Monitoring and Optimizing Performance in Team Sports: From Field-Based Testing to Game-Based Training Design

Team sports represent dynamic environments where performance emerges from the complex interplay of physical, technical, tactical, perceptual, and decision-making factors. Despite advances in sport science and coaching practice, the integration of laboratory and field-based assessments into daily training remains a challenge. Technologies such as wearable sensors, neuromuscular profiling tools, and video-based analyses now provide valuable data on player readiness, positional demands, performance development, and injury risk. However, one of the key issues continues to be translating these diverse data sources into meaningful, sport-specific training interventions that enhance both individual and collective performance.

Building on these foundations, this Research Topic aims to bridge the gap between performance assessment and applied coaching practice in team sports. It explores how field-based and laboratory-supported assessments can inform individualized and team-level training strategies, particularly through game-based and context-driven training design. The main goal is to identify practical frameworks that transform diagnostic insights into training applications, thereby improving performance, managing workload, and minimizing injury risk. This compilation seeks studies investigating physical, biomechanical, physiological, technical, and tactical indicators that can be monitored and optimized in real-world contexts, including research on youth, sub-elite, and elite athletes.

Building on these objectives, this Research Topic encompasses a broad range of investigations focused on the practical translation of testing data into effective training methodologies. To gather further insights into this evolving field, we welcome articles addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:

Field-based testing and performance diagnostics in team sports

Neuromuscular, biomechanical, and physiological profiling of team sport athletes

Positional and sport-specific performance indicators across levels of play

Wearable technology, GPS systems, inertial sensors, and video-based performance analysis

Training load monitoring, fatigue, recovery, and readiness assessment

Tactical and decision-making indicators derived from game-related statistics

Small-sided games and the design of context-specific training interventions

Practical translation of testing outputs into individualized and team training programs

Athlete development, long-term performance monitoring, and injury prevention strategies

Accepted article types include original research, systematic reviews, brief research reports, perspectives, and methods papers.

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
• Conceptual Analysis
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• ... 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
• Conceptual Analysis
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Review
• Systematic Review

Keywords: team sports, performance assessment, training load monitoring, wearable technology, neuromuscular profiling, game-based training, athlete monitoring, injury prevention

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.