Systematic Review: Technical-Tactical Behaviour in Small-Sided Games in Men’s Football

Abstract

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. 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. 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. 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. The included articles were subjected to a methodological quality assessment and all of them scored good or excellent. This assessment was performed by two researchers and resulted in a Cohen's Kappa agreement index of .96. 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 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.