Today we are going to talk about competitiveness and competition .
The great dimension of soccer as a game and as a sport is competition. The ability to overcome an opponent is the original reason why soccer was structured as a sport and diversified in its complex discipline until it rose to the top of team sports.
But within this competitiveness there are different ranges that have to be traversed until reaching the final outcome, which is to make a cohesive group competent to confront a rival and beat him within the entire compendium of possibilities offered by the game, contemplating the generality of the collective expression until it is completed with the most insignificant nuances that a priori could decant the probability of victory towards one side or the other.
That is why in the strategic planning process and later in the development of organizational operations , the different stations in which competitiveness takes shape must be assessed .
The different phases of competitiveness
Compete with yourself
In a soccer team, the player, as a unit determining the team, first competes with himself . The player has to develop the basic structures necessary to evolve and adapt their potentialities in terms of skills and abilities, cognitive abilities and conditional talents that allow them to behave as what they are, an open, adaptive and dynamic system with the ability to grow within the field. of uncertainty.
The player is trained to develop in all the fields in which the game requires and demands him, with the aim of inserting his contributions to a higher level segment, which will be the line and the flank in which it manifests itself, within a higher-ranking entity that we call a team. Therefore, the player will adapt their competitive capabilities to a space delimited within the general context of the team, framed within an operational strategy in which the specific tactical missions for each game will be defined, from the two fundamental aspects of the game, the attack. and defense.
Compete with peers
That is why the second stage in relation to the evolutionary range of the player’s competitive capacity is competitiveness with colleagues who manifest themselves in tactical missions and strategic spaces similar to their own . From competing with oneself to evolve the intrinsic abilities that the player himself possesses, we now compete with colleagues to guarantee the presence in the designated position within the framework of the team to unite that will go out to compete.
Compete to play . The training process must not only contemplate the integral improvement of the soccer player, but this improvement must be directed towards the potential confrontation that the player has to sustain in training to be chosen among the eleven that will define the team. Competing with oneself involves defining individual starting points and, from the beginning of the training process, measuring the evolution towards the required levels and later towards the levels achieved depending on the nature of the player, which can and should exceed the established requirements, if the training process is well conceived.
Competing with your partner implies assuming specific tactical missions, defined by the staff within a broader framework of action and developing them in conditions that allow optimizing performance, not only the individual player but the group of the line or flank (right , central or left) in which he develops, within the general dynamics of the team. In other words, competing against my colleagues means that my incidence in the game, in the position I occupy, is such that I develop all the tactical missions under the conditions that are requested, I facilitate the exercise of the tactical missions of my colleagues with whom I interact and I also generate more added value in terms of performance than my fellow potential competitors would offer for the same position we are fighting for.
That is why in the training process, the competitiveness of the sessions should facilitate and stimulate this type of behavior to determine who are the most suitable candidates at all times to occupy the corresponding position , based on our own competitive objectives as team and in contrast to the particular characteristics of the opponents that we are going to confront, each one different due to the non-transferable particularity of the players who play at all times.