How do young football players together with coaches, teammates, the layout of the field, and the emerging circumstances, distribute perception to make successful passes and runs? Interactive sports teams have been the focus of various scientific contributions focusing typically on team interdependence and the ability and skills to coordinate shared team efforts, often focusing on shared cognition (Cannon‐Bowers & Bowers, 2006) or applying a wider ecological perspective (Araújo et al., 2006; McNeese et al., 2016). Video-based analysis of football matches is also commonly used, but mostly with a test setup and quantifiable measures to determine e.g. decision-making choices and skills (Farahani et al., 2020; Vaeyens et al., 2007). While many other studies have also focused on coordination and perception in fluid team sport (Steiner, 2018; Steiner et al., 2017), I aim in this presentation to contribute with insights from an ethnomethodological approach to real-world video recordings of youths playing football matches.
While ethnomethodologically informed ethnographies of sport typically have studied the role of coaching (Corsby et al., 2024; Corsby & Jones, 2020), demonstrations (Evans & Reynolds, 2016) or embodied instructions (Evans & Lindwall, 2020), I focus in this presentation on the role of distributed perception for the accomplishment of making runs and passings in live, naturally occurring matches. Whereas prior EMCA studies of perception have shown how perception is tied to action (Goodwin & Smith, 2020; Nishizaka, 2000; Smith, 2020) and may be distributed not only to other people but also to technologies (Due, 2021), this presentation contributes with new understandings of perception as inherently a property of an assemblage and an activity, rather than any particular agent (Due, 2023).
Data are from ethnographic studies of a Danish team in northern Zealand, Denmark, where an automated VEO camera recorded whole matches with an AI available that tracks the ball. In some matches, I served as the coach while in other matches I did not. In all instances the ethnographies are based on my immersion in this particular culture for seven years, thereby enabling “vulgar competence” (Garfinkel & Wieder, 1992) in these settings. For this presentation, I will show 2 to 3 excerpts and transcriptions from these matches focusing on how players are making successful passes without clear visual access, and hence observably rely on distributed perception for their passing decisions.

References
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