1CAMILO SPERANZA

A CONVENIENT MYTH

THE GAME MODEL

THE GAME MODEL A CONVENIENT MYTH

Camilo Speranza

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3

PROLOGUE

Summer. Sunday afternoon. Are you at home. Shorts and flip

flops. Don't fly a fly at home. It would seem that even they

have taken a breather and suspended activities. The only

thing heard is the hum of the fan. There is not much to do, so

you finally decide that it is a good time to stop procras-

tinating and get down to business. You go to your room or

wherever you have your computer and open Word. You sit

there, in front of that blank page and think "well ... at least,

I'm going to start by putting the title. The rest will come."

And you write it there, at the top, in Calibri or Verdana size

48. And in bold too! You want it to be seen clearly. You type:

"GAME MODEL". And so you start your season.

Perhaps the above scene is familiar to you. It wouldn't be

weird. Almost all of us have been there. Humans don't like

uncertainty. For this reason, we seek mechanisms that help us

foresee what will happen in the future. We need to have a

sense of security, even if it is artificial. Football is a game of

stochastic nature, with a very high degree of uncertainty.

Therefore, we have built a tool that helps us feel that nothing

escapes to our control: the "game model".

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In this work I want to share with you, very succinctly, part of

the journey that I have taken so far. This journey has taken

me from having no notion about the existence of the idea of

the "game model" to the place where I am today from which I

question the concept of "game model" as they have explained

it to some of us.

This is not and is not intended to be an academic paper. I am

not in a position to teach anything to anyone. The most I can

hope for is to raise questions that make you someone reflect.

This is just about sharing. From a simple football coach to

other colleagues.

I hope you like it. Or you hate it! Whatever the case, be sure

to send me an email to camilosperanza@gmail.com to tell

me.

Camilo Speranza

Guayaquil, Ecuador

March, 2020

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PART ONE

"GAME MODEL? WHAT'S THAT?"

"Our game is not a succession of plays, but a stochastic

succession of phase spaces".

-Francisco Seirul.lo (2012)

The definition of the concept of "game model" is a matter that

usually raises controversy, mainly because there are different

opinions regarding the relevance of this concept. During my

playing years I had no contact with this idea. I used to play a little

bit in "automatic" mode, sort of speak. Just like I had done it

throughout my whole life: pure inertia. I went to training, did the

activities that the coaches put in front of me without questioning

them at all (nothing beyond "I like this one more, I like this one

less", or "this is boring") and that's it. If the coach congratulated

me, great. If the coach yelled at me and scolded me, well... that's

just what coaches do sometimes, right? Meanwhile, I had no idea

about the game. Today I feel that there were very few clear

indications of what I was supposed to do or how to relate to my

teammates, which possibly had repercussions on the effectiveness

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of the team's collective organisation and on my possibilities of

performing at a high level. I'm not saying that the coaches I had

during my time as a player didn't do a good job. They most

probably did. Otherwise, Uruguayan football would not be one of

the quarries that contributes the most players to the elite of

international football. Today my priorities make me spend most of

my time thinking about football.

Back in the day as a player it was not like that. Surely, the thing

goes there. And, mind you, I'm not saying that if things had been

done differently they would have been better. Nor worse. Different,

for sure. The point is that I didn't know the concept of "game

model" and logically did not gave any importance to it. How are

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Here I am (right) going out with a controlled ball on the day of my debut in the Uruguayan 1st division. Year 2001.

you going to give importance to something that you don't even

know exists? Furthermore, as Vítor Frade, father of Tactical

Periodisation says, “nobody needs what they don't know”. Thus, I

lived my years as a player in a very calm fashion, sunk in a

comfortable ignorance: "they don't explain too much to me and I

don't ask anything either". However, once I set out on the path that

I hope will one day lead me to become a coach, I began to intuit

that there was something that didn't fit in the way I had been

trained and the way I had always played, although I didn't had

neither the knowledge nor the capacity to define it clearly.

