Complex Systems in Sport, International Congress: Linking Theory and Practice

In this 5th edition of the Complex Systems in Sport Congress it is time to evaluate where we are and get a consensus about where to go in the near future. The science of complex systems is evolving very fast and society is requesting for practical applications of our research, a non easy endeavour that obviously keep us really busy and involved. Complex Systems in Sport is still a baby learning to walk. It started its development in areas like biomechanics, motor learning and control, and during the last two decades evolved fastly diversifying into fields like decision making, performance and game analysis, talent identification, sport injuries or thought dynamics with outstanding research published in top journals. We hope to be able to provide in the future enough research evidences and rigorous mathematical models for changing the dominant statical paradigm of sport science, still based on timeless inferential statistics. In our humble opinion, future efforts should be oriented towards a) trying to formulate deductive mathematical models and theories which should more rigorously channelize the experimental and empirical research, and b) extend the realm of Complex Systems in Sport to other areas (e.g., molecular and cellular biology in sports) by collaborating with specialists which already model and analyse these levels of organization using the complex systems toolbox. We are very grateful to the join collaboration of Complex Systems in Sport Research Group, FC Barcelona and INEFC for organizing this congress and we hope to contribute with our scientific work to do a step forward in the understanding of sport related phenomena. Sport scientists and also sport professionals can benefit of the complex systems approach because there is nothing more practical than a good theory. Natàlia Balagué