Abstract

Psychological characteristics, including personality traits and psychological skills, have been shown to be relevant predictors of soccer performance. In research, general and sport specific standardized self-report questionnaires have been applied in psychological diagnostics of sports talent. However, with regard to the assessment of psychological characteristics of talented soccer players, a gap between research and practice is apparent. While soccer clubs often ask their coaches to assess their players on self-designed, unevaluated scouting sheets, research widely neglects expert coaches’ and clubs’ perspectives on relevant performance characteristics. As we believe that expert coaches’ assessments could be a valid predictor of a player’s current performance and future success, we provide recommendations on how to improve coaches’ assessment of psychological characteristics. As the quality of the assessment of psychological characteristics is crucial, we provide recommendations on how to ensure the central diagnostic standards: objectivity, reliability, and validity in talent assessment. Further, we argue that assessing psychological characteristics should combine self ratings of players and external ratings of coaches in talent development. Sport psychologists should assist clubs and coaches in improving the diagnostics of psychological characteristics as well as in embedding psychological diagnostics and interventions in the talent development process.

Highlights

  • Specialty section: This article was submitted to Performance Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

  • Whereas personality traits are conceptualized as being relatively stable across time and situations (Aidman and Schofield, 2004), psychological skills are less stable, meaning that they can change according to the situation or context

  • To improve coaches’ assessment of psychological characteristics, we provide recommendations on how to integrate coaches’ expertise and how to design diagnostically sound instruments that can be used in talent diagnostic

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Summary

PSYCHOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF TALENTED SOCCER PLAYERS

One of the most prominent sports worldwide, coaches are part of a highly professional talent identification and development system (Mills et al, 2012; Lobinger, 2015). Study results often lack clear implications for talent identification and development that can be implemented in the field (Abbott and Collins, 2004), yielding a gap between research and practice (Figueiredo et al, 2014) This gap is apparent in the assessment of psychological characteristics of talented players in professional youth soccer. Qualitative interview studies involving coaches point out other, additional relevant psychological characteristics like awareness, passion, professional attitude (Mills et al, 2012) or conforming dedication and willingness to sacrifice (Holt and Dunn, 2004) that are not necessarily considered in standardized self-report questionnaires This indicates that considering the coaches’ perspective provides additional insight on relevant psychological characteristics. The characteristics identified by expert coaches’ intuition might be helpful in characterizing talents and valid for predicting current performance and future success in soccer players (van Yperen and Duda, 1999; Williams and Reilly, 2000). To optimize coaches’ assessments, several aspects with regards to objectivity, reliability, and validity of the instruments applied have to be considered

Improving Objectivity
Improving Reliability
Improving Validity
Findings
CONCLUSION

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