Progressão

Jani Sarajärvi
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Soccer
  • 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. 4d ago

    #217 Sculpting in time: perception, memory and the game players live inside (Space and time II)

    Last week we argued that the two seconds on the clock are not the same two seconds for every player. This week we go one layer deeper and ask: what is perception doing, if it is not stitching frozen snapshots together? We say to players: take a picture of the situation. It is a well-meant instruction. And as a description of how perception works, it is wrong. The frantic defender is not short of pictures. They see every frame. What they are missing is the flow. What great ice hockey player Mäkiaho has is not faster processing, but a deeper attunement to the game as it unfolds. The mind does not generate experience from the inside like a projector in a dark room. It resonates with what is already out there. And because perception is time-extended, the just-past of the current moment is still alive inside it. There is no retrieval from storage. There is no snapshot-stitching. There is a continuous coupling with the shape of the thing as it unfolds. Bergson said it in one line: perception is always already a memory. This episode also takes a short detour through Andrei Tarkovsky, who got to the same place through film, and whose idea of sculpting in time turns out to be the same insight Gibson and Bergson had, just arrived at through film. 🌍 More at progressao.fi  📷 Instagram @progressaofi  👥 LinkedIn @Project Progressão

  2. Nov 3

    #216 Relativistic time: why space and time are not what you think (Space and time I)

    Space and time. A player has a metre, a player has two seconds, the whole Barcelona tradition built on these concepts. The philosophy that shaped a generation of coaches rests on them. We understand space and time, or do we? The space and time we talk about in coaching are borrowed from physics, and physics measures something different than players' lived experience. The metre on the overlay is not the metre the player perceives. And the two seconds on the clock are not the same two seconds for every player. Daniel Mäkiaho leads the scoring charts in the Finnish ice hockey league. He is not the fastest nor the biggest. And yet he finds passes that should not exist, acts inside windows that have already closed for everyone else. Ismo Lehkonen tried to explain this and reached for an image from diving: the great divers, he said, learn to turn one second into two seconds. Mäkiaho does the same thing on ice. This episode is about how we might understand space and time in ecological terms, as something that lives in the player-environment relationship. For how we understand time in football, for how we coach, and for how we help players find more space and time than the clock says they have. 🌍 More at progressao.fi  📷 Instagram @progressaofi  👥 LinkedIn @Project Progressão The Progressão book is on its way in English, more on that soon.

  3. Oct 27

    #215 DISCUSSÃO MUNDO: Camilo Speranza – what Uruguay calls garra

    Uruguay has three and a half million people. Two World Cups. Fifteen Copa Américas. A permanent stream of players into the biggest clubs in Europe. For a country that small, these are impressive numbers that require exploration. Camilo Speranza grew up in Montevideo. He has spent his coaching career trying to understand, from the inside, what football cultures are and how they work. Spain, then Barça academies in Rio de Janeiro and Arizona, Auckland City in New Zealand, Guayaquil City in Ecuador, Valladolid and Watford with Paulo Pezzolano, Liverpool Montevideo back home, and now Ilves, in Finland. More football cultures in one career than most coaches encounter in a lifetime. In this conversation we talk about garra charrúa, what it means from inside Uruguayan football, and whether it can be coached or only grown. We talk about Baby Football, Uruguay’s national children’s game played competitively from age four. We talk about Luis Suárez. And we ask the question that runs underneath all of it: what can other countries learn from a small country like Uruguay, and what has to be grown in its own soil? And, of course, we talk about Camilo himself. Who he is as a coach, what shaped him, and what a career across ten countries does to a person. Welcome to Discussão Mundo. 🌍 More at progressao.fi  📷 Instagram @progressaofi  👥 LinkedIn @Project Progressão The Progressão book is on its way in English — more on that soon.

  4. Oct 20

    #214 Messi’s tango, Neymar’s samba, and the dance we haven’t found yet

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

  5. Oct 13

    #213 Sixty concepts for one word: a scoping review of football skill research

    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 🌍 progressao.fi 📷 IG: @progressaofi 👥 LinkedIn: Project Progressão

  6. Oct 6

    #212 Tigers don't live in chaos: reading the leaves, the sounds, the wind

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

  7. Sep 29

    #211 DISCUSSÃO MUNDO: Daud Sihombing – the writer who watches from afar

    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. 🌍 More at progressao.fi  📷 Instagram @progressaofi  👥 LinkedIn @Project Progressão The Progressão book is on its way in English, more on that soon.

  8. Sep 22

    #210 Enskilment: how coaches become skilful

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

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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
    217
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Progressão
  • Show Website
    Progressão

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