The concept of "game model" in the way we understand it today

comes to me as a result of conversations held with a colleague

named Álvaro del Blanco Pérez (@Alvarodelblanco) back in 2008

who in an act of extraordinary generosity, because he did not know

me at all, he told me about Mourinho who at that time was in

charge of Inter Milan and patiently explained the training

methodology that the extraordinary Portuguese coach applies,

called Tactical Periodisation. "Game model? What's that?" I asked

him. So this great guy, Alvaro, told me that according to this

coach's conception the "game model" is a complex set of collective

and individual references, which are the game principles conceived

by the coach. The principles of the game are references of action,

references of behaviour that lead players to play as a team, thus

leading to a collective coordination.

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It is those references who somehow shape the team's organisation

(Mourinho, cited by Oliveira et al. 2007). Honestly, at the time this

definition seemed extraordinary to me. Highly satisfactory. It had a

revolutionary effect on my way of understanding the game and its

training; I went from completely unaware of the idea of "game

model" to finding a solution to the problems I felt was in the steps

to follow to get a team to express a certain way of playing. "You

have to have a game model. It's so obvious... how could I not have

thought of it before!", I said to myself.

But what is a "model"? According to the Cambridge Dcitionary it's

"something that a copy can be based on because it is an extremely

good example of its type" A copy can be based on... from this

perspective, should we understand that the players are mere actors

in a previously thought script, created, established by whoever

created that "model"? Is this how the game of football operates? In

Paco Seirul.lo's opinion, no. According to this brilliant Master, "our

game is not a sequence of plays, but a stochastic sequence of phase

spaces." (Seirul.lo, 2012).

It seems appropriate to remember that, as Morin (1990) explains;

(cited by Balagué and Torrents, 2011), "any interaction endowed

with any stability or regularity assumes an organisational character

and produces a system". Thus, the decisions of the players are

inscribed in a system and, therefore, in a logic of operation

according to which game actions acquire meaning (Garganta &

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Cunha e Silva, 2000; cited by Silva, 2014). This is in line with the

opinion of several authors, who consider football to be a sport of

tactical preponderance (Teodorescu, 1984, 1991; Meinel &

Schnabel, 1988; Dufour, 1989; Riera, 1989; Konzag, 1992, 1995;

Bauer, 1994; Artero, 1997; Garganta, 1997, 2001; Lillo, 1999,

2000; Giráldez, 2000, 2003; Gréhaigne, 2001; Gil, 2008; cited by

Pol, 2011). Thus, as Amieiro (2007; cited by Pol, 2011) says, any

technical or physical action has an underlying tactical intention,

that is, an intention in the game.

The difference between "game model" and game system must be

clear. A "game model" is a series of concepts, ideas and ways of

acting that identify a specific team. While a game system is related

to the distribution of space by the coach through the initial

arrangement of the players on the field of play. This initial

disposition of players determines the possibilities of interaction of

each player with the rest of the team and with the opponent,

naturally. In the words of Mourinho (2011), a system contributes

to "knowing that in a certain position there's a teammate, that from

a geometric point of view there is something built on the field of

play that allows the players to advance the action."

Therefore, the "game model" would not be a game system, it is not

the positioning of the players (although it is conditioned by it, as

well as by countless other factors), but it is the way in which these

players relate among themselves and how they express their way of

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seeing football (Portolés, cited by Tamarit, 2007) and the creation

of this system of relations between players, that is, of the game's

"model", will be sought through the process of training (Pol, 2011).

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PART TWO

"GAME MODEL" AND DECISION MAKING

"Players must be prepared to act, not to think.”

-Isaac Guerrero (2017)

Over time I conti-

nued to be interes-

t e d i n Ta c t i c a l

Periodisation, in-

cluding a visit to

Porto in 2015 to

meet wi th Ví tor

Frade, arranged by

m y g o o d f r i e n d

L u c a s G o n z á l e z

(@GlobalFutbolIns).

I needed to know

more about the mechanisms available to a coach in order to

organize his team on the field and get it to manifest certain

behaviors.

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Vitor Frade (left), father of Tactical Periodization in 2015. On the right, me.

