Abstract
Soccer players inescapably live under stress during the sportive career, and many real-life aspects of soccer situations operate in the ongoing performance. This study’s main objective was to elaborate the List of Stressors in Professional Indoor and Field Soccer, a self-report instrument designed to measure the impact of 77 soccer situations upon the sport performance. Participants were 138 indoor and field soccer players from the Brazilian Premier League. Each situation was evaluated on a 7-point scale, ranging from the most negative (−3) to the most positive (+3). Data were analyzed according to the players’ perception of the items: distress or eustress and its intensity, and after that, situations perceived as plus −1 and +1 were compared by time in which they were experienced and distributed among five categories established by the literature: Expectations about the Performance, Personal Factors, Competition Aspects, Training Demands, and Relationship with Significant People. Narratives of athletes’ experiences were also used to discuss the results. An Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling using Bi-factorial (BI-ESEM) was employed to assess the factor structure. For the total participants, 49 situations were perceived as distress and 28 as eustress. Using the criteria established a priori, the distribution was among the five categories in the remaining 32 situations. Differences in perception between less and more experienced players were found in 11 situations. The results revealed that Brazilian professional soccer players experience various stressful situations. These events are important representations of environmental demands and could predict the performance as they are perceived as eustress or distress. Some of these stressful situations are inherent in sport and others adjacent to the sports system or environment. Coach pressure to win and conflicts with teammates are examples of stressors in-sport, family problems and disputes with press or fans are examples of stressors external to the team, also called peripheral opponents, and showed the relative social influence of significant others in soccer performance. We can conclude that the knowledge of the direction of a given stress situation has important practical implications in preparing athletes and helping them face the performance stressors that are part of soccer daily life.
Highlights
The term stress started to be used only at the beginning of the 20th century
Soccer players are faced with a series of requirements, stressors, which can vary in terms of the content and intensity of their effect on sports performance (Jones et al, 1993; Swain and Jones, 1993; Jones, 1995a; Brandão, 2000; De Rose Junior et al, 2004; Zahariadis et al, 2006; Thelwell et al, 2008, Main and Grove, 2009; Garcia-Maás et al, 2010)
The purpose of this study was six, including (a) development of a List of Stressors in Professional Indoor and Field Soccer to facilitate the identification of situations that can cause stress in professional indoor and field players, (b) confirm if the stressful situations can be perceived as both distress and eustress, (c) identify the situations perceived as distress and eustress, (d) check which items make up the five previously established categories (Expectations about the Performance, Personal Factors, Competition Aspects, Training Demands, Relationship with Significant People), (e) examine the differences in the perception of the situations by age, and time as professional, and (f) assess the factor structure of the list
Summary
The term stress started to be used only at the beginning of the 20th century. Until the term was used in physics to describe the force that tends to deform an object. From the point of view of psychological stress research, the main emphasis of the studies is not on the physiological genesis, but on the psychological genesis of stress, changes in the well-being of individuals, cognitive processes, and appraisal of stressors and their psychological control (Nitsch, 1981; Jones, 1990). According to this conception, the following principles are important: the starting point of the study of stress is in the reciprocal relationship between the individual and the environment, in subjective perception and in the attribution of value judgments that the individual has about the situation of this environment (Folkman and Lazarus, 1984; Lazarus, 2000)
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