A shift of paradigm – The game belongs to the teams

Complex

 

Look deep into nature and you will understand everything better
-Albert Einstein

 

Floorball is a young sport and therefore it still has a huge margin for development – not just economically, but as a game. While floorball has its own special features, it is not separate from other invasion team sports. There is a lot to learn from the international knowledge sources of other invasion team sports. They all have a lot in common – regardless of the playing surface or the equipment used to control the ball or puck. The relationships, patterns and interactions between players, the ball, space and time form similar patterns although the details may differ. Likewise in nature, certain patterns are repeated in the interactions and forms of different organisms and objects – for example the golden ratio.

 

Spirals

Figure 1. Repeating patterns, fractals of nature: In plants or snowflakes, the same shape appears repeatedly on a different scale.

Following team sports with longer history of evolution and scientific research, new framework for understanding the game as collective behaviour could be brought to floorball. Work and research already made by others might be utilized by recognizing the patterns and common principles among sports. Such integration of our young sport to the global pool of invasion sports knowledge could help floorball adopt more contemporary methodologies and philosophies of team sports instead of individual-based reductionist sports science. Development of the game and players would inevitably follow. In this context, the concept of “tactics” may be interpreted as taking the context and interactions into account, thus focusing on improving the whole team instead of focusing on individuals. Contrary to the public discussion which is downplaying tactics (especially in Finland), tactics are actually not discussed or trained enough. One reason is that there is little if any academic research on the collective behaviour or tactics of team sports in the leading floorball countries, Finland for example. So instead, loose comments on individual player performance dominate the press conferences. Often certain single situations and mistakes are thought to decide the match winner. Floorball is seen almost as an individual sport.

The training of tactics does not have to consist of a coach drawing set plays that the players are expected to execute without adapting to situations. It is modern tactical training in particular that builds game sense, as it prepares players to find better solutions in real game situations. Criticizing tactical focus in training still refers to these (rigid) set play traditions, as there is no common lanFor example soccer science has compared a team with superorganisms formed by animals. A lot of resources are used to analyze and better understand the tactical performance in team sports. This data is utilized in everyday work of the teams. This is where floorball should be heading instead of separating individual performance indices out of context. In more advanced ball games, belittleing the importance of tactics is less common and the success or failure is not accounted to coincidences and unlucky bounces. In floorball it is still disputed whether the game belongs to players or coaches. The correct answer would be that the game belongs to whole teams and is a complex system of interdependencies. The visions from our leading coaches on how developing better individuals is the main factor of future success emphasizes this gap in philosophies with top level team sports.

Especially in such moments when success does not come in any way or another, the accumulation of personal errors on the altar is more natural than digging the cause and effect relationships from the whole. The game is not won by an individual bump, mistake or whistle, but by the team that makes more goals during the whole match. In the moment of success the role of an individual becomes even more pronounced. Attempting to copy what has happened is usually seen as the best way to the next victory. It is also customary to worship the talented individuals – even to a degree of forming a cult of personality (e.g. Patrik Laine) – instead of analyzing where the team was better than the opponent as a whole, collective.

StructureFigure 2. From the left: chaos & individuals without connections. On the right: a completely rigid structure without any freedom for the individual. In the middle: complex structures create recurrent connections in the middle of chaos. In other words, you could describe an team sport belonging to individuals chaotic, or belonging in totality to the coach as a rigid machine. Complexity on the other hand, works like swarm intelligence in nature. (Source: https://methodkit.com/thoughts-behind/)

”I agree that ‘the footballer owns the game’ but I disagree with general belief that football belongs to the plyaers. In fact it doesn’t belong to players or coaches, or to the fans or even the directors. It belongs to the teams.”
– Pep Guardiola (Marti Perarnau: Pep Guardiola – The Evolution)

Getting a team to play (tactically) sound game together as a whole is the most important task of a coach in most international team sports. Tactics as a word mean all the concrete actions and choices taken to achieve objectives in the game. It is more than a couple set plays. Tactics do not take away the creativity of the players, but are a critical dimension of the competition between the teams. At the heart of the discussion in floorball, however, seems to be the individual’s talent, technique and physicality.

 

Team performance analysis might still be a luxure of the richest organizations but in the future it could change our perception of the game. The interaction between players and teams is what really should be measured. To a large extent the game happens between the players – interactions.

The history of team sports has shown that co-operation and teamwork can make a group of players better than the sum of individual skill. It is vital for the team that the players think of the game with clear and common principles. It is like having a common language or a collective instinct. Playing together as a collective is a value that, makes it possible for the lesser or cheaper roster to challenge to nominally higher ranked club.

Building up of the collective play is a complex process. Everything has an impact on it. The coach and the team are required to do a lot of things well. Coaching, like the game itself, is a complex phenomenon full of interactions between players and different entities. It cannot be simplified to examining the individuals and their physical-technical properties, training programs, repetitions, previous results and statistics alone. The improvement in results does not happen in a linear fashion. Human sciences such as psychology, pedagogy and sociology, are an essential component of coaching.

We have set up this blog in order to raise awareness of the contemporary framework of team sports through which the game may be understood in a deeper and more meaningful way. It is an alternative to the reductionist isolation of individuals and their properties discarding the context. The game is a whole that can be ”zoomed” deeper, but should not be reduced to parts without the interactions between them. Playing the game is a dialogue between two teams. Each individual is interdependent to the rest of the players.

 

Authors:

Antti Hänninen (@AjHanninen)
Mikael de Anna (@MikaeldeAnna)
Perttu Kytöhonka (@PKytohonka)
Miika Peltonen (@miikapeltonen)