Silence,Signals,and Split-Second Meaning: Nonverbal Communication and Collective Sensemaking in Elite Team Sports

Abstract

The literature on communication in team sports has also focused mostly on verbal interaction whereas the use of nonverbal cues to facilitate real-time collective sensemaking has been underdeveloped. Based on the coordination theory and the model of collective sensemaking as presented in the communication research, this observational-computational study focused on the topic of nonverbal communication in 24 professional games (12 football and 12 basketball) in Spain La Liga and ACB League. The nonverbal behaviors coded by computer vision-assisted video analysis and human verified are 14,287. The behaviors that were analysed were gestures, direction of gazes, body position, and proxemic modifications among players. The effectiveness of collective sensemaking was evaluated using indicators of coordinated changes in tactics, adaptive play, and quick rebound on mistakes. It was found that dynamic network analysis showed higher densities of nonverbal communication in teams were converging to shared tactical understanding 34% more quickly (p < .001). Hidden Markov model revealed three shared understanding states, with nonverbal signs being the most frequent event that caused a state shift 2.3 times higher than verbal command. These results indicate that nonverbal communication is an interactive system, which distributed and helps in collective cognition and coordinated actions in group sports.

Keywords

nonverbal communication collective sensemaking team cognition dynamic network analysis hidden Markov models computer vision

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Araújo

Davids

(2016). Team synergies in sport: Theory and measures. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 1449. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01449

Ashford

Taylor

Payne

Waldouck

Collins

(2023). “Getting on the same page” enhancing team performance with shared mental models—case studies of evidence informed practice in elite sport. Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 5, 1057143. https://doi.org/10.3389/fspor.2023.1057143

Bavelas

J. B.

Coates

Johnson

(2000). Listeners as co-narrators. Journal of personality and social psychology, 79(6), 941–952. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.79.6.941

Bialkowski

Lucey

Carr

Yue

Matthews

(2014, February). Win at home and draw away: Automatic formation analysis highlighting the differences in home and away team behaviors. In Proceedings of 8th annual MIT sloan sports analytics conference (pp. 1-7). MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.

Blumer

(1986). Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method. Univ of California Press.

Burgoon

J. K.

Guerrero

L. K.

Manusov

(2021). Nonverbal communication. Routledge.

Clemente

F. M.

Martins

F. M. L.

Mendes

R. S.

(2016). Social network analysis applied to team sports analysis. Springer.

Cooren

(2020). A communicative constitutive perspective on corporate social responsibility: Ventriloquism, undecidability, and surprisability. Business & Society, 59(1), 175–197. https://doi.org/10.1177/0007650318791780

Duncan

(1972). Some signals and rules for taking speaking turns in conversations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 23(2), 283–292. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0033031

10.

Eccles

(2010). The coordination of labour in sports teams. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 3(2), 154–170. https://doi.org/10.1080/1750984x.2010.519400

11.

Eddy

S. R.

(2004). What is a hidden Markov model? Nature Biotechnology, 22(10), 1315–1316. https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt1004-1315

12.

Escalera

Athitsos

Guyon

(2017). Challenges in multi-modal gesture recognition (pp. 1–60). Gesture Recognition.

13.

Fewell

J. H.

Armbruster

Ingraham

Petersen

Waters

J. S.

(2012). Basketball teams as strategic networks. PLoS One, 7(11), e47445. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0047445

14.

Filho

(2019). Team dynamics theory: Nomological network among cohesion, team mental models, coordination, and collective efficacy. Sport Sciences for Health, 15(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11332-018-0519-1

15.

Filho

Tenenbaum

(2020). Team mental models: Theory, empirical evidence, and applied implications. In Tenenbaum

Eklund

R. C.

(Eds.), Handbook of Sport Psychology (4th ed., pp. 611–631). Hoboken, NJ, USA: Wiley-Blackwell.

16.

