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Progressão

Jani Sarajärvi

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.

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  • 33 episodes
  • weekly
  • Avg 21 min
  • English

Episodes 33

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  • Tuesday · 13 min

    #217 Sculpting in time: perception, memory and the game players live inside (Space and time II)

    Last week we argued that the two seconds on the clock are not the same two seconds for every player. This week we go one layer deeper and ask: what is perception doing, if it is not stitching frozen snapshots together? We say to players: take a picture of the situation. It is a well-meant instruction. And as a description of how perception works, it is wrong. The frantic defender is not short of pictures. They see every frame. What they are missing is the flow. What great ice hockey player Mäkiaho has is not faster processing, but a deeper attunement to the game as it unfolds. The mind does not generate experience from the inside like a projector in a dark room. It resonates with what is already out there. And because perception is time-extended, the just-past of the current moment is still alive inside it. There is no retrieval from storage. There is no snapshot-stitching. There is a continuous coupling with the shape of the thing as it unfolds. Bergson said it in one line: perception is always already a memory. This episode also takes a short detour through Andrei Tarkovsky, who got to the same place through film, and whose idea of sculpting in time turns out to be the same insight Gibson and Bergson had, just arrived at through film. 🌍 More at progressao.fi 📷 Instagram @progressaofi 👥 LinkedIn @Project Progressão

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  • November 3 · 18 min

    #216 Relativistic time: why space and time are not what you think (Space and time I)

    Space and time. A player has a metre, a player has two seconds, the whole Barcelona tradition built on these concepts. The philosophy that shaped a generation of coaches rests on them. We understand space and time, or do we? The space and time we talk about in coaching are borrowed from physics, and physics measures something different than players' lived experience. The metre on the overlay is not the metre the player perceives. And the two seconds on the clock are not the same two seconds for every player. Daniel Mäkiaho leads the scoring charts in the Finnish ice hockey league. He is not the fastest nor the biggest. And yet he finds passes that should not exist, acts inside windows that have already closed for everyone else. Ismo Lehkonen tried to explain this and reached for an image from diving: the great divers, he said, learn to turn one second into two seconds. Mäkiaho does the same thing on ice. This episode is about how we might understand space and time in ecological terms, as something that lives in the player-environment relationship. For how we understand time in football, for how we coach, and for how we help players find more space and time than the clock says they have. 🌍 More at progressao.fi 📷 Instagram @progressaofi 👥 LinkedIn @Project Progressão The Progressão book is on its way in English, more on that soon.

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  • October 27 · 1 hr 3 min

    #215 DISCUSSÃO MUNDO: Camilo Speranza – what Uruguay calls garra

    Uruguay has three and a half million people. Two World Cups. Fifteen Copa Américas. A permanent stream of players into the biggest clubs in Europe. For a country that small, these are impressive numbers that require exploration. Camilo Speranza grew up in Montevideo. He has spent his coaching career trying to understand, from the inside, what football cultures are and how they work. Spain, then Barça academies in Rio de Janeiro and Arizona, Auckland City in New Zealand, Guayaquil City in Ecuador, Valladolid and Watford with Paulo Pezzolano, Liverpool Montevideo back home, and now Ilves, in Finland. More football cultures in one career than most coaches encounter in a lifetime. In this conversation we talk about garra charrúa, what it means from inside Uruguayan football, and whether it can be coached or only grown. We talk about Baby Football, Uruguay’s national children’s game played competitively from age four. We talk about Luis Suárez. And we ask the question that runs underneath all of it: what can other countries learn from a small country like Uruguay, and what has to be grown in its own soil? And, of course, we talk about Camilo himself. Who he is as a coach, what shaped him, and what a career across ten countries does to a person. Welcome to Discussão Mundo. 🌍 More at progressao.fi 📷 Instagram @progressaofi 👥 LinkedIn @Project Progressão The Progressão book is on its way in English — more on that soon.

