Is football a technical game?
It’s a question that sits at the heart of how we coach, how we design sessions, and ultimately how our players develop.
For a long time, the dominant belief has been that football is a technical endeavour. That young players must first learn to pass, dribble and shoot in isolation before they are ready to play. It sounds logical. But when we look more closely through the lens of football skill acquisition, and understand football as a complex, adaptive system, it becomes clear that this assumption does not accurately reflect the true dynamic and non-linear nature of the game.
What Do We Mean By “Technique”?
From a skill acquisition perspective, technique refers to the ability to bring about pre-determined results using an ideal movement pattern (Ali, 2011). It is stable, repeatable, and free from external interference. Passing back and forth in pairs, dribbling through cones, shooting without pressure — these are all examples of technique in its purest form. They allow players to rehearse movement patterns, but in environments where the outcome is known in advance and the demands of the game are removed.
The beautiful game, however, does not look like this.
Football Is a Skilful, Not Technical Game
The game of football is played in an open, dynamic environment where every action is shaped by interaction — with opponents, teammates, space and time. This is where skill comes in. Skill is not simply the execution of a technique, but the ability to adapt that technique in response to the ever-changing demands of the game. Furthermore, it involves perception, communication, decision making, and execution, all working together in real time. As a result, skill is not something that can be separated from the environment; it emerges through interaction with it.
Research in ecological dynamics and complex systems has consistently shown that players and teams behave as adaptive systems, continuously adjusting their actions based on the information available to them (Araújo, Davids, & Hristovski, 2006; Chow et al., 2007). From this perspective, football is not a technical game at all — it is a skilful one. It is about solving problems with functional solutions under pressure, not reproducing ideal movements in isolation.
Implications for Training Design
Obviously, this has important implications for how we design our training environments.
If we accept that skill emerges from interaction with contextual information. Then removing that interaction in training fundamentally changes what players perceive and, therefore, what they learn. When we separate perception from action, and decision from execution, we are no longer preparing players for the game. Instead, we are preparing them for the drill. The traditional approach of breaking the game into parts and mastering each component in isolation assumes that these parts will transfer seamlessly back into performance. In reality, this transfer is often limited because the context in which the movement is learnt does not resemble the context in which it must be applied.
Effective learning environments, therefore, are not those that eliminate problems, but those that present them in a manageable and meaningful way. Constraints-led approaches to coaching emphasise the importance of designing practice tasks that retain the key information sources of the game — opposition, teammates, direction, goals, and consequence — while manipulating constraints to guide learning (Davids, K., Button, C., Chow, J. Y., Araujo D., Seifert L. Bennett, S. (2021); Renshaw et al., 2010). By adjusting factors such as space, numbers, tasks or objectives, coaches can shape behaviour without prescribing it, allowing players to explore, adapt, and discover solutions for themselves.
The Role of the Coach: Designing Learning Environments
This shifts the role of the coach in a fundamental way. Rather than being instructors of technique — the bestowers of knowledge — coaches are instead designers of learning environments alongside their players. Their role is to design ‘alive’ practices that are rich in contextual information, invite decision making and problem solving, and encourage players to attune to the cues present in the performance environment — the weekend game. It requires a move away from control and towards facilitation: from telling players what to do and how to do it, to creating environments where they can learn to perceive relevant, representative information and solve problems in accordance with their own individual constraints.
None of this means that technique is unimportant. Rather, it suggests that technique should be developed in context, not in isolation. Players still need to pass, dribble and shoot, but they need to do so in environments where those actions are coupled to the correct informational cues. It is this coupling of perception and action that underpins skilful performance and enables successful transfer to the game.
What This Means for Football in New Zealand
As we reflect on this, it is worth bringing the conversation back home. Football in New Zealand is in an exciting place. Both our men’s and women’s national teams have qualified for their respective FIFA World Cups. We now have two professional environments with the growth of Auckland FC alongside Wellington Phoenix, and with the emergence of the OFC Pro League, we are seeing new opportunities for players within our region.
The question now is whether we can build on this momentum.
If we are serious about supporting the development of the next generation of players, then we must ensure that the environments we design reflect the reality of the game. Players do not develop because of what we say, but because of what they experience. Learning is not delivered — it emerges through interaction. Our role, therefore, is not to construct players through isolated instruction, but to design the conditions in which they can explore, adapt, and self-organise. That means moving beyond the idea that football is simply the sum of its technical parts and embracing it for what it truly is — a skilful, complex, and dynamic game.
Because ultimately, to borrow from Mark O’Sullivan, learning is not the process of repeating a solution — it is repeating the process of finding one.
References
Ali, A. (2011). Measuring soccer skill performance: A review. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 21(2), 170–183.
Araújo, D., Davids, K., & Hristovski, R. (2006). The ecological dynamics of decision making in sport. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 7(6), 653–676.
Chow, J. Y., Davids, K., Button, C., Shuttleworth, R., Renshaw, I., & Araújo, D. (2007). The role of nonlinear pedagogy in physical education. Review of Educational Research, 77(3), 251–278.
Davids, K., Button, C., Chow, J. Y., Araujo D., Seifert L. Bennett, S. (2021). Dynamics of skill acquisition: An ecological dynamics approach. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.
Renshaw, I., Chow, J. Y., Davids, K., & Hammond, J. (2010). A constraints-led perspective to understanding skill acquisition and game play: A basis for integration of motor learning theory and physical education praxis? Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 15(2), 117–137.
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