SSG are training situations that somewhat replicate competitive contexts with the aim of optimising the different components that make up an athlete ( Pons, et al., 2020). Therefore, it is important for the coach to appreciate this relationship and understand its influence in order to design tasks according to the desired objectives. These studies have shown that each modification in the design of an SSG influences the achievement of the desired objectives and the event of certain behaviours ( Praça et al., 2016). Therefore, in recent decades, a multitude of studies have emerged to investigate the influence of SSGs. SSGs are frequently used in football however, they do not always match their design to the desired training objective.

SSGs are down-sized situations where one, several, or all phases of the game can be trained in a smaller space and where there are fewer players than in a real situation. As a result, Small Sided Games (SSG) have become a widely used training tool in football ( Clemente et al., 2020b). This reality is recognised by coaches and new sport professionals who understand that training environments should resemble those that are found in a real competitive contexts ( Ros & Oliva, 2005). The fact that several players share a space, fighting over possession of the ball gives the sport one of its most defining characteristics: spontaneity and, therefore, makes it more difficult to predict events ( Praça et al., 2016). Introductionįootball is a complex sport of teamwork and competition, a shared space whose objective is to kick the ball into the opposite goal more times than the opposition ( Parlebas, 2020). Keywords: analysis of performance, collective behaviour, Modified Games, small-sided situations, technical-tactical performance.

This information is very useful for coaches as they are able to tailor the formats of the SSG in terms of the games’ desired goal in order to achieve the upmost occurrence of certain actions or work with a certain conditional load. As a result, all the modifications in the SSG formats have led to the development of different actions on the part of the players: the distribution of players on the field, the development of certain tactical behaviours or the number and type of technical actions, are among the most important ones. This assessment was performed by two researchers and resulted in a Cohen’s Kappa agreement index of. The included articles were subjected to a methodological quality assessment and all of them scored good or excellent. These have been grouped for analysis into the following categories: 1. Imbalanced interactions 2. Playing field dimensions 3. Players’ age 4. Number of players 5. Modification of the game’s principles, sub grouped into the following: 5.1 Goals 5.2 Aim 5.3 Limit of touches. Following instructions from the PRISMA’s guide (Preferred Reporting for Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses), a search was made in the Google Scholar, Pubmed, Scopus, SportDiscus and Web of Science databases, which yielded 48 papers were included in the review as they met the pre-established requirements. The aim of this study was to carry out a review of the technical-tactical behaviours that appear in the main formats of SSG tasks. Small-Sided Games (SSGs) have become a widely used tool by football coaches, yet there are few studies on their influence on technical-tactical behaviour.

Technical vs tactical soccer