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In this episode of the Progressão podcast, we continue our discussion on skill in football. While skill is often understood as an individual quality — something that belongs to a single player — this episode explores skill from a wider perspective: as a phenomenon that also emerges at the level of groups and teams.

We ask why it is important to talk about group-level skill. When skill is understood narrowly as individual technical ability, group-level behaviour is often reduced to tactics and pushed to later stages of development. In the previous episode, we discussed Arsène Wenger’s well-known house metaphor, where technique forms the foundation and tactical skills are learned later. This way of thinking can delay the learning of essential football skills related to coordination, cooperation, and acting together.

In this episode, we explore skill as something that does not exist only in individual actions, but also in how players coordinate, adapt, and act together. Drawing on ideas from ecological dynamics and complexity, we discuss key concepts of group-level skill such as collective action, coordination, synchronisation, and synergies.

We also return to the player level, reframing individual skill not as isolated action, but as co-action — skillful behaviour that is always relational, whether with or without the ball. Off-ball actions are discussed as fundamental football skills that should be developed early, alongside on-ball actions.

This episode continues the reframing of skill introduced in our first English episode and connects directly to ideas presented in our upcoming book, including a visual figure that illustrates skill as something that lives in the overlap between player and group.

Progressão is a book, a podcast, and a long-term thinking project focused on football, learning, and human behaviour from a complex, holistic, and ecological perspective.

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