In 2011 I was in the second year of my training as a coach at the

High Performance Center in Sant Cugat del Vallès and I had Rafel

Pol (@rafelpol), current fitness coach for the Spanish national

team, as a teacher of the methodology course. I remember an

occasion in which I mentioned the methodology of Tactical

Periodisation in class and a healthy debate was generated around it

in which both classmates and the teacher participated. After a

while of brainstorming, Rafel gave us his point of view according

to which he feels (or felt, at that time) more comfortable with

approaches to play and training that do not limit freedom and

expressive-creative capacity of the players, which from his point of

view Tactical Periodisation does from the concept of "game model".

This vision of his about the collective organisation of the teams is

reflected in the book “El fútbol ¡NO! es así" when he writes that:

“the collective organisation is what should guide our training process,

since the behaviors and capacities of the players depend on the

opportunities for action that emerge from the intra-team and inter-

team interaction. From this perspective, the appearance of

coordinated behaviors in teams starts from the formation of

interpersonal synergies between the players that result from collective

actions based on opportunities for action that are collectively formed

and exploited. And it is with these opportunities for action in specific

environments that players must become aware of. ”

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Juan M. Lillo (2011) manifests similar ideas when he says that: “it

is true that preferential guidelines for behaviour must be sought for

the group to settle, but in the end there are some guidelines that

each one has been building depending on the experiences acquired

and their capabilities. It is necessary for someone to establish a

series of principles that manage to make the group have its own

procedural dialect ”.

I find those ideas tremendously revealing. According to what these

authors tell us, we must not only attend to collective guidelines

that somehow have the purpose of embodying the way of playing

that the coach has in mind, but it's essential to take into account

the abilities of the players and the roles that they can play in the

team, from which the coach must design tasks to coordinate the

potential of the players, to create coordinated movements between

the team members, without prejudicing the individual qualities of

each of the players (Pol, 2011). In this sense, I think that the words

of Xavi Hernández (2011) synthesize the aspects that a coach

should take into account when building the "game model" of his

team: "Honestly, it gives me and takes away the team. My game needs

partners. I am nobody if one does not throw uncheck me, the other is

not offered to me in short. (...) Without partners my football doesn't

make sense ”.

At first glance it might seem that the vision of coaches like

Mourinho, for whom the "game model" is the frame of reference

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for the collective decision-making of their teams, and the vision of

coaches like Lillo according to which the dynamics that arise from

the interaction of the players themselves will be responsible for

revealing the most appropriate trends for a team's game are

antagonistic. However, from my point of view these are totally

complementary ideas. I see no reason why it is not possible to

establish certain preferential responses to a series of circumstances

at the collective level and at the same time be open to the

uniqueness of each of the players and to perceive the synergies that

emerge from their interaction with peers, opponents and play.

After all, complex adaptive systems only need a few simple rules to

form a set that has highly effective and harmonious properties,

such as a capacity for self-organisation and co-adaptation (Balagué

and Torrents, 2011). In this same line, Pol (2011) expresses

himself stating that: “It is very important to bear in mind that,

despite the need for the coach to reduce the degrees of freedom of the

team system, so that it exhibits a coordinated behaviour, you should

be aware that a too rigid behaviour will be a poorly adaptive

behaviour. Rather than trying to impose a strict and hierarchical

order from the outside, some basic principles should be established,

the principles of the "game model", such as the preferred positions of

the players, in which area the pressure begins, etc. and, based on

these principles and the resources that the coach offers, propose

training situations to achieve system coordination accepting that the

organisational characteristics respond to the principles of self-

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organisation." The

statement of Isaac

G u e r r e r o ( 2 0 1 7 )

(@IsaacGuerreroH),

c u r r e n t d e p u t y

director of the FC

B a r c e l o n a

methodology area,

comes to mind. He

tells us that "the

player must be pre-

pared to act, not to

think" in clear re-

ference to the dis-

tinction that we must

make between de-

clarative knowledge and procedural knowledge. The "game

model", as a document and as a set of principles, sub-principles

and sub-principles defined previously by the coach, would be

circumscribed within the sphere of declarative knowledge. It is

important to have a rational frame of reference that, in some way,

contributes (contributes!) To conditioning the actions of the

players on the field of play. Now, given the evidence provided by

the aforementioned authors and in an exercise in critical thinking

on our part, we must question that this is hardly the solution to a

team exhibiting harmonious and coordinated behaviour in the face

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The flocks of certain birds exhibit highly complex behavior from a few simple rules.

of the different episodes that they happen in the course of the

game.

