Coping strategies of footballers who have recovered from COVID-19 in five European countries

Abstract

In the realm of sports performance, coping skills play a pivotal role, particularly within the stress inducing environment of sports. The aim of this research was to explore differences between football athletes who had tested positive for COVID-19 and athletes who had not contracted the virus in terms of their utilization of coping strategies. Additionally, differences among countries were investigated, in the case of football players who had, at some point, battled COVID-19. A total of 147 (one hundred and forty-seven) male football players from five European countries - Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania – took part in this study. To assess coping skills, we employed the Brief COPE questionnaire, which encompassed fourteen coping strategies, grouped into three categories: emotion-oriented coping strategies, problem/task-oriented strategies, and dysfunctional coping strategies. Using the Dwass-Steel-Critchlow-Fligner pairwise comparison test, the differences between the five countries were scrutinized, starting from the three dependent variables (the grouped coping strategies). Notably, football athletes from Poland and Romania exhibited a higher frequency of employing emotion-focused coping strategies (during the pandemic). Conversely, athletes from Italy leaned towards employing problem-focused strategies more frequently. No significant differences were observed in terms of dysfunctional coping strategies among football players who had battled COVID-19 across the five countries. We discussed the frequency of using coping strategies among football athletes who reported no infection with the SARS-COV-2 virus (up to the 4th wave of the pandemic) and those who had experienced COVID-19. The findings are of considerable interest to specialists, raising awareness on the coping skills employed by footballers during the pandemic.