TACTICAL PERIODIZATION
FOOTBALL ORGANIZED BY
THE OPERATIONALIZATION OF A
GAME MODEL
In football training methodology, the player is considered an indivisible unit. It’s therefore necessary that the training includes a functional interconnection of the four dimensions that make up football performance from a technical, physical and psychological standpoint. These, however, have been constantly reduced and ‘impoverished’ by a mechanical vision of Cartesian origin, whose
methodological aim is to maximize them, in separate form with the belief that there is a compounding effect on the (overall) competitive performance.
Upon examining the training methodologies and the related planning present in today’s elite football, it becomes apparent how limited the working methods are with means and resources so ever dependent on physical dimension.
In this paper, a study was conducted on the bibliographic material relating to a new methodology studied in the last forty years at the University of Oporto (Portugal), whose concepts want to go beyond the limits of planning and programming for the preparation of football teams.
The complex nature of situational team sports highlights the importance of the tactical dimension as a key to reading, analyzing and responding to this complexity. The theory considers tactics to be the nucleus of competitive preparation and as such the central element from which the remaining performance areas depend on. This is where tactical periodization is born. It’s a new methodology focused on a vision closer to the game. Tactical periodization
is faithful to the needs of team football.
It is achieved through the attentive choice and operationalization of a specific game model. It also translates the theoretical model (based on game principles) into procedural operations that manifest themselves in the form of observable and reproducible behaviors. Thus, training becomes a space in which it is possible to ‘simulate’ the conceptual model of the game that one wants to achieve in the match without the need to consider analytically the inseparability of the components of a complex sporting practice such as football.