Systematic review of declarative tactical knowledge evaluation tools based on game-play scenarios in soccer

In the last two decades, the analysis of tactical knowledge has become a research channel of increasing interest, contributing to the development of ad-hoc tools to carry out this task. The aim of this study is to collect evaluation tools which allow to measure the declarative tactical knowledge (DTK) in soccer. Five databases (Web of Sciences, Pub Med, SportDiscus, Psycinfo and Eric) were used for the literature search based on PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses) guidelines, according to five inclusion/exclusion criteria: (i) tools that determinate DTK in soccer players, (ii) come from primary sources, that is, published for the first time, (iii) show game-play scenarios in video sequences or static images via questionnaires, (iv) have been submitted to a process of validity and reliability, (v) and avoid the use of verbal language. Nine tools were selected and analyzed in this systematic review: Soccer decision-making tests (McMorris, in Percept Mot Ski 85(2):467, 1997), Protocol for the evaluation of declarative tactical knowledge (Mangas, in Conhecimento declarativo no futebol: Estudo comparativo em praticantes federados e não-federados, do escalão de sub-14, Dissertação de Mestrado, Faculdade de Desporto da Universidade do Porto, 1999), Questionnaire for the evaluation of tactical comprehension applied to football—CECTAF—(De la Vega, in Cultura, Ciencia y Deporte, 2002. https://repositorio.uam.es/bitstream/handle/10486/1723/11535_vega_marcos_ricardodela.pdf?sequence=1 ), Decision making instrument for Soccer (Fontana, in The development of a decision making instrument for soccer, Master’s degree dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 2004. http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10124/ ), Game Understanding Test (Blomqvist et al., in Phys Educ Sport Pedagogy 10(2):107–119, 2005), Offensive Football Tactical Knowledge Test—TCTOF—(Serra-Olivares and García-López, in Revista Internacional De Medicina y Ciencias De La Actividad Física y Del Deporte 16(63):521–536, 2016. https://doi.org/10.15366/rimcafd2016.63.008 ), Video-based decision-making test (Keller et al., in Int J Sports Sci Coach 13(6):1057–1066, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1177/1747954118760778 ), Decision-Making form IOS application (Bennett et al., in J Sci Med Sport 22(6):729–734, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsams.2018.12.011 ) and TacticUP video test for soccer (Machado and Teoldo, in Front Psychol, 2020. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01690 ). Most of the tools did not pass many of the criteria proposed to assess their quality. Fundamentally, it can be concluded that few tools show specific tactical scores based on game principles or subroles that allow identifying possible points of improvement in the knowledge that players have on specific aspects of the game. For this reason, and based on the other findings found in this review, future studies should consider: (i) the importance of designing tools that reflect scores based on tactical principles and game subroles; (ii) the advantages and disadvantages of designing tools based on static images or video sequences; (iii) the need to design tools that can access the DTK of young children; (iv) the requirement to design tools that present game-play scenarios in the first person; (v) the essentiality of facing the tools designed to rigorous processes of validity and reliability.