Cultural evolution of football tactics: strategic social learning in managers' choice of formation.

ABSTRACT: In order to adaptively solve complex problems or make difficult decisions, people must strategically combine personal information acquired directly from experience (individual learning) and social information acquired from others (social learning). The game of football (soccer) provides extensive real world data with which to quantify this strategic information use. I analyse a 5-year dataset of all games (n = 9127, 2012-2017) in five top European leagues to quantify the extent to which a manager's initial formation is guided by their personal past use or success with that formation, or other managers' use or success with that formation. I focus on the 4231 formation, the dominant formation during this period. As predicted, a manager's choice of whether to use 4231 is influenced by

SUBMITTER: Mesoudi A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10427434 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature