Progressão
Progressão is a book, a podcast, and a long-term thinking project focused on football, learning, and skilful human behaviour. Our work approaches football from a complex, holistic, and ecological perspective, where players and all football actors are understood as living beings always in correspondence with their environment.
Progressão
#191 Representative design: does your training really reflect the game?
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Welcome to the Progressão podcast.
In this episode, we continue our journey from drills and games, through situations, and now into one of the key concepts of ecological dynamics: representative design.
In football, training often looks organised, structured, and even very “game-like”. But does it truly represent the demands players face in matches? In this episode, we explore how learning depends on the relationship between the player and the environment, especially on the information available, how it is perceived, and how action emerges from it. We discuss key ideas such as perception–action coupling and action fidelity, and why even small differences in timing, spacing, or pressure can completely change player behaviour.
Through practical examples, from finishing and pressing to rondos and positional games, we reflect on why some exercises transfer to the game, while others only appear to. Representative design is about identifying the essential elements of football situations and bringing those into training in a meaningful way.
Articles mentioned in the episode:
Pinder, R. A., Davids, K., Renshaw, I., & Araújo, D. (2011). Representative learning design and functionality of research and practice in sport. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 33(1), 146–155.
Full article
Headrick, J., Renshaw, I., Davids, K., Pinder, R. A., & Araújo, D. (2015). The dynamics of expertise acquisition in sport: The role of affective learning design. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 16(Part 1), 83–90.
Full article
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SPEAKER_00Kelka, valta prokritala podcast. Jada weemme diskussina representativ desin. A very important konceptet konnetka to ekologisikalla dynamiks.
SPEAKER_02Rite, representativ design. One of the key koncepts konjust to ekologiska dynamiks alänka constraints-based coaching ja non linea pedagogy, etc. So esenti, itse like this: How can we create training environments that really represent a real competitive environment and from where the transfer to the game is present?
SPEAKER_00The idea is that if the training environment is representativ, if it contains the key information that exists in the real game, then the players can start to attune to that information and become skillful.
SPEAKER_02Yes, exactly. And then when they move into the competition, there is a better chance of transfer between training and the game.
SPEAKER_00I think we all want to create rich and effective training environments that really help the players to develop and become skillful. And again, traditionally, we often think in terms of parts so we break the game down we break even the players down, the teams down, and then when we have the pieces we develop them and then try to put them somehow together. But actually it may not work like that.
SPEAKER_02What we often miss in this whole discussion is are the deep specific things that are happening in the game. For example the rhythms, the flows and the key information that is present, like press for example, how the press is coming towards the player, which distance, which speed, which rhythm? So we come to the question that is also haunting us here all the time. Are our exercises really representative of the game? So sometimes this training looks very good, like this exercise, oh, everything is in place, it's well organized, cones are in place, coaches also and coach instructions. What's happening actually? is it close to the real game or not?
SPEAKER_00I could say that many trainings can look really good but are not representative. And also, sometimes I think also, some trainings can look a little bit like bad, or not bad but messi but are representative and good for the players.
SPEAKER_02I agree on this. The main thing that comes from ecological dynamics to this discussion is perception-action coupling. The perception and action are intertwined processes, they happen together. So if we design training where perception and action are separatä, for example repeating technique without context, or then we have a game that looks good but it's not really the same similar information and I'm coupling my action to that non-gamelike information. I might not learn the specific skills that are needed in the game. So we are breaking the perception-action coupling, and that can limit then how learning transfers or skills transfer to the game.
SPEAKER_00Let's take a concrete example and a very traditional one also a finishing exercises. So back in the days, the players shoot out from outside the box. There could be as many touches as the players wanted, there were never no pressure. And this was the standard. You and me, we have experienced this as players. So repeating those shots outside from the box.
SPEAKER_02And goalkeepers were wanting this. They didn't want shots from close range also. They were angry when we went close.
SPEAKER_00But then even player, you started to realize that when you have match, the situations were so much different they were juuraita training. So there was always defenders, always pressure, always very little time. The situations were very varied. Sometimes you were heading the ball, same shooting with your right foot very close to the goal, sometimes from the left side, right side, and so on and so on. So it was, the game was anything but the training we did.
SPEAKER_02Exactly. So there was a lot of space, like you said, a lot of time, and the shooting where the shot was taken from was far away from the goal. We were training something different, I think shooting long-range shots or something like that. And all the timings of the shooting, the behavior were different. And that leads us to one of the key concepts in representative learning design that is conceptualized by Pinder 2011 article. We can set the link in the intro. That concept is action fidelity. And action fidelity means basically like this: do the actions performed in training match the actions performed in the real game? And do they really match the actions performed in a real game, in their rhythm, in their specificity and such.
SPEAKER_00And this comes to the point that even if an exercise looks similar, small differences in information can change behaviour. Example from baseball: players practicing hitting balls from a machine, so the movement looks very similar. But researchers looked more closely and they found that timing was different, the coordination was different. And why? Because the key information like the pitcher's movement was missing. This is super interesting.
