#196 Game models & Ecological dynamics

Game models in football are discussed constantly. Most coaches have strong opinions about them, but fewer can describe their own model with depth — or stop to ask where the underlying thinking is actually leading them.

In this episode: a new paper by Jones, Kubayi, Stone and Davids that reframes what a Game Model is and what it should do. The core argument is that when a Game Model becomes a script, meaning telling players what to do in advance, it reduces their exposure to the informational complexity of the real game. The player who has learned what to do stands waiting for the right moment to execute a pattern, instead of reading what the game is actually offering. Along the way: affordances and why they appear and disappear in seconds, the difference between skill acquisition and skill adaptation, constraints-led approach, coach feedback reframed as questions that direct attention rather than prescribe solutions, and a new way of visualising the Game Model itself as a continuous infinity loop with a Transition Nexus at its centre. A Sam Allardyce anecdote about the West Ham way, too, which lands well for this context.

The thread underneath: if you're coaching from a traditional Game Model, you're trying to build a team that executes your system. If you're coaching from an ecological dynamics perspective, you're trying to build a team that reads the game and adapts.

Further reading

• Jones, G., Kubayi, A., Stone, J.A. & Davids, K. (2026). Game Models in Football Coaching: An Ecological Dynamics Perspective. International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey friend! This is Procellus, where we talk about the beautiful, often misunderstood and complex game of football. It's a holistic, skillful, and adaptive journey to better humanity. Welcome to Procristal, the podcast about football skill and what it means to develop as a player and a human being. I'm your host Janis Sarajarvi and today we are diving into a paper that was published just recently. An interesting paper asking a question that every serious football person has wrestled with at some point. What actually is a game model and are we using them right or even understanding them right? The paper is by Gerard Jones et al. and the title is Game Models in Football Coaching An Ecological Dynamics Perspective. And it's a very interesting paper and it gives you language for something you have perhaps felt intuitively but couldn't quite articulate. So let's get into the paper. First, what even is a game model? It's a very common term in football, but as the authors of the paper point out, it's one of those concepts that everyone uses and almost nobody defines the same way. In broad terms, a game model is a framework, a kind of performance philosophy that shapes how a team plays. It covers playing style, tactical principles, it also can include training methodology, things like do we press high or sit deep, do we build from the back or go direct, do we prioritize width or vertical combinations and everything like this. And historically game models have been used to do something very specific, namely prescribing behavior, coaches defining the patterns they want, players learning those patterns and then executing them. You will recognize this in things like shadow play, so when we are rehearsing movements without opposition and learning kind of tactical movements to put into muscle memory. The authors of this paper aren't saying that game models are bad, but what they are saying and what's interesting is that the way we tend to implement them might be even sometimes working against us and that there might be some different ways to understand game models and how to train them also. And the core critique is this when a game model becomes a script, when it tells players what to do in certain situations in advance, it does something a little bit dangerous. It reduces their the players' exposure to the informational complexity of real football. Think about what match actually is. It is dynamic, even sometimes chaotic. Space is open and close in fractions of a second, the opponent does something you didn't expect, and such things. Nothing is actually stable, the weather even is changing. And yet a lot of training environments try to remove all the complexity. We simplify, we drill and we say in this situation you do this, and the hope is that players will then apply that solution in the game. But the problem is the game never quite gives you that exact situation. Not exactly. So the player who has learned what to do stands there waiting for the right moment to execute the pattern instead of reading what the game is actually offering and responding to it. And the authors cite research suggesting that elite football performance is characterized by tactical flexibility and responsiveness, not actually adherence to preset patterns. The blessed players aren't the ones who follow the plan most faithfully. They are the ones who can adapt when the plan no longer fits. There's a great anecdote also in the paper about Sam Allardyce when he was in West Ham. He was appointed to West Ham and the debate was whether he would follow the so-called West Ham way. He recalled that nobody could actually define what the West Ham way was, but fans had been led to believe it was akin to Barcelona, how Barcelona plays, which he described as and I'm quoting here Poti. So what's the like core of this paper? The alternative the researchers propose is grounded in something called ecological dynamics. And this is a framework from sports science that's been growing in influence over the last decades, associated particularly with Kit David, Prof Duart Araujo and such researchers. The central idea is this skill performance doesn't live inside the player's head as a set of memorized solutions. It emerges from the interaction between the player and the environment or in the player environment correspondence. You cannot actually separate the two. And this is where the key concept comes in, namely the affrodances that we have been talking before in these episodes. And the term comes originally from the