Planning and assessing performance through narratives in soccer team meetings

Soccer teams, as many other sport teams, need, among other activities, to plan their behaviours for future matches and to reflect upon their past performances on the pitch. Within a discursive perspective, we aim to analyse how narratives contribute to shape these team activities during technical meetings. The analyses are based on naturally occurring interactions of an Italian soccer team, recorded during three technical meetings (after a victory, after a defeat and before a match). In particular, our goal is to analyse the relation between type of activity and narrative forms, focusing in particular on the role of the coach. We found that he used different forms of narratives to lead different team activities. In particular, the pre-match 'fictional' narratives evoke characters and actions in possible scenarios in order to plan and coordinate future team actions during the match. The after-match narratives are instead 'rewindings', reconstructions of past events through which the coach leads the team through a shared interpretation of the team's behaviours on the pitch. More in general, the research suggests a way to empirically observe and understand how coaches build and lead a team 'in practice', that might integrate more widespread questionnaire-based methods of measurement of individual abilities. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.