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  • October 20 · 11 min

    #214 Messi’s tango, Neymar’s samba, and the dance we haven’t found yet

    Put Neymar on one screen and Messi on the other. Play samba under the Brazilian and tango under the Argentine, and then sit back and watch, and something in you knows, immediately, without being able to say exactly how you know, that this is true. That the dance is not beside the football. The dance is inside the football. It has always been there. What does it mean that a man carries his culture in his body without knowing it? That a child in Rio learns a way of moving that is not in any coaching manual, that no club ever taught him, that came through the street and the music and the air of a place, and that this way of moving turns out to be somethign others can't catch? Do we need to imitate this? Could a Messi be born outside Argentina? 🌍 More at progressao.fi 📷 Instagram @progressaofi 👥 LinkedIn @Project Progressão

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  • October 13 · 9 min

    #213 Sixty concepts for one word: a scoping review of football skill research

    Four thousand papers. Eighty-three studies. Sixty concepts for the same word. A few years ago we started asking a question. What does research on football skill-related interventions look like. What theories does it rest on. What players does it study. Where in the world does it happen. And where are the gaps. The answer came out as a paper called Skill-related studies from youth to high-performance football: a scoping review. Published in 2023. In this episode, the mapping that came out of the project. European. Male. Fragmented. Many concepts. And future directions. 📄 Sarajärvi, J., Freitas, R., Elovaara, M., & Volossovitch, A. (2024). Skill-related studies from youth to high-performance football: A scoping review. German Journal of Exercise and Sport Research, 54, 341–353. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12662-023-00910-w 🌍 progressao.fi 📷 IG: @progressaofi 👥 LinkedIn: Project Progressão

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  • October 6 · 16 min

    #212 Tigers don't live in chaos: reading the leaves, the sounds, the wind

    Football has chaotic moments. Watching them, a coach might think the training needs more chaos too. Fair enough. But what is chaos. The word has slipped into coaching conversations. It is a technical term. However, it does not mean what we think it means. Tuomas Iisalo once said the game is a jungle and a zoo. The training too often is the zoo. The game is the jungle. But a jungle is not chaos. The tiger reads the leaves, the sounds, the wind. A tiger that lived in chaos would not last a week. Fifteen minutes on a small misunderstanding. 🌍 More at progressao.fi 📷 Instagram @progressaofi 👥 LinkedIn @Project Progressão

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  • September 29 · 42 min

    #211 DISCUSSÃO MUNDO: Daud Sihombing – the writer who watches from afar

    From Jakarta, Daud Sihombing watches football. He writes about it, edits it, publishes it. Halftime Speech is a football magazine that comes out of Indonesia, not out of London or Madrid or São Paulo. Petrikor Books is his publishing house, built around the idea that the questions matter more than the answers. In 2025 he published On Publishing Practice, nearly a decade of essays about what it means to make things for people. The book does not conclude. It thinks. He is an AS Roma fan who has never been to Italy. Never seen them play in person. He watches one of Europe's most storied clubs from the other side of the world, from a country that European football barely notices. From that distance, he sees things that insiders cannot. That is what this conversation is about. Skill, and what it means in Indonesia. What the game looks like from the outside of the mainstream. What Southeast Asian football carries and what it is still searching for. And why the non-mainstream view can be very interesting and fresh. Welcome to Discussão Mundo. 🌍 More at progressao.fi 📷 Instagram @progressaofi 👥 LinkedIn @Project Progressão The Progressão book is on its way in English, more on that soon.

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  • September 22 · 13 min

    #210 Enskilment: how coaches become skilful

    Last week we reopened the word education through its Latin root educere, to lead out. This week we go one step further, into enskilment. Enskilment comes from the anthropologist Tim Ingold, and it names something most of us already know but rarely have language for: the process by which a person becomes deeply skilful not through instruction, but through long, embodied immersion in a real landscape, alongside people who are already skilled in it. A child in a fishing village who absorbs the whole culture of fishing without ever being formally taught. A blacksmith's apprentice who moves, over years, from the edge of the work toward the centre. Today we look at enskilment through a 2025 paper by Selimi and Woods, which proposes a completely different model of coach education in Australian football. In this episode: why the transmissive model of coach education — lectures, curricula, classrooms — produces coaches who can pass an exam but struggle to coach. The three interwoven dimensions of a situated model: real-world exposure, legitimate peripheral participation, and mentorship. Jean Lave and Étienne Wenger's communities of practice, and why the apprenticeship structure most modern education abandoned is still how humans actually become skilful. What Australian coaches themselves said they wanted from coach education — and why the blockage is in the structure, not the coaches. And what a next-generation coach education pathway could look like. Coaches grow in landscapes. That is where the learning has to happen. Further reading Selimi, E. & Woods, C.T. (2025). Enskilment into the coaching landscape: towards a situated approach to coach education in Australian football. Sport, Education and Society, 30(4), 413–426. Lascu, A., Wood, M., Moulds, K. & Davids, K. (2024). Coach education as 'leading out with an experienced other'. Sports Coaching Review, 13(2), 277–292. The Progressão book is on its way in English — more on that soon. 🌍 More at progressao.fi 📷 Instagram @progressaofi 👥 LinkedIn @Project Progressão

