Rationale

Rationale Despite the increasing integration of spatiotemporal tracking data into football research, existing systematic and scoping reviews have predominantly focused on team-level tactical metrics, such as centroid positions, surface area, and team synchronisation, or on general physical demands. In many of these studies, however, the distinction between on-the-ball and off-the-ball behaviour is either absent or ambiguous, with analyses often aggregating all player movements regardless of their tactical relevance or context. This lack of conceptual clarity limits the ability to isolate and understand the specific behaviours that occur away from the ball, which are critical to both individual and collective performance. To date, no scoping review has systematically synthesised the literature concerning how players behave without ball possession, whether their team is in attacking or defending phase. Specifically, there is a lack of structured analysis on how players: • in attacking phases: create or attack spaces, support teammates by offering passing options, execute tactical runs (e.g., coming short, pulling wide, running behind, overlapping, underlapping), or coordinate movements with teammates based on role-specific tasks, game phase, or field zones; • in defending phases: maintain defensive compactness, apply pressure, cover zones, coordinate positioning with adjacent teammates, or engage in pressing structures, cover-shadow positioning, or block shifting. Interactions such as pairwise coordination (e.g., between a full-back and a winger) or group behaviours based on tactical roles remain under-explored at the micro level. Similarly, behavioral adaptations in response to spatial configurations, ball location, or team shape dynamics are often mentioned anecdotally but rarely analysed quantitatively using tracking data. Furthermore, although off-the-ball actions are crucial to match performance, often determining the success of on-ball events, their classification, measurement, and operational definition remain fragmented or inconsistent across studies. This limits both the academic understanding and the practical application of such behaviours in performance analysis, training design, and tactical modelling. Given the rise of new tracking technologies, increased access to high-frequency positional data, and the growing relevance of space-oriented performance frameworks, a comprehensive mapping of current research on off-the-ball behaviour in elite football is both timely and necessary. This scoping review aims to fill that gap by identifying how off-the-ball behaviours have been defined, measured, and analysed in the literature, with a focus on both individual and collective patterns in different game phases, field zones, and team contexts. In addition, it seeks to map the analytical, computational, and mathematical methods adopted to study these behaviours, in order to better understand how such techniques are currently being applied and where further methodological innovation is needed.