SPEAKER_02So when they were hitting the machine, they are basically learning heating and it looks similar. But when you look at it from closer range, you can see that the timing is different. So in football in shooting or goal scoring, the timing, for example, of your movement, the timing of the shot, timing of your leg movement and such things, they might be different in different kinds of environments. What is the important part here is that the information action coupling is not present, real information action coupling from real game. And that we need always in the training so that the players can attune to the key information and then act upon it.
SPEAKER_00The same applies to football. So for example, we can take a possession exercise where we try to play against the press, but then in that exercise, the distances are shorter, the speeds are different, the options are maybe limited, so the behavior becomes different because the key information is also different.
SPEAKER_02An example of one of my earlier teams where I was coaching, we used small positional games to train transitions, and it created a lot of losses, so basically, like a transition. But also a lot of chaotic situations that were not really clearly connected to the game. So the ball was bouncing outside from the game area. Or it was so chaotic that you didn't have any kind of time to train transitioning, it was just super chaotic. It was more like we were training just, I don't know what we were training actually, just chaotic football. But it was not chaotic in a football game like way. And then we started to think: what are the players actually learning here? And what do you think, for you? How do you feel this kind of exercise? Super small space, a lot of transitions, ball going out of the field and such.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's that's super interesting also, koska I know many coaches think that those exercises are good to train transitions. Mutta as you said, what happens in the exercise, että it's like ball going back and forth for the teams, or the ball is so easily going outside of the pitch, that there is no time in a way to train those situations. And there is often there can be a minigole, but it can be like a one touch. You try to score the minigolin in transition, but that is not like the transitions in a real match. Or sometimes in a way it's like a counter-pressing situation, it can be a little bit like this. But many times it's like transition to counterattack where there is like big spaces, and the ball is not like going outside so easily, especially if it's like in the middle of the pit. So it's, I think it's I think it's not a good way to train transitions. Okay, you can some small behaviors like this counterpressing in a way. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Reaction and counterpressing can be there, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but if you think about transitions as a wall, then I think no chance.
SPEAKER_02Even in the counterpressing, if you think like real game. Normally, if in my experience small sided games, the spaces are so small in this transitioning game that you very easily get to counterpress. But in a real game, you might need to run maybe 20 meters to counterpress, for example. That's a different kind of run. And if you never did that in the training, longer run that you need to really kind of push yourself or even run backwards 50 meters, 60 meters, that's a totally different thing.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. And this is where we need to think carefully. So, are we sampling the right information from the game environment? So, because representative design is not only about players, it's about the environment we create.
SPEAKER_02So, for example, if you train high pressing in a small area, the opponent cannot escape in the same way as in full pitch. So the dynamics change a lot. So it's about the behavior, the action fidelity, how is the behavior of the players? Do they need to run similar kind of distances than in the real game and such things? And again, we want to emphasize that we are not saying that small-sided games are bad, but we need to kind of kritikally evaluate them and think how we can make them more representative. And then when we think about not only the kind of structure of the game, like where the cones are, what are the rules and such, but when we think about emotional representative design, kind of or effective learning design, as Jonathan Hetrick in his article, The Dynamics of Expertise Acquisition in Sport, the role of effective learning design has written, we can share that link also in the episode. So, what do you think I about about this? Like, do we need these emotions, similar emotions that we have in the game in the training also and do we miss them?
SPEAKER_00Yes, I think that is a very sometimes a very difficult thing to achieve in the training. For example, if you think about building up against high press in the training. Mutta match you can sense that okei, now the players are more tense because the opponent is pressing really hard and they're starting a little bit like thinking about että, okei, if I lose the ball now, it can have a big big consequence of the result. And I think the easiest way to think about this: how hard is to train penalties? Koska one of the main things is about emotions and the stakes.
SPEAKER_02That's a good example. And then we have set, there are some coaches who said that we cannot train penalties, that it's impossible because the situation is so specific. However, there are some coaches who are kind of trying to build that environment into the training situation. So, for example, they have a lot of noise there, or they get fans into the training place to shout to the penalty taker and they try to create this chaos that can be around the taker, for example, the time also that it might take time referees go into the VAR and such things. So at least we have to acknowledge these things because then in the training, if we don't acknowledge them at all, these pressures and such, we miss a lot of things, and then in the game we might be kind of shaking and not ready for it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, this is this is an interesting thing, how you can achieve and how much, for example, you try to create, for example, this kind of stress situation in training or how relaxed it should be, or how more relaxed it should be, and what helps the players really to compete when it's the match day.
SPEAKER_02So, yeah, the role of effective learning design, Jonathan Hedrik et al. This article is an interesting one related to representative learning design discussion. In the end, we could summarize this episode in a way that representative design is about sampling the right information from the game environment, trying to have that in the training environment also, so maintaining perception, action coupling, ensuring action fidelity so that, for example, when we shoot to the goal, the shooting movement, for example, is similar than in a real game, and that is linked to the perception and the information, and then also designing for effective learning design. So acknowledging the role of emotions in the trainings.