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  • September 15 · 11 min

    #209 Leading out: coach education as an ecological phenomenon

    The word education comes from the Latin educere — to lead out. Not to fill in or to pour into. To lead out. Today's episode is the first of two on a subject that is one of the most under-examined corners of the football world: how coaches learn to coach. We walk through a 2024 paper by Lascu, Wood, Moulds and Davids that reframes coach education as an ecological phenomenon — and in doing so, turns the same argument we have been making about player development directly onto ourselves. In this episode: why the transmission model of coach education — curriculum, content blocks, workshops, licences — contradicts the very pedagogy we are increasingly asking coaches to use with players. Two concepts worth carrying into conversations about coach development: guidance without specification, and attentive dwelling. The idea of an evolving correspondence between mentor and mentee, and why it is the heart of what leading out actually means. The difference between knowledge about coaching and knowledge of coaching — and why our current model is wildly tilted toward the wrong one. Not more workshops. Long walks. Further reading Lascu, A., Wood, M., Moulds, K. & Davids, K. (2024). Coach education as 'leading out with an experienced other'. Sports Coaching Review, 13(2), 277–292. The Progressão book is on its way in English — more on that soon. 🌍 More at progressao.fi 📷 Instagram @progressaofi 👥 LinkedIn @Project Progressão

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  • September 8 · 13 min

    #208 Not every rep at the red line: a case for varying training intensity

    Last week we split the word intensity in two. Good intensity, effort as the natural consequence of a clear read. Bad intensity, effort as decoration. This week we take that split into the training session. Because something strange has happened in football over the last decade. The word intensity, having conquered how we talk about matches, has now conquered how we talk about sessions. Every rep at match pace or above. If you are not in the red zone, you are not really working. There is truth in some of this, but there is also a serious mistake buried in it. In this episode: why nobody has ever proved that constant high intensity is the optimal design for learning football over the long arc from age five to twenty-five. What javelin throwers, cross-country skiers and judokas have known for decades that football has somehow forgotten. The wood-chopping image returns — why slow is often where the real learning happens. What a rep actually is in an ecological design, and why counting touches misses most of what is happening. Why the active playing time metric, taken as the measure of session quality, quietly drifts sessions toward bad intensity. And what deliberately varied training intensity looks like on a football pitch. The Progressão book is on its way in English — more on that soon. 🌍 More at progressao.fi 📷 Instagram @progressaofi 👥 LinkedIn @Project Progressão

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  • September 1 · 16 min

    #207 The intensity illusion: why "more intensity" is football's most misused instruction

    Everyone in football uses the word intensity. Federations put it first in their principles. Coaches demand it. Analysts measure it. But what does it mean? Today's episode is about splitting the word in two. Because intensity is doing at least two very different jobs in football — and confusing them is the source of a lot of confused coaching. In this episode: why "more intensity" is often just "fight harder" wearing a nicer coat. The wood-chopping test, meaning why intensity without skill is flailing. What good intensity is: not effort as decoration, but effort as the natural consequence of a clear read. Insights from Joni Ruuskanen, physical performance specialist at the Football Association of Finland, on what actually separates top players in high-intensity moments, and why Julián Álvarez and Pernille Harder win duels their physique alone shouldn't win. Why sprint metrics tell us what is different between levels, but not why. And what it would mean to change what the word intensity means inside your sessions. Good, skillful intensity is knowing where to look and when to move. That is what we should coach. The Progressão book is on its way in English, more on that soon. 🌍 More at progressao.fi 📷 Instagram @progressaofi 👥 LinkedIn @Project Progressão

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  • August 25 · 53 min

    #206 DISCUSSÃO MUNDO: Mike Keeney – American soccer, skill, and what thirty years across continents teaches you

