part III considers the main principles of complex sport analytics, expanding the prism of complexity to include all levels of a sport organization from athletes, coaches and trainers to top decision makers, and suggests practical applications and simulations for cases of both individual and team sports. This is illuminating reading for any advanced student, researcher or practitioner working in sport analytics, performance analysis, coaching science or sport management.

Shedding new light on sport pedagogy and the teaching and coaching of games, this book shows how complexity theory can be used to improve team sport performance, coach education, and young player development. The book draws together insights from both the humanities and behavioural sciences, including psychology, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, and play theory into a new educational methodology for team sports. It shows how concepts from complexity theory underpin and inform team sport dynamics, including the uncontrolled nature of live human systems; the nature of complex systems and how this shapes student and young athlete learning; self-organization and its relation to decision-making in play; and mental self-regulation and motivation. It presents an innovative and sophisticated definition of sport pedagogy that can help teachers and coaches deepen their understanding of teaching and learning in team sports and help them develop more motivated, more effective, and more creative athletes.

Team Sports Training: The Complexity Model presents a novel approach to team sports training, examining football (soccer), rugby, field hockey, basketball, handball and futsal through the paradigm of complexity. Under a traditional prism, these sports have been analyzed using a deterministic perspective, where the constituent dimensions of the sportsmen were independently examined and treated in isolation. It was expected that the body worked as a perfect machine and, once all the components were maximized, the sportsmen improved their performance. If the same closed recipe was applied to all the players that formed part of the squad, the global team performance was expected to be enhanced. As much as these reductionistic models seem coherent, when contrasted in practice we see that the reality of team sports is far more different from the closed conditions in which they were idealized. Team sports contain variable, heterogeneous and non-linear constrains which require the development of a different logic to organize their training. During the last years, ecological psychology, the dynamical systems theory or the constraints-led approach have opened interesting fields of research from which many conceptual foundations can be applied to team sports. Based in this contemporary framework, the current book presents the study of the players and the teams as complex systems, using coordination dynamics to explain the emergence of the self-organisation episodes that characterize them. In addition, this thinking line provides the reader with the ability to apply all these innovative concepts to their practical training scenarios. Altogether, it is intended to challenge the reader to re-think their training strategy and to develop an original theory and practice of training specific to team sports.

Complex systems in nature are those with many interacting parts, all capable of influencing global system outcomes. There is a growing body of research that has modeled sport performance from a complexity sciences perspective, studying the behavior of individual athletes and sports teams as emergent phenomena which self-organise under interacting constraints. This book is the first to bring together experts studying complex systems in the context of sport from across the world to collate core theoretical ideas, current methodologies and existing data into one comprehensive resource. It offers new methods of analysis for investigating representative complex sport movements and actions at an individual and team level, exploring the application of methodologies from the complexity sciences in the context of sports performance and the organization of sport practice. Complex Systems in Sport is important reading for any advanced student or researcher working in sport and exercise science, sports coaching, kinesiology or human movement.