Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Team Sports: Contextualizing Training and Competition Demands -Volume II

This is the second volume of our previous Research Topic, "Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Team Sports: Contextualizing Training and Competition Demands." Feel free to check out the first volume here.

This research topic advocates a multidisciplinary approach to understanding team sports by hypothetically treating performance as a mosaic, where each piece—whether psychological, physical, tactical, or contextual—plays an essential role in completing the picture. By encouraging submissions that integrate psychological aspects such as mental fatigue, perceived exertion, anxiety, mood, and stress with physical, physiological, and tactical variables, this collection seeks to enrich the current understanding and methodologies employed in team sports analysis.

The desired manuscripts should encompass the following perspectives, ideally within a combined framework:
• Physical Demands: Metrics derived from GPS and accelerometers provide essential insights into the athletes' physical engagement during play.
• Physiological responses: Valid indicators such as heart rate, heart rate variability, blood lactate, neuromuscular responses, and respiratory frequencies provide valuable information on how the athlete's biological systems respond to the physical and psychological demands imposed by training and competition.
• Cognitive, Psychological, and Emotional Factors: Indicators including mental fatigue and cognitive demands, anxiety, mood states, stress levels, and psychological activation can be correlated with performance metrics to offer a holistic view of the athlete’s competition and training environment.
• Technical and Tactical Analysis: Recognized performance indicators, such as points, goals, passes, tackles, and strategic formations, are fundamental for a comprehensive and contextualized performance analysis.
• Contextual Influences: Factors like game location, scoreline, opponent level, and phase of the season are crucial for contextualizing data.
• Perceptual Metrics: Athlete-reported measures like wellness and recovery add valuable subjective insights that should be integrated with objective data to fully understand performance dynamics.
Contributors are encouraged to include data from training scenarios and competitive matches, provided they incorporate the listed domains. The findings should aim to present practical, actionable strategies that coaches and sports scientists can implement. Moreover, this cross-disciplinary initiative welcomes studies across all demographics, including adapted sports, from professional to amateur and youth levels.

By fostering a comprehensive evaluation that aligns physiological, psychological, and tactical data, this Research Topic aims to revolutionize how performance in team sports is analyzed and enhanced. Through such multidisciplinary contributions, the field can progress towards more sophisticated and practically relevant sports science practices

Information for authors: Please be aware that this research topic is cross-listed with multiple journals and sections. When submitting your manuscripts, please ensure that they fall within the scope of the journal and sections to which you are submitting. Kindly note that the Exercise Physiology section only considers manuscripts that focus on the physiological mechanisms underlying the acute response to exercise as well as the adaptation to exercise from the molecular and cellular level to individual systems. Please see here the scope statement of the section.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Clinical Trial
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Clinical Trial
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Registered Report
• Review
• Study Protocol
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: performance, training, physical demands, physiology, psychology, contextual factors, perceived exertion, athlete monitoring

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.