Filho

Tenenbaum

Yang

(2015). Cohesion, team mental models, and collective efficacy: Towards an integrated framework of team dynamics in sport. Journal of Sports Sciences, 33(6), 641–653. https://doi.org/10.1080/02640414.2014.957714

17.

Foster

W. M.

Coraiola

D. M.

Bastien

(2025). Repairing ontological security: The collective sensemaking of affective stakeholders in online communities. Human Relations.

18.

Furley

(2017). The social synapse in sports: Interpersonal coordination and nonverbal behavior in sports. BOOK OF, 99.

19.

Furley

Schweizer

(2016). Nonverbal communication of confidence in soccer referees: An experimental test of Darwin's leakage hypothesis. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 38(6), 590–597. https://doi.org/10.1123/jsep.2016-0192

20.

García-de-Alcaraz

Cui

Gong

Liu

(2025). Spatial-temporal metrics to assess collective behavior in team sports. Frontiers in Psychology, 16, 1743592. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1743592

21.

Goodwin

(1981). Conversational organization. Interaction between speakers and hearers.

22.

Goodwin

(2000). Action and embodiment within situated human interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 32(10), 1489–1522. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0378-2166(99)00096-x

23.

Griffin

E. M.

(2006). A first look at communication theory. McGraw-Hill.

24.

Grund

T. U.

(2012). Network structure and team performance: The case of English Premier League soccer teams. Social Networks, 34(4), 682–690. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socnet.2012.08.004

25.

Hall

E. T.

(1966). The hidden dimension.

26.

Hollan

Hutchins

Kirsh

(2000). Distributed cognition: Toward a new foundation for human-computer interaction research. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 7(2), 174–196.

27.

Hutchins

(1995). Cognition in the wild. MIT press.

28.

Jewitt

(Ed.), (2009). The Routledge handbook of multimodal analysis (1): Routledge.

29.

Karpathy

Toderici

Shetty

Leung

Sukthankar

Fei-Fei

(2014). Large-scale video classification with convolutional neural networks. In Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (pp. 1725–1732). IEEE.

30.

Katz

Kahn

(2015). The social psychology of organizations. In Organizational behavior 2 (pp. 152–168). Routledge.

31.

Kendon

(1967). Some functions of gaze-direction in social interaction. Acta Psychologica, 26(1), 22–63. https://doi.org/10.1016/0001-6918(67)90005-4

32.

Kendon

(2004). Gesture: Visible action as utterance. Cambridge University Press.

33.

Kuhn

(2012). Negotiating the micro-macro divide: Thought leadership from organizational communication for theorizing organization. Management Communication Quarterly, 26(4), 543–584. https://doi.org/10.1177/0893318912462004

34.

Lucey

Bialkowski

Monfort

Carr

Matthews

(2015). Quality vs quantity: Improved shot prediction in soccer using strategic features from spatiotemporal data.

35.

Maitlis

(2005). The social processes of organizational sensemaking. Academy of Management Journal, 48(1), 21–49. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2005.15993111

36.

Maitlis

Christianson

(2014). Sensemaking in organizations: Taking stock and moving forward. The Academy of Management Annals, 8(1), 57–125. https://doi.org/10.5465/19416520.2014.873177

37.

Malone

T. W.

Crowston

(1994). The interdisciplinary study of coordination. ACM Computing Surveys, 26(1), 87–119. https://doi.org/10.1145/174666.174668

38.

McPhee

R. D.

Zaug

(2009). The communicative constitution of organizations. Building theories of organization: The constitutive role of communication, 10(1-2), 21.

39.

Mead

G. H.

(1934). Mind, self, and society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist.

40.

Mehrabian

(1972). Nonverbal communication. A1dine Atherton.

41.

Monge

P. R.

Contractor

N. S.

(2003). Theories of communication networks. Oxford University Press.

42.

Müller-Budack

Theiner

Ewerth

(2025). Computer vision and deep learning for sports analytics. In Artificial intelligence and machine learning in sports science (pp. 65–77). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

43.

