Francisco Fardilha, Elite Speaker in our School, completed a PhD in Sport Studies at the University of Stirling (UK), on the topic of creative development in professional football academies. Founder of “Special Interest Coaching Research Group”, Higher Education Academy member, British Association of Sport and Exercise Scientists member, Portuguese society of Sports Psychology member, Teaching Impact Award winner (2019). Former Assistant Academy Manager at LOSC Lille and Technical Director at FC Girondins de Bordeaux Women, he is currently Women´s Technical Director of FC Bayern Munich, in Germany.

TP: It’s a hot topic, people say that constraints limit creativity. How can we give freedom of choice to the players but at the same time have to emerge a game ideia?

Francisco Fardilha: When talking about constraints and Tactical Periodization, I call it the “Netflix paradox”. I don’t know if it has happened to you, but it happens to me sometimes if I feel like watching something but I don’t know what, then I go to Netflix and you have so much choice, that a sort of “paralysis by analysis” happens. You can do so many things that you actually get stuck because you’re not able to choose.

And this is where I think that Tactical Periodization® is actually a good match for creative behavior because it doesn’t tell you how you need to behave
but it kind of “frames” you. You have a starting point, you have this kind of shared mental model, an overarching idea that guides you.

One of my favorite sentences of Professor Frade is that as a player – and why not also as a coach? – “you can be free to act without acting freely”. Creativity is related to novelty/originality but also to adequacy. So, what will matter for you as a coach when you are measuring or evaluating that player’s creativity is if their actions actually make sense in terms of what is the collective intention or what you are trying to achieve as a team. It’s not just creativity for the sake of novelty. It’s creativity with a purpose, and that for me is one of the key messages in terms of creativity in sport.

Creativity is not simply being able to do 300 different dribbles or flicks or whatever. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good to have options and it’s good to explore those options
but it’s easier to explore options under/guided by constraints.

This is something that a professor in Barcelona, Carlotta Torrents, talks about. She refers to the motor creativity paradox, to argue, just like Rui Faria (2008), that thinking inside the box is not a bad thing. So thinking inside the box can have some power. If you think of the game idea, this kind of shared mental model as the box, then you are free to create within that box because as Rui says: “It is fundamental to avoid inhibiting creativity but is also crucial that creativity is inserted in a global perspective because that support must always exist. This means that creativity cannot be random nor decontextualized, otherwise we will end up unbalancing our team instead of unbalancing our opponent”.

So, for me, if there’s not this shared mental model guiding us, this previous intention, our attempts to be original or novel might end up being a bit counterproductive.

TP: Is creativity a skill/ability? How you see it in the development of players?

Francisco Fardilha: I’m very much aligned with a researcher and coach developed called James Vaughan in terms of defining creative moments, skill and talent. He says: “Creative moments, skill and more generally talent in sports, are not traits possessed by individuals alone, but rather can be conceived as properties of the athlete-environment system shaped by changing constraints”.

When you ask me if creativity is an ability, like a purely individual ability, I would say no. Creative moments are not something exclusively about individual, the individual is not some kind of predestined God born with this special power within himself. Creative moments are also influenced by how the environment allows the player to express their potential.

To make it clear, I’m not saying there’s no such thing as innate creative potential, but this link between the environment and the athlete is really important for creativity and for the previous intention to become an intention in action. So, elements such as the weather conditions, the weather constraints can limit, and other constraints like for example who are your teammates and how they think and what they are able to do. So, depending on who your teammates are, you might also be more or less able
to express your creative potential.

Luis Campos, he was a coach before, he’s now a sporting director, and he talks about something called the puzzle theory, which I think fits a lot with the idea of creativity underpinned by Tactical Periodisation®. He assesses the quality of players, he measures or evaluates the quality of players, but he does it based on pre-defined principles. This means that his team of scouts, they all have this shared mental model of what a good fit could look like. They are looking for something to fit into what he calls the puzzle. It’s about understanding if a player is the correct piece of the puzzle and understanding if it fits the reality or the specificities of the club. For me this idea fits really nicely with creativity.

And there is another recent model, that we can establish a parallel with Tactical Periodization® and creativity. Danish professor Henriksen and his colleagues, published in 2010 a model

that is now being widely adopted in research. Professor Henriksen has a lot of links with something called the Team Denmark, which is the structure that looks after the different Danish national teams across different sports. He says that context is really important and we need to start looking not only in terms of what happens on the pitch, but what actually happens outside of the pitch.

There are all these influences in the talent development environment. All this things affect talent development. Things like who are your teammates, what is the sport culture in the country, the educational system, family life and values, media approaches. For the people that are already thinking a little bit along the lines of Tactical Periodization®,
this will be nothing new, but this is something that is becoming quite trendy in terms of research.

TP: If it is possible, what is fundamental to developing creativity in Football?

Don’t miss Franciso Fardilha answer in our next week’s article.

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KEYWORDS: TACTICAL PERIODIZATION; TRAINING; FOOTBALL; SOCCER; CREATIVITY; PLAYER DEVELOPMENT.