We also need to think about how human beings make decisions.

The concept of "game model" as a set of guidelines that guide the

actions of a team makes sense in the traditional perspective of the

decision-making process (which would be something like this:

observe, identify, refer to a kind of "data bank" where known

solutions to similar problems are stored, choose the right solution

and execute). Today, thanks to advances made in the field of

neuroscience, we know that this process does not occur linearly. It

is not a thoughtful and conscious succession of events, but occurs

unconsciously, which doesn't mean that it is irrational. At the risk

of being boring, I leave you what in this sense explains the

Portuguese neurologist António Damásio (2006) in the magnificent

documentary "Football. L'intelligence collective": "when you make a

decision you face a certain situation. A situation in The one that asks

you a question: 'What do I do?' for example, if the situation is very

simple, the decision can be made completely consciously and, say,

progressively using knowledge and logic. 'I know that it's coming that

way. I'll go that way. ' But the interesting thing is that if the

complexity increases, it is curious to see that we are going in. We

enter a non-conscious space. Because, curiously, the non-conscious

space, not being controlled by attention, offers more capacity. You

have more room to include complexity. And when you do it and you

assume you've trained, and footballers have to be well-trained, you

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often give preference to some things because of training and add the

emotion to decide one action or another. Emotions work easily in that

non-conscious space and they offer you a solution for you to apply.

So, you have a problem, you dive into that kind of non-conscious

zone and come up with something that is almost intuitive. You have

an instant solution." Thus, it would seem that in situations of

extreme complexity, with multiple variables and that require us to

offer a solution in a very short period of time, we do not make

decisions consciously. In other words, we are immersed in

situations that are beyond the sphere of our declarative knowledge.

Is it harmful for the player to have detailed information available

on paper or verbally about how to solve the situations of the game

that the coach has managed to imagine or foresee? Frankly, I don't

know. What's relevant is what Guerrero and Damásio tell us: this

will not be the information that the player will preferably use to

make his decisions on the field, when his degree of involvement in

the game is high; a situation that tends to occur in spaces near the

ball.

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PART THREE

THE CLUB'S "GAME MODEL"

"The club's structure should contribute to facilitating

the mobility of players between different teams within

the club."

In my opinion, this "complex set of references" that Mourinho

refers to and that make up the way in which a team plays ends up

looking very much like a language. A language is used to

communicate effectively and that is precisely what we want to

facilitate for our players during the development of the game. Let's

imagine that we are dealing with the case of a club that wants to

organise its training process. From a club's point of view this can

sometimes be an interesting challenge. It is important that the club

has its own "model", ideas and philosophy! However, this "model",

those intentions that we want our teams to express will not be

reproducible in exactly the same way in each of the club's squads.

The reason this is so is that the sensitivity and possibilities of each

player and each coach are not identical. From a systemic

perspective, human beings are hypercomplex structures, made up

of various sub-structures that configure our possibilities and that

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makes us all different. Does this mean that the first team plays in

one way, the U20 squad plays in the opposite way and the U18s

play in a totally different way from the previous two? No way.

Going back to the "language" simile, the objective of the

management of a club should be that, if we speak Spanish in the

first team of the club, Catalan is spoken in the U20s, Portuguese is

spoken in the U18 squad and Italian is spoken in the U16s. Each

language is different. They all have their nuances. But they all

share the same root: Latin. Thus, under normal circumstances, a

person who has grown up speaking Spanish at home surely does

not have too many problems in communicating if one day he

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Children of the ACademy project of Auckland City FC.

travels to Brazil or Italy. Furthermore, if this Spanish-speaking

person decided to move permanently to Rio de Janeiro, he would

be able to understand and speak Portuguese in a relatively short

period of time. I know this from my own experience. The same

should happen with players from different teams from the same

club. This common language added to values and a methodology

shared by all within the club structure should contribute to

facilitate the mobility of players between different club teams, thus

accelerating the adaptation processes and helping each individual

to always perform at their best. How do we achieve this? I am

afraid that for that, as for most subjects, there is no single answer.

