Progressão

Put Neymar on one screen and Messi on the other. Play samba under the Brazilian and tango under the Argentine, and then sit back and watch, and something in you knows, immediately, without being able to say exactly how you know, that this is true. That the dance is not beside the football. The dance is inside the football. It has always been there. 

What does it mean that a man carries his culture in his body without knowing it? That a child in Rio learns a way of moving that is not in any coaching manual, that no club ever taught him, that came through the street and the music and the air of a place, and that this way of moving turns out to be somethign others can't catch? Do we need to imitate this?

Could a Messi be born outside Argentina? 

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Four thousand papers. Eighty-three studies. Sixty concepts for the same word.

A few years ago we started asking a question. What does research on football skill-related interventions look like. What theories does it rest on. What players does it study. Where in the world does it happen. And where are the gaps.

The answer came out as a paper called Skill-related studies from youth to high-performance football: a scoping review. Published in 2023. In this episode, the mapping that came out of the project.

European. Male. Fragmented. Many concepts. And future directions.

📄 Sarajärvi, J., Freitas, R., Elovaara, M., & Volossovitch, A. (2024). Skill-related studies from youth to high-performance football: A scoping review. German Journal of Exercise and Sport Research, 54, 341–353. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12662-023-00910-w

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Football has chaotic moments. Watching them, a coach might think the training needs more chaos too. Fair enough. But what is chaos.

The word has slipped into coaching conversations. It is a technical term. However, it does not mean what we think it means.

Tuomas Iisalo once said the game is a jungle and a zoo. The training too often is the zoo. The game is the jungle. But a jungle is not chaos. The tiger reads the leaves, the sounds, the wind. A tiger that lived in chaos would not last a week.

Fifteen minutes on a small misunderstanding.

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From Jakarta, Daud Sihombing watches football. He writes about it, edits it, publishes it. Halftime Speech is a football magazine that comes out of Indonesia, not out of London or Madrid or São Paulo. Petrikor Books is his publishing house, built around the idea that the questions matter more than the answers. In 2025 he published On Publishing Practice, nearly a decade of essays about what it means to make things for people. The book does not conclude. It thinks.

He is an AS Roma fan who has never been to Italy. Never seen them play in person. He watches one of Europe's most storied clubs from the other side of the world, from a country that European football barely notices. From that distance, he sees things that insiders cannot.

That is what this conversation is about. Skill, and what it means in Indonesia. What the game looks like from the outside of the mainstream. What Southeast Asian football carries and what it is still searching for. And why the non-mainstream view can be very interesting and fresh.

Welcome to Discussão Mundo.

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The Progressão book is on its way in English, more on that soon.

Last week we reopened the word education through its Latin root educere, to lead out. This week we go one step further, into enskilment.

Enskilment comes from the anthropologist Tim Ingold, and it names something most of us already know but rarely have language for: the process by which a person becomes deeply skilful not through instruction, but through long, embodied immersion in a real landscape, alongside people who are already skilled in it. A child in a fishing village who absorbs the whole culture of fishing without ever being formally taught. A blacksmith's apprentice who moves, over years, from the edge of the work toward the centre.

Today we look at enskilment through a 2025 paper by Selimi and Woods, which proposes a completely different model of coach education in Australian football.

In this episode: why the transmissive model of coach education — lectures, curricula, classrooms — produces coaches who can pass an exam but struggle to coach. The three interwoven dimensions of a situated model: real-world exposure, legitimate peripheral participation, and mentorship. Jean Lave and Étienne Wenger's communities of practice, and why the apprenticeship structure most modern education abandoned is still how humans actually become skilful. What Australian coaches themselves said they wanted from coach education — and why the blockage is in the structure, not the coaches. And what a next-generation coach education pathway could look like.

Coaches grow in landscapes. That is where the learning has to happen.

Further reading

• Selimi, E. & Woods, C.T. (2025). Enskilment into the coaching landscape: towards a situated approach to coach education in Australian football. Sport, Education and Society, 30(4), 413–426.
• Lascu, A., Wood, M., Moulds, K. & Davids, K. (2024). Coach education as 'leading out with an experienced other'. Sports Coaching Review, 13(2), 277–292.

The Progressão book is on its way in English — more on that soon.

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The word education comes from the Latin educere — to lead out. Not to fill in or to pour into. To lead out.

Today's episode is the first of two on a subject that is one of the most under-examined corners of the football world: how coaches learn to coach. We walk through a 2024 paper by Lascu, Wood, Moulds and Davids that reframes coach education as an ecological phenomenon — and in doing so, turns the same argument we have been making about player development directly onto ourselves.

