Progressão

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

    #202 Predictability is the enemy

    There is a debate that runs through football coaching like a fault line. On one side: all training should be game-based. On the other: players need drills with a lot of repetition. The two camps argue past each other, as if the choice is binary. It isn't. And a volleyball study can help us understand why. Today we walk through a 2023 paper by Paulo Caldeira and colleagues — research that sits close to the intellectual home of this podcast, with Duarte Araújo and Keith Davids among the authors. The setting is volleyball, but the implications belong to anyone who has thought about representativeness in their training. The study took skilled young players and gave both groups the same three attack options against the same three block configurations. Same possibilities, same reps. One difference only: one group knew in advance what was coming, the other had to read and decide in the moment. That single variable, pre-arranged versus emergent decision-making, changed everything. The group that had to read the situation improved substantially more, and kept improving after the study ended. In this episode: what representative decision-making actually means, and why a decision is representative when it is made off the same online information the game provides. What functional movement variability is, and why the best performers don't repeat one perfect technique but find slightly different solutions each time. Also, a football example of how to constrain the option space without losing the decision. Further reading Caldeira, P., Paulo, A., Veloso, A., Infante, J., Davids, K. & Araújo, D. (2023). How functional movement variability facilitates successful skill adaptation during the volleyball attack. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching.The Progressão book is being translated into English — more on that soon. 🌍 More at progressao.fi 📷 Instagram @progressaofi 👥 LinkedIn @Project Progressão

  2. Jul 21

    #201 DISCUSSÃO MUNDO: Roger "Ruxi" Bonet – Spain, the World Cup, and the team as skill

    Spain just won the World Cup. A highly coordinated team that played the movement, the relation, the shared language of a group that had been feeling the game the same way since they were children. To make sense of that, we called someone who has lived football from the inside — as a player across several continents, as a psychologist, as a coach, and as the founder of The Game Changer, a global football analysis community now active in over 20 countries. Roger "Ruxi" Bonet has also written the book Play with Purpose, and holds a UEFA Pro licence. In this episode: Spain's World Cup through the eyes of a person who watches the game analytically. What the tournament revealed about collective intelligence, and why the absence of a star scorer was not a weakness but the whole point. A case study of the final, Spain versus Argentina, as two completely different answers to the question of what football skill is and where it comes from. The rondo, the potrero, the street; whether you can see a player's upbringing in the way they move. And what Ruxi's years of playing in different countries taught him about football culture as a shaping force. The Progressão book is on its way in English — more on that soon. 🌍 More at progressao.fi  📷 Instagram @progressaofi  👥 LinkedIn @Project Progressão

  3. Jul 14

    #200 Two hundred Tuesdays: still Progressão

    Two hundred Tuesdays of trying to understand and explain why we as humans have previously misunderstood football. Where the feeling started? In a gap between the language of football and the actual game we were watching. In this episode, how the feeling led to Lisbon, to a doctorate, to a laboratory, to a book written under the trees of Parque Urbano de Jamor. How Jussi-Pekka Savolainen, Antti J. Peltonen and Harriet Huhtakangas shaped what you hear and read. And how nearly 140,000 downloads happened, one Tuesday at a time. This episode is also a compression of everything Progressão has been arguing all along — that the game is relational, that skill lives in player-environment correspondence and not inside the player alone, that the metaphors we think with quietly become the coaching we do. Two hundred episodes of trying to say that more clearly, more precisely, learning with other wandering spirits along the path. The Portuguese word progressão does not mean arrival. It means we are still moving. The feeling that started all of this is still here. Still Progressão. The Progressão book is being translated into English — more on that soon. 🌍 More at progressao.fi  📷 Instagram @progressaofi  👥 LinkedIn @Project Progressão

  4. Jul 7

    #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

  5. Jun 30

    #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

  6. Jun 23

    #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

  7. Jun 16

    #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

  8. Jun 9

    #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

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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
    202
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Progressão
  • Show Website
    Progressão

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