Symbolic communication in football

• Vidar Halldorsson ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Iceland

     University of Iceland

     Islandia

     
• Localización: Actividad física y deporte: ciencia y profesión, ISSN 1578-2484, ISSN-e 2659-8930, Nº. 31, 2019, págs. 34-35
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto completo (pdf)
• Resumen

  • The creation of team spirit and team cooperation is one of the most important and difficult challenges of contemporary sports (Cashmore, 2003, 59; Pescosolido and Saavedra, 2012). Its importance lies in the potential it has to add to the pool of individual talent and skills of a team. Its challenges are due to its mystique as an emergent (and invisible-to-the-naked-eye) phenomenon. Effective team spirit can be influential in producing teams that become something more than the mere sum of their parts (Halldorsson, 2017; Maymin et al., 2013; Mead, [1934]/1972, 198, 329), which in turn makes team spirit “something of a Holy Grail for coaches and team managers” (Cashmore, 2003, 59). But can team spirit be identified, measured and linked to team performance? One way of identifying team spirit is to watch how teams´ play. Team spirit relies on active communication between team members (Losada, 1999; Snow and Davis, 1995) and is therefore most evident to observers in the game action (See Halldorsson, 2017, 68-70). Sport practitioners have increasingly turned to game analysis and statistics in order to try to improve team effectiveness and to produce winning teams. Prominent game analysing tools have however not been used to any extent to measure team spirit in sport. This paper (see Halldorsson, 2019) is a case study, which sets out to establish a framework for the analysis of team spirit in football by measuring forms of symbolic communication between players during a football match by content analysis. Special attention was given to players’ agency in this respect, that is, how they use positive or negative gestures towards their teammates in the heat of the game action. The analysed match, Argentina versus Iceland in the 2018 Men´s Football World Cup, provided rich data of symbolic communication between players.

    The analysis highlighted players agency, such as how they use symbolic gestures which could be identified as positive, negative or neutral for team spirit. The paper further concludes that the final score 1-1 (which was a great result for Iceland, the underdogs, but a disappointing result for Argentina, the favourites) was in part due to different team spirit in the two teams where the Icelanders used positive communication to far more extent during the match than the Argentinians, highlighting the communal and individualistic aspects of the two teams respectively