Vive la révolution! (part 2) What is the relationship between constraints and creativity?
- Mario Hansi
- Dec 27, 2025
- 9 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
"The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable."
-
Robert Henri
After countless positive and instructive experiences, three serious knee injuries, and significantly reduced playing time during the last season, I decided at the age of 24 to draw a line under pursuing playing football professionally. I had already started coaching alongside playing and wanted to go much deeper in that field. At the same time, after years devoted to sport, I felt I wanted to experience a completely new environment, different people, and new challenges. That’s how a new door opened in my life — I began studying graphic design in an art school located in Karlova, a district of Tartu.
One beautiful spring day we were given an assignment to paint a monochrome picture: we were allowed to use only one colour, plus black and white. If you’ve ever been to Karlova, you may have noticed that in this neighbourhood — often nicknamed a “shingled village” because of its two-storey Tsar-era wooden houses — it’s quite difficult to find two buildings painted the same colour. How do you depict a place so rich in colour and overflowing with greenery using such limited means? At first, the task felt restrictive and almost impossible. Yet it forced me to adapt, to look at the environment from a new angle, and to find creativity where, at first glance, there seemed to be silence.
In fact, dealing with constraints like this is familiar to every artist. In her blog post "Constraints in Art" (2018), Dabi Baker writes: "The painter is limited by their tools, their color palette, the size of their canvas, and the amount of time they can devote to a piece of work before going mad. Oftentimes we exemplify great painters for how they overcame the constraints inherent to the medium that they work with. Whether it be mixing irregular ingredients to fashion new colors, experimenting with brush sizes and types, or the variations of technique, all of these choices are meant to overcome a constraint and produce a work of art that is significant to the artist, and, hopefully, someone else in the world."
"Yet, we encounter particular styles of painting that are magnificent because of the artist’s self-imposed limitations and constraint. The painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (pictured above), is probably the most prolific examples of the expert use of pointillism, with detailed characters and landscapes displayed in vibrant colorful dots. However, the use of pointillism to create this illustration was a limitation imposed by Georges Seurat and the world of art at the time."
All of this raises a question: can the same idea be applied to football?
Can constraints actually help us see more?
An ecological approach to creativity
ecology — a field of study dealing with relationships between organisms and their living environment. (EKSS 2009)
To understand ourselves and the world around us, we often try to explain complex phenomena — like football — by breaking them into small, separate parts. For a long time, sport has largely relied on a learning model in which a skill is decomposed into technical (as well as tactical, physical, psychological, social, etc.) elements. These are practised in isolation and according to precise instructions, assuming that once every component has been refined to perfection, it can later be “put back together” and applied successfully in the performance environment.
Ecological approach offers a different perspective. It emphasises the reciprocal influence between the player and the environment and views learning as a process of adaptation and exploration. There are no ready-made solutions. Instead, conditions are created that help the player find and shape effective ways of acting on their own.
However, the ecological approach is not merely one alternative to coach-centred instruction; it is a coherent, science-based framework whose core ideas come from ecological psychology and dynamical systems theories.
Ecological approach in science and practice
Ecological Psychology
— From James Gibson’s work comes the understanding that perception is not a separate internal processing system, but a direct interaction with the surrounding environment. Humans perceive the world not simply as a collection of shapes and colors, but directly through action possibilities (affordances) offered by the environment.
Dynamic System Theories
— Karl Newell’s work and that of other researchers view the athlete as a complex, adaptive system in constant change. Skill is not static; it emerges through the interaction of an individual’s internal characteristics (physical and psychological factors) and external conditions. Development often occurs through self-organisation, where adaptation means the system’s ability to organise its components to achieve the goals of action.
Later, researchers such as Keith Davids, Duarte Araújo, and Ian Renshaw and others linked and applied ideas from ecological psychology and dynamical systems theories in sport. This led to a framework in sport science known as ecological dynamics.
The ecological dynamics framework helps explain how skills do not develop merely through repeating technique, but emerge through the dynamic interaction of the player, the task, and the environment. Through this approach, coaches can design learning environments that reflect the realities of the game, where the player learns to adapt and solve situations effectively under constantly changing conditions (as shown in the video below).
Ecological dynamics brings together the following concepts and methods:
Representative learning design (Pinder et al., 2011)
This training and research concept, grounded in ecological dynamics, follows the principle that the learning environment must reflect the reality of the game — meaning that the same key information the player perceives in competition should be represented in training. Important sub-principles include:
Functionality — in training, there is access to the same key information as in the game (for example opponents’ movement, teammates’ positioning and runs, the location of the goal, etc.).
Action fidelity — the actions performed in training are equivalent in movement nature and purpose to those required in real game situations.
This is a step away from non-contextual isolated practice methods toward creating environments that mirror the complexity of the real game.
Nonlinear pedagogy (Chow et al., 2016)
Learning and skill development do not happen in a straight line or as a predictable step-by-step process. Each player develops at their own pace and in their own way, depending on their individual characteristics, the environment, and the tasks.
