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Tactical Skills are Not Verbal Skills: A Comment on

Kannekens and Colleagues

Article in Perceptual and Motor Skills · June 2010

DOI: 10.2466/pms.110.C.1086-1088 · Source: PubMed

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 Perceptual and Motor Skills, 2010, 110, 3, 1086-1088. © Perceptual and Motor Skills 2010

TACTICAL SKILLS ARE NOT VERBAL SKILLS: A

COMMENT ON KANNEKENS AND COLLEAGUES1
D. ARAÚJO B. TRAVASSOS L. VILAR
Faculty of Human Kinetics Faculty of Human Kinetics Faculty of Human Kinetics
Technical University of Lisbon Technical University of Lisbon Technical University of Lisbon
University of Beira Interior Lusófona University of
Humanities and Technologies
Summary.—In 2009, Kannekens and colleagues evaluated the development of tacti-
cal skills of elite youth football players using a method based on verbal reports. Results
showed no improvements in players’ tactical skills over the years of their longitudinal
study. These results are based on an erroneous assumption that tactical skills and verbal-
izations about tactical skills are equivalent. This note comprises an explanation of why
verbal reports are not a valid measure of tactical skills.

Kannekens, Elferink-Gemser, Post, and Visscher (2009) conducted a study

that aimed to identify “changes over time of self-assessed tactical skills of elite
youth soccer players” (p. 461). They found that self-assessed tactical skills of
elite youth soccer players did not statistically significantly improve over time.
The authors emphasized that the self-ratings of attackers, but not defenders
or midfielders, seem to have improved less than one point on a 6-point Likert-
type scale, over 4 yr. The improvements were not statistically significant in the
multilevel model presented by the authors, and data showed that the self-rat-
ings of the attackers increased and decreased over the 4 yr. According to many
studies in sports (e.g., Ericsson, 2007; Williams & Ward, 2007), it is expected
that players improve their tactical skills over years of practice, particularly
elite youth players practicing in high-level soccer clubs. Most probably, these
results were due to the fact that what was evaluated was not players’ actual
tactical skills, but players’ verbalizations about their tactical skills.
This conceptual mistake is particularly evident in the Summary and Dis-
cussion, where the descriptor “self-assessed tactical skills” was used inter-
changeably with “tactical skills.” No theoretical support was provided for the
relationship between verbal behaviour and tactical behaviour. It is intriguing
that Kannekens, et al. (2009) described the measure as subjective (p. 461) and
asked the elite players to compare themselves with the “top players” of their
age. The absence of scientific control over this comparison raises questions
about what exactly was measured by these questionnaires.
Cognitive psychologists found decades ago that researchers are asking
the participants to tell more than they can verbalize (Ericsson & Simon, 1993),
and this tendency has appeared in sport psychology (see Araújo, Davids, &
Hristovski; 2006; Araújo, Davids, Cordovil, Ribeiro, & Fernandes, 2009). The
problems related to using verbal reports to evaluate tactical skills include in-

Address correspondence to Duarte Araújo, Faculdade Motricidade Humana, Estrada da

1

Costa, 1495-688 Cruz Quebrada, Portugal or e-mail (daraujo@fmh.utl.pt).

DOI 10.2466/05.07.25.28.PMS.110.C.1086-1088 ISSN 0031-5125

 TACTICAL SKILLS ARE NOT VERBAL SKILLS 1087

terindividual inconsistencies in reports in the same domain of expertise, dis-

crepancies between the reported strategies and observed behaviors, evidence
that the mere act of engaging in self-assessment changes the content of the cog-
nitive processes, the fact that verbal descriptions lack sufficient detail about
the evaluated knowledge (Araújo, et al., 2009), and evidence that verbal re-
sponses often lead to misleading summaries or after-the-fact reconstructions
(see the extensive review of Ericsson & Simon, 1993). For example, Araújo, et
al. (2009) showed that observations of tactical behaviour in a one-on-one sub-
phase of basketball were completely different from verbal self-reports about
the same task. The behavioural dynamics captured kinematically in relation
to the setting of play (e.g., distances of each player to the basket changing over
time) indicated precisely how the attacker acted (with his own action-scaled
movements) in relation to the defender in order to achieve his goal—to shoot
at the basket. These analyses were conducted to elaborate formal (mathemati-
cal) models of tactical behavior. In contrast, verbal reports indicate only some
task subgoals, and some descriptions about (frequently efficacy judgements
of) the attacker’s actions, often not entirely corresponding to the observed ac-
tions. The main reason for this is that verbal behaviour measures individual
processes, neglecting the fact that tactical behaviour is not an individual pro-
cess, but is grounded in the interactions between the individual and the en-
vironment. From this perspective, a more substantial emphasis needs to be
placed on understanding how each individual performer assembles unique
performance solutions in satisfying the range of personal, task, and environ-
mental constraints at any moment (Araújo, et al., 2006).
For Gibson (1966), awareness of the environment is based on the adjust-
ment of the performer’s entire perceptual system to the information surround-
ing it. This adjustment includes a range of processes, all of which may be de-
scribed as the simultaneous extraction of persisting and changing properties
of stimuli, despite disturbances to the array of information (Gibson, 1979). Per-
formers perceive themselves, their environments, and the changing relation-
ship between themselves and their surroundings. Perceptions of specific infor-
mational sources (environmental objects, places, events, and people) support
performers’ actions (Gibson, 1979). The knowledge of how to perceive and
act is not formulated in words but is based on the performer’s perceptual at-
tunement to the goal-relevant informational variables of a certain task. Verbal
representations, such as those formulated about procedural and declarative
knowledge, are subordinate, with greater significance attributed to specifica-
tion (i.e., specificity of information to environment, specificity of perception to
information; Turvey & Shaw, 1999). Environmental properties structure fields
of information flow in such a way that the structure of these fields specifies—
is uniquely related to—the environment’s properties. The lawful relations that
exist between environmental properties and patterns of flow give rise to what
Gibson (1979) called specification. For example, the established starting point
of traditional approaches of visual perception is the inability of light to speci-
 1088 D. ARAÚJO, ET AL.

fy the facts of the environment. The mechanisms typically proposed for asso-
ciative memory, inference engines, and concepts are normally formulated by
words as special mediators. Their role is to recover the link between the indi-
vidual and its environment, the link that is missing, in large part, because of
the (nonparsimoniously) assumed nonspecificity of light distributions.
Perceivers are actively engaged in dynamic transactions with their func-
tionally defined environments. Gibson (1979) argued that in all instances in
which affordances (i.e., action possibilities) are perceived, cognition (tactical
skill) is necessarily rooted in perception. It is this knowledge that makes verbal
formulations about perception and action possible. The distinction between
declarative and procedural knowledge is elusive, since both types of knowl-
edge are verbal formulations. This distinction highlights a certain kind of con-
straint related with “what” and “when” to do something, but ignores other
constraints related with “how” and “where” to do it (Van der Kamp, Rivas, Van
Doorn, & Savelsbergh, 2008). Thus, decisional behaviour should be viewed as
emerging from the interactions of individuals with environmental constraints
over time toward specific goals (Araújo, et al., 2009). Emergence and phase
transitions are key aspects of decisional behaviour that have not been handled
well by theories such as those claimed by Kannekens, et al. (2009).
Tactical skills cannot be captured by verbal reports as assumed by Kan-
nekens, et al. (2009). Instead, tactical skills are captured by dynamic motion
variables, at the level of the person–environment system.
REFERENCES
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Accepted June 8, 2010.

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