Progressão

Jani Sarajärvi
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  • Football
  • Updated weekly

Progressão is a book, a podcast, and a long-term thinking project focused on football, learning, and skilful human behaviour. Our work approaches football from a complex, holistic, and ecological perspective, where players and all football actors are understood as living beings always in correspondence with their environment.

  1. 2 hr ago

    #199 Potentiality, not talent: why the forest matters more than the trees

    You are eleven years old. You love football. This game is yours. Then a piece of paper somewhere, a meeting you were never in, and a word gets attached to your name. Or doesn't. That word is talent. We have used it for decades like a flashlight, searching young bodies for something hidden inside them, something we could find if we looked hard enough, early enough. Find it, take it, water it. Leave the rest in the dark. This episode asks what happens under the ground while we are busy looking at the tree. The roots talk to each other down there. Fungus runs between them like nerve and vein, feeding the weak, warning the strong, holding the whole forest together as one breathing thing. Cut that down to save your one good trunk, and the trunk dies too. It was never standing alone. So we put forward a different word. Potentiality. Something that grows between a child and everyone who ever passed a ball to them, drove them to training, taught them a trick on a summer evening and forgot they ever did it. This one runs close to the bone of what Progressão has always tried to say — that a player is not a tree standing alone in a field, but a forest, and we're counting trees when we should be tending the soil. The Progressão book is being translated into English. More on that soon. 🌍 More at progressao.fi  📷 Instagram @progressaofi  👥 LinkedIn @Project Progressão

    20 min

  2. 30 Jun

    #198 Culture as a methodology

    Culture, in the language of the Aboriginal researcher Tyson Yunkaporta's people, has no direct word. Instead, they use a phrase that roughly translates as "being like our place." That is the idea this episode sits with: not culture as the backdrop to coaching, but culture as the methodology itself. This episode grew out of a conversation with two football experts, namely Adin Osmanbašić, Assistant Manager at FC Schalke 04, and Mario Hansi, Technical Director at the Estonian Football Association, who has spent years working at the intersection of culture, identity and football development. Something Adin said in that conversation, that culture isn't the context for the methodology but the methodology itself, set off everything that follows. In this episode: why ginga in Brazil and the quiet, individualised habits of Finnish football both come from worlds that shaped the people in them, not from training programmes. Why you can copy a club's sessions but not its culture, and why Barcelona's training plans don't produce Barcelona players. And, most importantly, why the culture is the methodology itself. This one also connects directly to the Progressão book which is currently being translated into English — more on that soon. 🌍 More at progressao.fi  📷 Instagram @progressaofi  👥 LinkedIn @Project Progressão

    13 min

  3. 23 Jun

    #197 DISCUSSÃO MUNDO: Rodrigo Picchioni – data, scouting, and what we can't measure

    Data scouting. One of the most intriguing and fast-developing corners of professional football. Most people have seen a heat map. Very few know what a Lead Data Scout actually does on a Tuesday afternoon, or what the method can genuinely explain about a player, and where it hits a wall. Rodrigo Picchioni built analytics department at Atlético Mineiro and now works at AS Monaco. In this conversation he crosses two worlds that rarely talk to each other directly: the rigour of data analysis and the deeper question of what we can do with data, and what not. In this episode: what data scouting actually is, how the Monaco model differs from what Rodrigo built in Brazil, and what the hardest things to quantify reveal about the limits of the field. The Moneyball promise — has analytics democratised football, or have rich clubs simply bought both the data and the best players? A provocation from @ThePurist on the felt connection between players and audience that precedes analysis. The most interesting version of this conversation is not data versus the eye. It is what it means to understand a footballer at all, and whether we are getting closer. 🌍 More at progressao.fi  📷 Instagram @progressaofi  👥 LinkedIn @Project Progressão

    51 min

  4. 16 Jun

    #196 Game models & Ecological dynamics

    Game models in football are discussed constantly. Most coaches have strong opinions about them, but fewer can describe their own model with depth — or stop to ask where the underlying thinking is actually leading them. In this episode: a new paper by Jones, Kubayi, Stone and Davids that reframes what a Game Model is and what it should do. The core argument is that when a Game Model becomes a script, meaning telling players what to do in advance, it reduces their exposure to the informational complexity of the real game. The player who has learned what to do stands waiting for the right moment to execute a pattern, instead of reading what the game is actually offering. Along the way: affordances and why they appear and disappear in seconds, the difference between skill acquisition and skill adaptation, constraints-led approach, coach feedback reframed as questions that direct attention rather than prescribe solutions, and a new way of visualising the Game Model itself as a continuous infinity loop with a Transition Nexus at its centre. A Sam Allardyce anecdote about the West Ham way, too, which lands well for this context. The thread underneath: if you're coaching from a traditional Game Model, you're trying to build a team that executes your system. If you're coaching from an ecological dynamics perspective, you're trying to build a team that reads the game and adapts. Further reading Jones, G., Kubayi, A., Stone, J.A. & Davids, K. (2026). Game Models in Football Coaching: An Ecological Dynamics Perspective. International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport.🌍 More at progressao.fi  📷 Instagram @progressaofi  👥 LinkedIn @Project Progressão

