Identifying the Centrality Levels of Futsal Players: A Network Approach

(ProQuest: . denotes formulae omitted.)IntroductionFutsal or indoor football it is a team sport with a great dynamic properties between teammates (Travassos, Araujo, Vilar, & McGarry, 2011). As a team sport, the cooperation between teammates it is a crucial factor to improve the patterns of play and the possibilities to win (Grehaigne, Godbout, & Bouthier, 1999). For that reason, the study of cooperative process in sports must be carefully cogitated in order to identify how coaches may adjust the sports training to improve the collective performance (Clemente, Couceiro, Martins, & Mendes, 2014). The cooperative process in sports can be understood in many ways. In fact, there are different cooperative processes from social cooperation until the cooperation in match based on actions or behaviours (Johnson & Johnson, 1989). Knowing the importance of each cooperative process for the overall result, one of the prominent cooperation occurs in the field and during the match. The interaction among teammates to conclude the attack process can be considered a specific kind of cooperation that integrates the notion of match analysis (Grund, 2012; Pena & Touchette, 2012). In the specific case, the passes between teammates can be considered as the linkage indicator (Passos et al., 2011). There are different possibilities to study the interaction in attacking process, such as traditional notational analysis (Hughes & Franks, 2005), temporal patterns (Bloomfield, Jonsson, Houlahan, & Donoghue, 2005), artificial neural networks (Grunz, Memmert, & Perl, 2012), spatiotemporal coordination (Travassos, Araujo, Duarte, & McGarry, 2012), or the Social Network Analysis (SNA) based on graph theory (Bourbousson, Poizat, Saury, & Seve, 2010; Clemente, Martins, Kalamaras, Wong, & Mendes, 2015; Grund, 2012). Despite of the importance of each approach, the SNA provided a multiple range of possibilities to analyse the interaction, based on the multiple network metrics for centrality analysis (Clemente, Couceiro, et al., 2014) and for general analysis (Clemente, Couceiro, Martins, & Mendes, 2015). The majority of studies of SNA in team sports have been made in football (Clemente, Martins, et al., 2015; Duch, Waitzman, & Amaral, 2010; Grund, 2012; Malta & Travassos, 2014; Pena & Touchette, 2012). The studies distribute their analysis in general properties of the team and in the centrality levels of players. In the case of general properties, the results revealed that teams with greater levels of density and cohesion increases their performance in matches and competitions (Clemente, Martins, et al., 2015; Grund, 2012). In the case of centrality levels, the teams that tends to act in attacking building or indirect attacking style has as the prominent players the external defenders and midfielders (Clemente, Couceiro, et al., 2014; Pena & Touchette, 2012). In other hand, during offensive transition (or counter-attack) the prominent players tend to be the external midfielders and the forwards (Malta & Travassos, 2014). If in the case of football, the SNA produced some findings in the last years, the same evidence it is not verified in futsal. In fact, the patterns of play and the intrinsic dynamics of futsal are quite different from football. For that reason, it is necessary to analyse how teammates' cooperates in attacking process during futsal matches. Based on that, this study aimed to analyse the centrality levels of cooperation of futsal players during official matches. The objective it is analyse the variance of network centrality measures between different tactical positions and competitive levels.MethodsSampleForty-six futsal players (11 players of under-11; 9 players of under-14; 13 players of under-16 and 11 players in amateurs with more than 20 years) it were analysed in three official matches. A total of twelve adjacency matrices corresponding to 3128 passes were recorded based on the team-members interactions and then converted in final graphs. …