Of course I have my own point of view. However, I think we would

go a long way, in addition to dealing with these issues is not the

objective of this work.

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EPILOGUE

After everything written above, should we discard the "game

model" of our usual practice as coaches? Is this concept

invalidated? In my opinion, no. I think sitting at home before the

season starts or whenever, taking a pencil and paper and starting

to sketch ideas related to how we imagine our team's evolution will

be is a totally healthy exercise. It is not only healthy, but it is

recommended. However, it is important that we understand that

coaches are not the center of anything. The more open we are to

the synergies that emerge from the interactions of our players

within the framework of the training activities that we are

proposing, the closer we will be to achieving organic and

sustainable growth as a team. Now, the "game model" can remain

in the day-to-day life of our teams as long as we coaches are fully

aware that this is only an idea with no value on its own. A kind of

guide, if you will. But the game of football is contingency and

chance. As coaches we cannot imagine all the possibilities.

Possibilities, moreover, that in any case, exist on paper, before the

start of the game and that do not take into account the exceptional

circumstances that surround each player. As a coach, it doesn't

make much sense for me to establish that "when the midfielder has

the ball in the B2 quadrant in a controlled manner, oriented to-

wards the opposite goal and without being pressured, the winger

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must offer a diagonal passing line, while the centre-forward will

carry out a run behind the opponent centre-back closest to the ball.

"Who are these players? What are they able to do today, all

together?" Because... surely, those interaction possibilities will be

different from what they were a week ago. And even more

different from what they will be two months from now. In general,

the line-up of a team on the last match of the season is different

from the line-up that very team had in the first game of that

season. As Martí Perarnau (2014) rightly said in his magnificent

work "Herr Pep": “A team is a living being and not a still photo. It

flows, it grows, it recedes, it advances… A team are moments that

mark successes. A team is much more than a state of mind, but it is

also a state of mind. A team is tactics and work, but also talent and

efficiency. It is training and clear ideas, but it is also emotion and

feeling. A team is a journey, sometimes novel, unpublished and full of

adventure. In others, it is a known path, full of necessary and

repetitive routines ”.

We have established that coaches are not the center of anything,

that we are not able to imagine all the possibilities or all the events

that will take place in an environment as unstable and as uncertain

as a football match.

And what can we say about the players? The football player is

probably one of the smartest individuals I know. Surely, some of

them are not able to recite Shakespeare's sonnets from memory (as

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most doctors cannot do it either). Others may not be able to carry

out an in-depth analysis of the geopolitical situation in the Middle

East (would we be shocked to find that most of our politicians

could not do it either?). However, they are individuals who

constantly deal with uncertain situations, who play with a ball

which happens to be spherical, on which they intervene with the

same body segment with which they move. They operate in the

"now" conditioned by the immediate "before", searching for an

imagined future. And they do it collectively! All together and at the

same time. If that is not an extraordinary manifestation of

intelligence, I do not know what is. Marina (1993) tells us that

"intelligence is the integration of multiple operations in a single

project. Speaking, for example, is a linguistic, perceptual, emotional

activity, in which a project directs search, construction and selection

of activities, and all this is driven by a decision maintained with

enthusiasm." In the same vein, Morin (2001), one of the fathers of

modern complex thinking, manifests himself when he explains that

"intelligence that only knows how to separate fragments the complex

of the world into separate pieces, breaks up problems,

unidimensionalizes the multidimensional. It atrophies the possibilities

of understanding and reflection, thus eliminating opportunities for

corrective judgment or long-term vision. Their failure to deal with our

most serious problems is one of the most serious problems we face. So

the more multidimensional problems become , the greater the

inability to think its multidimensionality, the more the crisis

progresses, the more the inability to think the crisis progresses, the

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more planetary the problems become, the more unthinkable they

become." This is what the "game model" represents. Let us imagine

for a moment that throughout our training sessions we do not fill

our players, whatever their age is, with ready-made linear

solutions of the "if ... then ..." type that restrict their creative ability

based on the fact that they do not coincide with the solutions

provided in our "game model". What if, instead, we foster

divergent thinking, collaborative learning and autonomy in an

environment of variability in order to empower the player and help

them effectively resolve the unexpected events they encounter

during the game? It wouldn't be difficult. It would imply that

coaches talk less. On the contrary, we would be obliged to

constantly listen, observe and reflect. We would be creating,

intuiting, imagining how we could do so that the "play" that we

have in our heads, that game that we identify with the most, and

the "play" that emerges from our team can coexist. It would be an

extraordinary challenge. I am convinced that this is the way to

achieve sustainable growth in our teams, respectful of the identity

and sensitivity of the team which we are a part of and which at the

same time brings us closer to the end of the game: scoring one

more goal than the opponent.