    13 min

  5. 9 Jun

    #195 Trained for one game, faced another: a France U21 case on representative practice

    Representative practice is one of those ideas that sounds simple until a match shows you exactly where your training stopped being representative. France U21 against Estonia U21. Final score six to one, but the number that stayed was a specific moment that kept repeating: a lateral penetration, a final acceleration to the edge of the box, and a ball into the danger area at a pace nothing in camp had produced. Estonia had trained for exactly this situation. Sessions with coaches crossing on the byline, three distinct end actions, defenders sliding and reading. And still the game arrived at a tempo they had never once seen in training. That is not a player problem. That is a design problem. In this episode: representativeness and the difference between general intensity and specific intensity — and why confusing the two is one of the most common, most invisible failures in practice design. Why the problem is almost always in the design, not the player. And why "we trained that" and "we trained the version of that which actually shows up at this level" are two completely different comments. 🌍 More at progressao.fi  📷 Follow us on Instagram @progressaofi and LinkedIn @Project Progressão

    12 min

  6. 2 Jun

    #194 The metaphors football lives by

    Metaphor is the lens through which we actually see the game. Call a player a computer and you start looking for software to upgrade. Call a team a puzzle and you start developing pieces to assemble. The metaphor decides, quietly, what counts as a problem and what counts as a solution. In this episode: George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's foundational argument that metaphors shape how we think, not just how we speak, and what happens when you apply that to football. The reductionist family of metaphors that built modern coaching: the clock, the computer, the house, the pyramid, the toolbox, the puzzle. And the newer family challenging them: the radio, Tim Ingold's lines and meshworks, Bruce Lee's water, Rob Gray's Matrix. A study by Thibodeau and Boroditsky showing how a single metaphor change — beast versus virus — shifts what solutions people reach for. And what it actually means for coaching if skill is a relation rather than a possession. The thread underneath: the metaphors we inherit are not neutral. They highlight some things and hide others. And the ones football has lived by for decades may be leaking the most important parts of the game away. Further reading Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press.Thibodeau, P. & Boroditsky, L. (2011). Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning. PLOS ONE.Ingold, T. (2015). The Life of Lines. Routledge.Brette, R. (2022). Brains as Computers: Metaphor, Analogy, Theory or Fact?. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.Sontag, S. (1966). Against Interpretation. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.🌍 More at progressao.fi  📷 Follow us on Instagram @progressaofi and LinkedIn @Project Progressão

    18 min

  7. 26 May

    #193 Resonance: the foundation of skill?

    Resonance starts as a simple idea from physics. Pluck a guitar string and the body of the instrument starts to vibrate with it. Two systems, coupled, moving together. James Gibson used the word as a synonym for attunement, to describe something much bigger: the way a perceiving organism tunes itself to the information in its environment. A great defender doesn't compute the game from inside his head. He resonates with it. In this episode, the first in the new monologue format, the conversation moves from Gibson's original intuition to the work of Vicente Raja, who has spent the last decade turning resonance from a metaphor into a testable scientific framework. Along the way: Anderson's neural reuse, tau-coupling, a study showing ecological resonance in human brain activity, Rúben Dias as a worked example, and what all of this means for how we design training environments. A small detour through Tim Ingold's "lines" too, because they turn out to describe the same phenomenon from a different angle. The thread underneath all of it: the player and the game are not two things interacting. They are one coupled system, and the coach's job is to build the conditions in which that coupling can develop. Vicente Raja's research 🌍 More at progressao.fi  📷 Follow us on Instagram @progressaofi and LinkedIn @Project Progressão

    14 min

  8. 19 May

    #192 DISCUSSÃO MUNDO: Vicente Raja – radical embodiment and resonance

    Welcome to the Progressão podcast. As Progressão now continues in English, we are revisiting some of our earlier Discussão conversations — episodes that have stayed with us and still feel highly relevant today. In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Vicente Raja, a researcher working at the intersection of ecological psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. His work explores the relationship between brain, behaviour, and environment through ideas such as radical embodiment and resonance. In this conversation, we dive into these concepts and reflect on what they might mean for understanding skill, learning, and coaching. A thoughtful and wide-ranging discussion that connects science, philosophy, and practice. Vicente Raja on ResearchGate 🌍 More at progressao.fi 📷 Follow us on Instagram @progressaofi and LinkedIn @Project Progressão

    41 min
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About

Progressão is a book, a podcast, and a long-term thinking project focused on football, learning, and skilful human behaviour. Our work approaches football from a complex, holistic, and ecological perspective, where players and all football actors are understood as living beings always in correspondence with their environment.

Information

  • Creator
    Jani Sarajärvi
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    199
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Progressão
  • Show Website
    Progressão

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