Practitioners and sports scientists have been always seeking to identify key factors or characteristics that can distinguish between successful and less successful players and teams. Quantitative analysis of performance provides coaches with additional information that describes performance in detail beyond that which they can access through recall of personal observations. Such critical information allows coaches to improve performance during matches and practice, through the improvement offeedback in an appropriate form . Traditional performance analysis have sought to understand performance by identifYing the behaviours that are important for a given sport . Notational analysis techniques have described the performance tendencies of players and teams, and strengths and weaknesses in specific performance situations in a range of sports (e.g. playing long or spreading wide during transitions phases in association football). This methodology has sought for performance indicators that he1ped to characterize successful and unsuccessful performance and creating awareness among players and coaches of how individual players can influence team patterns. In this chapter, it is shown how ecological dynamics provides understanding about how players use information from their performance environment to attain successful performances in team sports. Our programme of research has shown that attackers seek to break symmetry with their nearest opponents, as defenders try to maintain system symmetry by remaining between their own goal and the immediate attacker. Slight changes in player behaviours may induce a symmetry breaking process in the state of the dyadic systems. In this case, when the defenders do not have the collective ability to re-establish dyadic system stability, a shot at goal may occur. Attackers must perceive the locations of the immediate defender and the goalkeeper and shoot the ball in a specific direction and with a specific velocity that requires the opponents to displace faster than they are able to intercept the ball. Our results are encouraging and provide evidence that notational analysis based on performance statistics can be too reductionist. Moreover, this approach has potential in areas such as training and programming in team sports, proposing the simplification of tasks instead of deconstructing them. By unveiling the influence of interacting task constraints on the emergent selforganized behaviours of players during performance, ecological dynamics reveals itself as a powerful tool for both researchers and practitioners in sport performance analysis.
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