In this episode: why the transmission model of coach education — curriculum, content blocks, workshops, licences — contradicts the very pedagogy we are increasingly asking coaches to use with players. Two concepts worth carrying into  conversations about coach development: guidance without specification, and attentive dwelling. The idea of an evolving correspondence between mentor and mentee, and why it is the heart of what leading out actually means. The difference between knowledge about coaching and knowledge of coaching — and why our current model is wildly tilted toward the wrong one.

Not more workshops. Long walks.

Further reading

• Lascu, A., Wood, M., Moulds, K. & Davids, K. (2024). Coach education as 'leading out with an experienced other'. Sports Coaching Review, 13(2), 277–292.

The Progressão book is on its way in English — more on that soon.

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 👥 LinkedIn @Project Progressão

Last week we split the word intensity in two. Good intensity, effort as the natural consequence of a clear read. Bad intensity, effort as decoration. This week we take that split into the training session.

Because something strange has happened in football over the last decade. The word intensity, having conquered how we talk about matches, has now conquered how we talk about sessions. Every rep at match pace or above. If you are not in the red zone, you are not really working.

There is truth in some of this, but there is also a serious mistake buried in it.

In this episode: why nobody has ever proved that constant high intensity is the optimal design for learning football over the long arc from age five to twenty-five. What javelin throwers, cross-country skiers and judokas have known for decades that football has somehow forgotten. The wood-chopping image returns — why slow is often where the real learning happens. What a rep actually is in an ecological design, and why counting touches misses most of what is happening. Why the active playing time metric, taken as the measure of session quality, quietly drifts sessions toward bad intensity. And what deliberately varied training intensity looks like on a football pitch.

The Progressão book is on its way in English — more on that soon.

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Everyone in football uses the word intensity. Federations put it first in their principles. Coaches demand it. Analysts measure it. But what does it mean?

Today's episode is about splitting the word in two. Because intensity is doing at least two very different jobs in football — and confusing them is the source of a lot of confused coaching.

In this episode: why "more intensity" is often just "fight harder" wearing a nicer coat. The wood-chopping test, meaning why intensity without skill is flailing. What good intensity is: not effort as decoration, but effort as the natural consequence of a clear read. Insights from Joni Ruuskanen, physical performance specialist at the Football Association of Finland, on what actually separates top players in high-intensity moments, and why Julián Álvarez and Pernille Harder win duels their physique alone shouldn't win. Why sprint metrics tell us what is different between levels, but not why. And what it would mean to change what the word intensity means inside your sessions.

Good, skillful intensity is knowing where to look and when to move. That is what we should coach.

The Progressão book is on its way in English, more on that soon.

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Thirty years in football across five continents. The US, Finland, Slovakia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, including a stint in the UEFA Europa League. Mike Keeney has seen the game from enough angles to have well-informed opinions about what actually develops a player.

He now leads the MLS NEXT program at Hoover-Vestavia Soccer in Birmingham, Alabama, and shapes the next generation of American coaches as an instructor on the US Soccer A Licence course. He holds a UEFA Pro Licence.

In this conversation: what moving between football cultures teaches you about skill, and what gets left behind when you come home. The honest state of American soccer after a World Cup on home soil. Whether the cultural tendency toward athleticism over improvisation is really changing, or just being discussed. What an elite development environment looks like in Birmingham, Alabama in 2026. And, the pay-to-play model and how much potential the system isn't seeing.

The Progressão book is on its way in English — more on that soon.

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A training session can be tactically representative with right distances, pressure, opponent behaviours, and still be missing something important. The feeling in the stomach before a decisive pass. The exhaustion of a fifth game in two weeks. The awareness that this moment might decide qualification.

That ingredient has a name in the ecological dynamics literature: affect. And the conceptual framework related to it is called Affective Learning Design. Today we walk through the 2015 paper by Headrick, Renshaw, Davids, Pinder, and Araújo that framed this idea, and what it means for how we build sessions.

In this episode: the difference between cold cognition and hot cognition, and why removing emotion from training doesn't clean it up but thins it out. Why emotion sharpens perception and strengthens memory, and what that means for which skills players carry into the game. The two principles of Affective Learning Design, and how to use them. Practical moves: vignettes, stakes, scrutiny, individualisation. Studies from dart throwing, police handgun training, basketball free throws, gymnastics and football, all pointing the same direction.

Emotion is not noise. It is a constraint that shapes what a player perceives, decides and does. Time to design for it.

Further reading

• Headrick, J., Renshaw, I., Davids, K., Pinder, R.A. & Araújo, D. (2015). The dynamics of expertise acquisition in sport: The role of affective learning design. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 16(1), 83–90.

The Progressão book is on its way in English — more on that soon.

🌍 More at progressao.fi
 📷 Instagram @progressaofi
 👥 LinkedIn @Project Progressão