Coordination in sports teams – ethnographic insights into practices of video analysis in football

Abstract

The article deals with the performance of collaborative activities by sports teams. It sheds light on the knowledge stocks and skills that underlie team coordination and illustrates how these knowledge stocks and skills are imparted in training. A particular focus is on training procedures involving video recordings, which teams use to analyse and reflect on their performance, to identify coordination problems as well as possibilities to solve them, and to generate new knowledge for the future reorganisation of play. To address the research interests, the article draws on concepts derived primarily from sociological practice theories. By stressing the collective and corporeal dimensions as well as the constitutive role of (technological) artefacts in social processes, these theories are very well suited to analysing video-mediated coordination processes in sports teams. The article builds on data gathered through ethnographic research in the field of high-performance football, a sport in which performance analysis by means of videos has become established as a central component of training over the last two decades and has led to major modifications in the practices of play.

Keywords:

• Collaborative activities
• social practices
• practical knowledge
• video analysis
• high-performance football

Notes

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank the coaches, athletes and club officials involved in the research for their support. Furthermore, I’m grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback and comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 To date, there are only a few studies focusing on the use of videos in sports training. Groom, Cushion, & Nelson (2011) deal with video analysis in youth football from a psychological perspective. In contrast to the present article, they explore the videos’ effects on individual players by means of interviews only. Tuma (2017) presents a detailed account of video analysis done by coaches and analysts. He does neither systematically take into consideration, however, the players’ perspectives, i.e., the question of how they are involved in and affected by video analysis, nor the question of how video analysis interacts with other training procedures.

2 Instead of using the term ‘actor’, which is more common in sociology, practice theories speak of ‘participants’ to emphasise that agency is only produced and acquired in the context of a social practice.

3 The interviews lasted between 55 and 90 min in the case of the players, analysts, and director and between 115 and 190 min in the case of the two head coaches.

4 The presentation of the empirical findings will not draw on a clear differentiation between ‘raw’, ‘a-theoretical’ observation or description and theoretical analysis. Instead, description and analysis will be interwoven from the outset. This is not only an ‘economic’ decision to have the findings fit the format of a scientific article. It is also – and primarily – a usual procedure for ethnographic studies that builds on the epistemological idea that any scientific observation and description is inevitably infused with theory (Scheffer, 2002; see also Brümmer & Alkemeyer, 2017).

5 All data were gathered in German. For this article, the author anonymised the respective empirical material and translated it into English.

6 The videos do not sufficiently capture verbal communication between players or the atmosphere in a stadium and make it difficult to assess details of individual players’ activities. Furthermore, in the practices of video analysis involving the entire team only pre-selected sequences are discussed that show fragments of a match according to the coach’s selection choices.

7 Practice theories claim that practical knowledge cannot be verbalised in formal speech to its full extent. In fact, the players accomplish the explication of practical knowledge multimodally by combining incomplete, metaphorical utterances, gestures and bodily re-enactments of past activities.

8 See the introduction for the few exceptions.