Understanding player transitions in football through distributed situation awareness

Scott McLean; Tom Page; Paul Salmon; Barry Drust

doi:10.1080/24733938.2026.2634326

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Understanding player transitions in football through distributed situation awareness

Journal article

Open access

Peer reviewed

Understanding player transitions in football through distributed situation awareness

Scott McLean, Tom Page, Paul Salmon and Barry Drust

Science and Medicine in Football, Vol.Advanced access

23-Feb-2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/24733938.2026.2634326

PMID: 41725512

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Abstract

Distributed situation awareness

football

injury prevention

systems analysis

Player transitions in football are critical for talent development and involve players transitioning to more experienced squads. While transitions provide many positive developmental opportunities for players, the increase in workload, demands, and pressures can potentially cause injury or wellbeing issues. Despite this, they remain an under-investigated area in football and there is limited knowledge on how best the transition process can be managed to prevent adverse outcomes. The aim of this study was to develop a network-based model of player transitions between squads within a professional English football club, through the lens of Distributed Situation Awareness (DSA). The Event Analysis of Systemic Teamwork (EAST) framework was applied to describe and understand the interaction between transition tasks, performance staff, and required information during player transitions. Group model building, and semi-structured interviews with club performance staff were used to develop the EAST analyses. The findings demonstrate the complexity of player transitions, through the interaction of numerous tasks, performance staff, and required information sharing. Negative transition outcomes may result from failures in DSA during fast-paced, reactive situations where information sharing and error recovery are limited. Further, heavy reliance on key individuals, as well as limited involvement of the first team coaches in the transition process may be associated with potentially negative outcomes. The current findings will guide clubs in developing processes to reduce transition-related injuries and wellbeing issues and to increase positive outcomes for players and clubs.

Details

Title: Understanding player transitions in football through distributed situation awareness
Authors: Scott McLean (Corresponding Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast
Tom Page - West Bromwich Albion Football Club (United Kingdom)
Paul Salmon - University of the Sunshine Coast
Barry Drust - University of Birmingham
Publication details: Science and Medicine in Football, Vol.Advanced access
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/24733938.2026.2634326
ISSN: 2473-4446; 2473-3938
PMID: 41725512
Copyright note: © 2026 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Data Availability: Data in the form of network matrices used for the network analysis have been made available as supplementary material.
Organisation Unit: Centre for Human Factors and Systems Science
Language: English
Record Identifier: 991210047102621
Output Type: Journal article

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