    Thirty years in football across five continents. The US, Finland, Slovakia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, including a stint in the UEFA Europa League. Mike Keeney has seen the game from enough angles to have well-informed opinions about what actually develops a player. He now leads the MLS NEXT program at Hoover-Vestavia Soccer in Birmingham, Alabama, and shapes the next generation of American coaches as an instructor on the US Soccer A Licence course. He holds a UEFA Pro Licence. In this conversation: what moving between football cultures teaches you about skill, and what gets left behind when you come home. The honest state of American soccer after a World Cup on home soil. Whether the cultural tendency toward athleticism over improvisation is really changing, or just being discussed. What an elite development environment looks like in Birmingham, Alabama in 2026. And, the pay-to-play model and how much potential the system isn't seeing. The Progressão book is on its way in English — more on that soon. 🌍 More at progressao.fi 📷 Instagram @progressaofi 👥 LinkedIn @Project Progressão

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  • August 18 · 12 min

    #205 Emotion is not noise: affective learning design in football

    A training session can be tactically representative with right distances, pressure, opponent behaviours, and still be missing something important. The feeling in the stomach before a decisive pass. The exhaustion of a fifth game in two weeks. The awareness that this moment might decide qualification. That ingredient has a name in the ecological dynamics literature: affect. And the conceptual framework related to it is called Affective Learning Design. Today we walk through the 2015 paper by Headrick, Renshaw, Davids, Pinder, and Araújo that framed this idea, and what it means for how we build sessions. In this episode: the difference between cold cognition and hot cognition, and why removing emotion from training doesn't clean it up but thins it out. Why emotion sharpens perception and strengthens memory, and what that means for which skills players carry into the game. The two principles of Affective Learning Design, and how to use them. Practical moves: vignettes, stakes, scrutiny, individualisation. Studies from dart throwing, police handgun training, basketball free throws, gymnastics and football, all pointing the same direction. Emotion is not noise. It is a constraint that shapes what a player perceives, decides and does. Time to design for it. Further reading Headrick, J., Renshaw, I., Davids, K., Pinder, R.A. & Araújo, D. (2015). The dynamics of expertise acquisition in sport: The role of affective learning design. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 16(1), 83–90. The Progressão book is on its way in English — more on that soon. 🌍 More at progressao.fi 📷 Instagram @progressaofi 👥 LinkedIn @Project Progressão

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  • August 11 · 9 min

    #204 Manage the madness: three futsal principles football should steal

    Futsal is football's close cousin. Similar game logic, smaller space, less forgiveness. A bad angle shows up immediately, a lazy arrival is a shot on your own net. That density has forced futsal coaches to develop sharper language for certain moments than football coaches need to. Today we are going on a raid, walking into the futsal world to borrow three principles, the language and intentions that carry them, and bring them back to the football pitch. In this episode: why "manage the madness" is a great instruction and intention for a duel. What it actually means to "arrive with the ball", and why getting that timing right is a perceptual skill we often don't train. And "be electric" — the defender who keeps moving in small deceptive ways at set pieces, giving the deliverer conflicting information rather than being the statue the attacker is hoping for. All of the principles describe a way of being in the moment: alive, reading, adjusting. Steal them. 🌍 More at progressao.fi 📷 Instagram @progressaofi 👥 LinkedIn @Project Progressão

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  • August 4 · 15 min

    #203 In the storm and the silence: Turner, Pärt, and football as art

    Two artists. One tied himself to the mast of a ship in a real storm because painting storms from the shore was no longer enough. The other went silent for years — already recognised, already capable — because the music he was making was not yet the music that was truly his. One found the storm from the inside. The other found the silence, and from it, a new form the whole world now listens to. Today's episode is a slower one. We are sitting with J.M.W. Turner, the English painter, and Arvo Pärt, the Estonian composer, and thinking about what they might have to say to football. How they felt the world, and what we could learn from them. In this episode: what Turner's storm paintings — before and after he sailed into a real storm — tell us about the difference between observing the game and being inside it. Why the other Turner lesson is knowing when to put the brush down. Pärt's tintinnabuli, two voices that become one sound, and what it means for a small football nation to stop copying the big ones and find its own two notes. And why the crisis, the silence, the emptiness before new form arrives, is not something to escape but something to trust. The storm. The silence.

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  • July 28 · 12 min

    #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

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  • July 21 · 1 hr 6 min

    #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

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  • July 14 · 15 min

    #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

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  • July 7 · 19 min

    #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

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  • June 30 · 13 min

    #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

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Showing 1–20 of 33 episodes