In professional football clubs, young players often “transition up” from 18’s or 21’s to train with the first team squad. Transitions occur for a number of reasons, such as unavailability of players due to injury or illness, or because the young player is worthy of a chance. These transitions are powerful for learning and development, but they also increase intensity, workloads, and pressure. Handled poorly, they can lead to injury or wellbeing issues. Despite how common transitions are, clubs have had little clear guidance on how to manage them well.
This project set out to map what really happens during these transitions, who does what, when, and with what information, inside a professional English club. We applied a lens called Distributed Situation Awareness (DSA), which is a simple theory: in a complex team environment no single person sees the whole picture, so the outcome of transitions depends on how well the right pieces of information reach the right people at the right time.
The current project showed, for the first time, the complexity of player transitions in football, through the interaction of numerous tasks, the football club actors, and required information. Further, the analysis identified the knowledge and perspectives of actors involved in player transition processes that need to be shared to develop comprehensive DSA to mitigate potential negative outcomes for player transitions.
Problems in transitions usually happen given the unplanned and fast-paced nature in which they occur (usually a quick pre-training decision). The issue when reacting to unplanned events in fast paced environments is the limited opportunity for error recovery once a transition is set in process, as actions are prioritised towards efficiency rather than thoroughness. As such critical information on the transitioning player may not be shared. For example, the players acute load, previous injury, activation or preparation needs, acute mental condition, among others. If this information is not transferred among appropriate system actors, the player risks a potentially negative outcome.
Football clubs need to develop standardised processes for player transitions to ensure the needs of each player are carefully considered to enable positive outcomes for players and the club.
The concept of DSA in football would provide novel insights in other areas, including loan player management, transfer market management, talent identification, and general club functioning.
