Search

Top performance in team sports attracts the attention from the general public. In particular, the best players became incredibly skilled and physically powerful, a fact that potentiates to deliver a product considered attractive, exciting and competitive. Not surprisingly, this is a very valuable product from an economic and social standpoint, thus, all sports professionals are extremely interested in developing new procedures to improve sports performance. Besides, the great interests of the various stakeholders (owners, CEO-s, agents, fans, media, coaches, players, families and friends) are one of the main reasons for this development of sports science umbrella and the accompanying sports industry. all their personal performances should be coordinated and put into function by the sports team. In this scientific and applied manuscript, we will deal primarily with the individual treatment of players in order to improve their personal performance and, consequently, team sport performance.

Team sports belong to complex sports disciplines, and their complexity is manifested in the demanding structure of movements and situations and in many features that players must possess in order to be succe- ssful during the training and competition (Jukic et al., 2018 ; Marrier et al., 2018 ; Schneider et al., 2018). Besides, all these characteristics should be part of the players’ integral preparedness, which is responsible for competitive efficiency. Finally, all individuals in the team need to be aligned with each other, in order for the team to be more effective on the field/court and to achieve positive sports results. For these main reasons, the system of sports preparation in team sports is extremely complex and demanding.Although team preparation and team efficiency are a priority in the sports preparation system of sports teams, individual care for players is becoming an increasingly important category. The reason is the uti- lization of all the capacities and potentials of players. In this sense, sport and exercise sciences have also made a major contribution to this way of thinking through research on personalized approaches to physical exercise and sports training (Montalvo et al. 2017 ; Calleja-Gonzalez et al., 2018., Ross et al. 2019). The purpose of this paper is to present and emphasize the importance of a precise and personalized approach to the strength and conditioning of players in team sports.

Currently, there is a lack of scientific papers in the field of integral sports preparation in elite team sports, in particular regarding the structure and organization of high-performance systems. This lack of information does not allow for the comparison of different systems and the establisment of internation- al standards. The purpose of this paper is to describe the organization and function of high- performance systems in team sports, but also the performance specialists’ professional titles, education and emplyment opportunities. Also, in this paper we will describe the performance system as a part of the overall sports preparation (strength and conditioning, mental training, sports medicine, recovery, nutrition, assesment and 1 INVITED LECTURES Igor Jukic, Luka Milanovic, Ivan Krakan, Nenad Njaradi, Julio Calleja - Gonzalez, Sergej Ostojic... PERFORMANCE SPECIALIST: A NEW JOB OF RENAISSANCE EXPERTS IN TEAM SPORTS training monitoring, life performance, big data management, facility and equipment management, travel management) as a service to skills and competition performance (Glazier, 2017).