As you can imagine at this point, I firmly believe in human

intelligence. I am convinced that the football player neither wants

nor needs to be a mere actor who plays a role in a play whose

script has been established in advance by a "superior entity". In this

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case, the coach. Nor do I think that the most appropriate

"approach" is to arrive at the training session "to see what

happens". No way! I do believe in proposing activities that

contribute to generate contexts and that, through those contexts,

we can offer but also discover and agree with our players what will

be the collective intentions that the team will express while

establishing what will be the criteria and references that we will

use to coordinate our joint actions. For this reason, I don't want to

leave you without sharing this fragment of the book "A Theory of

Creative Intelligence" by José Antonio Marina (1993): "By inte-

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My brother Emiliano (right) and I in our childhood home

lligence we have come to see the invisible. Our measure is excess, what

has made the human history the cone of greatness, but also of

stupidity and cruelty. We have exploited the metal and dynamite

mines, we have created the instruments of music and those of torture,

generosity and murder. Man does not stop It is an animal of

remoteness: it distances itself from things, from others and even from

itself. That is why it eats without hunger, drinks without thirst, kills

members of its species and even commits suicide. It can untie

everything. which makes humanity a permanent supplier of

ambivalent novelties, we rightly attribute it to intelligence. Man has a

creative intelligence."

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Camilo Speranza (@camilosperanza) was born in Montevideo in

1982. He lived his childhood in Nuevo Paris, a neighbourhood west

to that city. His first experience as a player was at the age of five at

Lanza México 68 club. After a more than anodyne career as a

footballer in which he went through clubs such as Montevideo

Wanderers, River Plate, Defensor Sporting, Salus FC, Rentistas,

Deportivo Colonia and a season in the Second Professional Division

of Mexican football, in 2005 he moved to live in Barcelona. There,

he would be strongly

influenced by the

ideas of the positio-

nal game and by the

systemic thinking

applied to training in

football. It is in the

C a t a l a n c a p i t a l

where he carries out

his official studies as

a football coach, ob-

taining the degrees

of Higher Technician

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in Sport with specialisation in Football, awarded by the Spanish

Ministry of Education and Culture and the National Coach Football

licence, awarded by the Catalan Football Federation and the Royal

Spanish Football Federation. After working in several clubs from

the Catalan football scene, in 2016 he joined FC Barcelona. In this

club he will occupy different positions as a coach that would lead

him to have experiences in places such as Brazil, Australia, Japan

and the United States. After a season working for Auckland City FC

of New Zealand, in 2019 he arrived at Guayaquil City FC of the

Ecuadorian First Division, a club where he currently serves as

assistant coach to the first team.

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REFERENCES

Alonso Lano, Amieiro, B., Barreto, R., Fernández, V., Oliveira, B., & Resende, N. (2011). Mourinho ¿por qué tantas victorias?. Vigo, España: MC sports.

Balagué, N., & Torrents, C. (2011). Complejidad y deporte. Barcelona: Editorial INDE.

Gómez, P. (2014). El fútbol ¡no! es así. Castelldefels: Fútbol de Libro.

Marina, J. (2016). Teoría de la inteligencia creadora. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama.

Morin, E. (2012). A cabeça bem-feita. Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand Brasil.

Perarnau, M. (2014). Herr Pep. Barcelona: Roca Editorial.

Pol, R. (2011). La preparación ¿física? en el futbol. Vigo: MC Sports.

Ribot, J. (2006). Football. L'intelligence collective. Video. Francia.

Silva, M. (2008). O desenvolvimento do jogar, segundo a periodização táctica. Vigo: MC Sports.

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