With this approach, variability and complexity are not seen as obstacles, but as essential components that help the player discover solutions that suit them and fit the situation. The aim is to create a learning process that is flexible and responsive, supporting the player’s autonomy. Training is not merely the mechanical execution of a pre-planned script, but an open process in which coaches are ready to notice, recognise, and amplify developmental opportunities as they emerge.
Constraints-led approach (Renshaw et al., 2019)
The coach does not simply give players commands, but designs the environment, tasks, and rules in ways that guide them to explore, experiment, and adapt. Organism constraints (physical, psychological), environmental constraints (pitch, weather, opponents), and task constraints (goals, rules of the game) create conditions in which the player must find optimal solutions to football problems based on those constraints.
Constraints as amplifier of creativity
The Constraints-Led Approach (CLA) is a learning and training method that emphasises that players’ behavior and decision-making can be influenced most effectively not through direct instructions or commands, but through tasks, the environment, and the player’s own characteristics. At its core is the understanding that learning happens when the player adapts to specific challenges that guide them toward finding suitable solutions. In other words, constraints do not restrict creativity — they create the conditions in which creativity can emerge.
As noted earlier, CLA distinguishes three main types of constraints:
Organism constraints — the player’s physical and psychological characteristics: body build and composition, age, speed, coordination, fatigue, emotional state, personality, etc.
Environmental constraints — weather, pitch dimensions, surface, opponents, crowd, lighting conditions, or other external factors that influence the player’s actions.
Task constraints — goals and rules of the game, playing principles, tactics, etc.
It is important to understand that CLA (or representative learning design) does not mean ONLY playing football and ONLY training game-like situations. If the coach does not design the situation with purpose, the training environment can become more like unstructured street football and therefore a less effective learning environment, where the coach is more of an overly passive observer than an active companion [1]. CLA requires intentional design — constraints that are thought through and serve a developmental goal, rather than operating randomly. Effective CLA-based training is like “planned chaos”: structured enough to guide desired behavior, but open enough to leave room for exploration, experimentation, and adaptation.
The coach’s goal is not simply to provide activity, but to create conditions that foster learning and the transfer of skills into the real context of the game. In this way, designing the training environment becomes one of the coach’s most important creative challenges. A well-designed environment, adapted to the players, is purposefully connected to the essence of football and its key information.
Designing the training environment
Effective training does not mean “more rules” or more complicated drills. Football is already complex and challenging by nature. Therefore, a good starting point is the game’s universal features: teammates, opponents, the ball, goals, the pitch, and the rules of football. When these are present, football is being played. When they are missing — or manipulated excessively — the behaviors we hope to see in the game can disappear. At the same time, a skillful coach can filter out what is most important from the game and, when necessary, bring it to the player even in a more isolated environment.
How much and which features to change — for example the number of goals, the size of the playing area, or the player-number ratio — always depends on context and purpose. This is where the coach’s skillfulness — the “art of coaching” — comes in: the ability to decide when to simplify and when to add complexity so that learning happens naturally and meaningfully.
The coach–player relationship can resemble the collaboration between a music producer and an artist: the producer creates the space, the tuning, and the atmosphere in which the artist can realise their potential. In the same way, a coach can act as a designer of environments, leaving the player the freedom to interpret, respond, and act.
Conclusion — Rick Rubin, Johnny Cash and the creative act
Rick Rubin, one of the most influential music producers of all time, is not a producer in the traditional sense. He is not known for complex arrangements, technical tricks, or an overpowering signature style. On the contrary, Rubin is often described as someone who removes: noise, expectations, unnecessary layers, and sometimes even the entire genre framework — until what remains is something very simple and very honest.
In his book The Creative Act, Rubin treats creativity not as a skill but as a state. Creativity does not arise from control or the display of knowledge, but from presence, sensitivity, and the ability to notice what is already there. The producer’s role is not to teach what and how to do, but to create a space in which the artist can be who they really are — even when that is fragile, uncomfortable, or against expectations.
For me, this approach revealed itself most clearly in Rick Rubin’s collaboration with Johnny Cash in the early 2000s. By then, Cash was aging and worn down by illness; his voice was rough and breaking, and in the eyes of the modern music industry he was more a relic of the past than a living creator. Many would have tried to hide these “deficiencies” — Rubin saw their potential.
He made Cash’s constraints the creative centre. Age, slowing down, and a voice that no longer carried power but experience became expressive tools. The production was reduced almost to nothing: voice, guitar, and silence. Not to fix anything, but to reveal something.
One of the most powerful results of that collaboration is Cash’s cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt.” The original song speaks of depressive inner emptiness, but in Cash’s performance it becomes an honest summary of life’s final phase. It is a regret-filled look back, where every pause and trembling phrase carries meaning. It is not a technically perfect performance — it is humane. Rubin did not instruct Cash how to sing or what to feel; he created the conditions in which Cash could be honest inside his constraints. And that is precisely why something unforgettable was born.
In both music and football, quality does not emerge from instructions alone, but from meaningful co-creation. It requires trust, openness, a shared purpose, and the courage to be part of the process. The result is not a copy or the “correct solution,” but something unique — something born at the intersection of the person, the environment, and the constraints.
Vive la révolution! ✊