An ecological perspective on intra-team communication in team sports

Effective intra-team communication is fundamental for coordination and success in team sports. This paper critically reviews the existing conceptualizations of intra-team communication, identifying gaps in representational approaches within sport psychology. Representational theories rely on shared mental models to achieve coordinated actions, which limited practical impact due to their static nature and the assumption that all players share identical cognitive representations. This, in turn, constrains the ability to flexibly adapt to unpredictable and dynamic in-game situations. As an alternative, we propose an ecological (non-representational) perspective that conceptualizes intra-team communication as serving the collective attention to information specifying the shared affordances that support ongoing team actions. This perspective emphasizes the dynamic nature of communication, utilizing methods from the dynamical systems approach to explore these interactions. We highlight the essential role of communication in coordinating team actions and propose a research agenda for further exploration in this field, particularly in football.