For many years, physical preparation in soccer has been viewed from the prism of athletics, speed in soccer, in this case it was defined as the conditional ability to perform actions in the shortest time possible. With the passage of time, different concepts such as efficiency have been introduced, becoming defined as the ability to carry out actions in the shortest possible time and with maximum efficiency. This definition of speed in football is beginning to be more specific to football, since what really determines the success of an action in our sport is not performing it at maximum speed, but a correct spatial-temporal adaptation of the motor action.In soccer, the duration of the actions ranges between 1 and 3 seconds (Lago, 2002), insufficient time to reach the maximum speed, so the maximum speed of movement in short actions will have little impact. Along these lines, Di Salvo (2008) tells us that the actions at maximum speed of movement are less than 2% of the total game actions throughout a game. A surprising fact is that the best players in the world, and considered with the highest speed in football, Leo Messi and Cristianos Ronaldo, in the 2010 FIFA World Cup, have more than 80 and 40 players respectively ahead in the classification of maximum speeds of displacement achieved during the game.
In addition, speed can be considered as a collective property of the players, since, due to its possibilities of interaction, simple individual behaviors can lead to highly creative and effective collective movement patterns that manage to break the balance of defense and rival attack. . Therefore, an effective action from the individual point of view will not be effective without it being presented in a coordinated way with the rest of the members of the own and rival team.On a more practical level, if we want our players to be faster following the terms described above, we must work on decision-making, we must propose training situations in which the player has to constantly adapt to the context . In this way we seek that the player is able to create a high number of responses to a stimulus and that he be able to decide which is the most efficient. As coaches we are not interested in having rigid players, without ideas, but we want to achieve a behavior on the part of the team that is adaptive and flexible to the context in which it is presented.The tasks that we propose during the sessions should be tasks that teach the player to perceive the most important information that occurs in their interaction with the game, thus actively participating in the process of creation-perception of information, quite the opposite, to the mistake that we make many times of wanting the player to do only what we have required. An example might be a simple center spike action. The centering player must adapt and reach the optimal speed depending on the trajectory and speed of the ball, on the other hand, the attacker adapts his movements depending on the orientation, speed and behavior of the defender. The defender adapts his movements depending on the unmarking, distance from the goal, etc.