Resumen de The art of planning in football
Despite of the fact that every day we have more scientific evidence to approach the training process in football, there are still many aspects that are beyond our control. Based on previous knowledge, the art necessary to plan, program, design and evaluate microcycles, sessions and task is a key factor to optimize team performance (Castellano y Casamichana, 2016).
For the contextualized implementation of an intervention strategy based on game-based tasks, it is necessary to start from the needs of the team's game model. However, we must not neglect that the particularities of each match and rival, will place them in very varied competitive scenarios (e.g., losing, playing outside, superior rival ...). It is from this first idea of game when one can begin to fine-tune (e.g., proposing regulatory, structural, functional changes...) the contents (reduced, medium and long games) in order to avoid neglecting other demands of the game (e.g. conditionals).
Each training task presents peculiar expected effects. The knowledge of the task effects allow us to anticipate events, in the sense of being able to predict the physical and tactical demands elicited by different task constraints. The advantage of knowing the modulators that can transform the reduced games is that the same task, which seeks to develop or strengthen a certain tactical concept, principle or sub-principle of the game model, can be located anywhere in the session or day of the week, as long as with the proposed adaptations emerge the conditional demands prioritized for that moment of the session or day of the week.
Finally, original initiatives are emerging to explore new opportunities to innovate with the implementation of reduced games in the field of training. Recently it has begun to investigate if with reduced games we can replicate the demands of the competition in reference to the scenarios of maximum demand, or to explore which reduced games fit in the playing position considering their particular demands on competition. Applications around the use of reduced games to assess fatigue or monitor their performance is taking prominence among sports scientists. Of course, there is still a long way to go to extend what is known about how reduced games are able to transform collective behaviour and to what extent they can be transferred to competition. Quite a challenge!