psychologist James Gibson. An affordance is an opportunity for action that an environment offers with particular abilities. A simple example from football is a, for example, a true ball opportunity. That opportunity doesn't like objectively exist on the pitch. It only exists if player perceives the space, the teammates run, the defender's positioning, the right moment and such. The same gap in a defensive line might afford a true ball to one player and not to another depending on their vision, their technique, their relationship with the teammate, making the run and such things. And crucially, affordances appear and disappear. The window opens for maybe for a very short time, and if you're waiting to execute a pre-memorised pattern, you might miss it. If you're attuned to the environment, you see it. And this is what the authors mean when they say tactical principles should be understood not as fixed instructions but as functional invitations for action, which is very nicely put. Rather than saying always high press in a 4-3-3, you guide players to recognize what in the current situation affords a press, where is the space, what's the numerical situation, and many other such things. And that's a completely different kind of knowing. So then we go into a situation that if you cannot just hand players a script, how do you coach? This is where the concept of constraints comes in. The constraints-led approach based on Carl Newell's constraints model says that skilled behavior emerges from the interaction between the individual task and environmental constraints. Coaches cannot control all of them all the time, but they can manipulate shape and direct these constraints. So they can manipulate task and environmental constraints to shape the Afrodance landscape to create conditions where certain behaviors become more likely to emerge without prescribing them. And this is what many coaches do intuitively. So when you're playing small-sided games with two small goals, you're creating a constraint that invites different behaviors than a, for example, large-sided game with big goals. The insight from ecological dynamics is to be more intentional about this constraint design, to design training tasks that preserve the informational richness of match so that what players learn in training actually transfers to competition. So there we come into representative learning design that we have been talking a lot about. We should design representative environments where the players have the opportunity to similar key information that they would have in the game and to act upon it. So, based on all of this, the authors of the paper propose a new conceptual model for how a game model should be structured, and they visualize it as an infinity loop. And this is a very nice image. You can check that image in the paper. Instead of thinking of the game as a sequence of discrete phases, you are in for possession, then you are in transition, then you are defending. The infinity loop represents the game as a continuous flow of overlapping interdependent moments. So each phase or game state feeds into and emerges from the others. Very interestingly, at the center of this loop is what the authors call the transition nexus: a metastable space where offer dances rapidly reorganize. This is the moment when possession changes or when the game is stopped and restarted or when the spatial structure of the game suddenly shifts. At the transition nexus, multiple action possibilities coexist. But I would say that all these in all the games, many action possibilities coexist. Players always need to be in a metastable state where they are able to do kind of different actions based on the situation. And here the tactical principles that are related to this model: pressing, compactness, breaking lines and such function as what the authors call attentional anchors. They guide where players look and what they prioritize without dictating exactly what they do. They are enabling constraints, not rigid rules. So the traditional coaching model positions the coach as the source of solutions. The coaches are thinking normally that okay, what in this situation we have to do and how the players should move, and the coach knows what good football looks like. The coach transmits that knowledge to the players and players then implement it. The ecological model repositions the coach to someone who designs environments, manipulates constraints and guides exploration without determining outcomes in advance. So the coach's expertise is in creating conditions for good football to emerge, not in prescribing what that football exactly looks like. And this is a very interesting job for a coach because you cannot just write a playbook and tell everyone to follow it, but it's also more honest about what football actually is: it's a complex, dynamic, co-adaptive system where the right answer is always contextual, it's emerging, it's not fixed. The authors also make an important point about culture and identity. So game models shouldn't just be about tactical priorities, they should reflect the cultural context of the players, coaches and the whole community. So sociocultural constraints shape how players perceive and enact affordances. For me, the key takeaway from this paper is a shift in what we are trying to build. If you're coaching with a traditional game model, you're trying to build a team that kind of executes your system. If you're coaching from an ecological dynamics perspective, you're trying to build a team that or help a team grow that reads the game and adapts. So where the system is shared, tactical intentions based on principles, not specific prescribed behaviors. And it feels for me that this is kind of what really skillful football also looks like. It connects to something deeper to what is talked about a lot in this podcast: the relationship between player and environment, perception, action coupling and what all this means to be kind of truly present in a moment of play. Thanks for listening to Prokresau. Remember, Progress Sao book that is already published in Estonia and in Finland is being translated into English.