Naik

B. T.

Hashmi

M. F.

Bokde

N. D.

(2022). A comprehensive review of computer vision in sports: Open issues, future trends and research directions. Applied Sciences, 12(9), 4429. https://doi.org/10.3390/app12094429

44.

Norris

(2004). Analyzing multimodal interaction: A methodological framework. Routledge.

45.

Passos

Davids

Araújo

Paz

Minguéns

Mendes

(2011). Networks as a novel tool for studying team ball sports as complex social systems. Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, 14(2), 170–176. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsams.2010.10.459

46.

Pop

C. L.

Zamfir

M. V.

(2020). Nonverbal communication of young players in team sports. Pedagogy of Physical Culture and Sports, 24(1), 26–29. https://doi.org/10.15561/26649837.2020.0104

47.

Rabiner

L. R.

(2002). A tutorial on hidden Markov models and selected applications in speech recognition. Proceedings of the IEEE, 77(2), 257–286. https://doi.org/10.1109/5.18626

48.

Ramos

Lopes

R. J.

Araújo

(2018). What's next in complex networks? Capturing the concept of attacking play in invasive team sports. Sports Medicine, 48(1), 17–28. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-017-0786-z

49.

Rata

B. C.

Rata

Mares

Melinte

(2012). Verbal and nonverbal communication during hammer throw training and competitions. Ovidius University Annals - Series Physical Education and Sport / Science, Movement and Health, 12(2 Suppl), 370–375.

50.

Rossi

L. F.

Sanna

Manuri

Donna Bianco

(2025). How AI-based computer vision algorithms are impacting the sports industry: A survey. Discover Artificial Intelligence, 5(1), 374. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44163-025-00586-1

51.

Santos

Ribeiro

Davids

Garganta

(2025). Developing performance in sports teams through a collective homeostasis model supports regulation, adaptation, and evolution in competition. Adaptive Behavior, 33(2), 151–162. https://doi.org/10.1177/10597123241309980

52.

Silva

Garganta

Araújo

Davids

Aguiar

(2013). Shared knowledge or shared affordances? Insights from an ecological dynamics approach to team coordination in sports. Sports Medicine, 43(9), 765–772. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-013-0070-9

53.

Streeck

Goodwin

LeBaron

C. D.

(Eds.), (2011). Embodied interaction: Language and body in the material world. Cambridge University Press.

54.

Sullivan

(2004). Communication differences between male and female team sport athletes. Communication Reports, 17(2), 121–128. https://doi.org/10.1080/08934210409389381

55.

Vater

Williams

A. M.

Hossner

E. J.

(2020). What do we see out of the corner of our eye? The role of visual pivots and gaze anchors in sport. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 13(1), 81–103. https://doi.org/10.1080/1750984x.2019.1582082

56.

Wang

Zhu

Shen

Yao

(2015, August). Discerning tactical patterns for professional soccer teams: An enhanced topic model with applications. In Proceedings of the 21th ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining (pp. 2197-2206). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA.

57.

Weick

K. E.

Sutcliffe

K. M.

Obstfeld

(2005). Organizing and the process of sensemaking. Organization Science, 16(4), 409–421. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1050.0133

58.

Weick

K. E.

Roberts

K. H.

(1993). Collective mind in organizations: Heedful interrelating on flight decks. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38(3), 357–381. https://doi.org/10.2307/2393372

59.

Yin

Sinnott

R. O.

Jayaputera

G. T.

(2024). A survey of video-based human action recognition in team sports. Artificial Intelligence Review, 57(11), 293. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-024-10934-9

60.

Zamfir

M. V.

(2017). Verbal and non-verbal communication in sport environment. Marathon, 9(1), 99–106.

61.

Zheng

Al-Hamid

D. Z.

Chong

P. H. J.

Yang

X. J.

(2025). A review of computer vision technology for football videos. Information (2078-2489), 16(5), 355. https://doi.org/10.3390/info16050355