Football Coaches Research Articles

Exploring Soccer Coaching Methods: Design and Validation of a Measurement Instrument

Soccer coaches, although not prominently featured in the foreground, are essential to the outcomes of the sport. They are key figures between athletes and organizational goals. Choosing, retaining, and developing the greatest athletes is the cornerstone to a successful coaching career. The aim of this study was to develop and validate a questionnaire that was determine the characteristic soccer coaching styles. A experimental study involved the participation of 207 soccer coaches (B, A and PRO UEFA coaching license). The questionnaire comprises 14 themes and consists of 65 items designed to evaluate soccer coaching styles, developed from the updated Leadership Scale for Sport. The validation of the developed instrument in this empirical study was conducted using two procedures: (1) factor analysis (PCA with oblique rotation) and (2) an internal consistency assessment (Scale Reliability Analysis – Cronbach's Alpha). Nineteen significant factors were extracted, and they are as follows: Player contribution to the game system; Cooperation/ Opinions; Implementation of coach's requirements; Teaching; Motivation; Conflict resolution; Informations; Sanction; Expressing an opinion; Error correction at own discretion; Highlighting the good and bad sides of players; Instructions; Team goal setting; Highlighting positivism/ negativism; The coach's personal expectations; Team solutions; Strategy creation; Social support; The influence of the team on coaching decision-making. By analyzing the data, it was determined that “B” football coaches are characterized by the coaching style "positive feedback", “A” soccer coaches by the "training and instructor" and "positive feedback" styles, while “PRO” coaches are characterized by the "positive feedback" style and a slightly lower frequency by the "training and instructor" style. Using only one coaching/leadership style is certainly a limiting factor, as different situations require different coaching approaches.

Focus on reflective competence: A triangulation to examine youth soccer coaches' reflective competence

Introduction & Purpose Coaching is recognized as a complex socio-educational interaction (Jones, 2007), a view supported by the German Football Association (DFB). The DFB emphasizes reflection in the development of football coaches, seeing it as essential for the quality of coaching and the holistic development of youth players. Reflective competence (RC) is seen as a key component of professionalization (DFB, 2022), defined as the ability and willingness to comprehensively deal with one’s own knowledge and actions in breadth and to achieve a certain depth in the reflexive and transformative engagement with issues (Krieg & Kreis, 2014). Studies show that coaches learn primarily through observation and experience (Cushion, et al., 2012), which risks perpetuating outdated behaviors. Against this background, our study asks: What (breadth) and how (depth) do youth coaches reflect on their knowledge and coaching practice? Method Seven coaches from DFB selection centers in Bavaria participated in the study. Their training sessions were videotaped and used for reflection in stimulated recall interviews (Dempsey, 2010). Coaches were asked about their understanding of reflection using narrative prompts and to reflect independently on their training sessions using the video sequences. Analysis included categorizing the understanding and relevance of reflection, as well as the breadth and depth of reflection, taking into account individual differences. Result Coaches understood reflection as “thinking about oneself” or “looking back” to consciously justify or improve practices. They showed a high level of willingness to reflect, especially valuing peer feedback. In terms of breadth, coaches mostly reflected on corrective feedback behaviors, error patterns, or training alternatives. However, the depth of reflection was limited; coaches often moved to transformative reflection without deeply analyzing issues, lacking detailed descriptions against related assumptions, previous experiences, or theoretical explanations. Discussion Coaches focused primarily on optimizing practices rather than examining issues in depth. The breadth of reflection is consistent with the DFB's shift from coach-dominated to player-dominated training practices. Conclusion Our study highlights the critical role of reflection in the professional development of youth soccer coaches at DFB selection centers in Bavaria. While coaches show a significant willingness to engage in reflective practices, there is a notable deficiency in the depth of their reflection. This highlights the need for enhanced reflective training programs that encourage deeper, more comprehensive engagement with coaching practices and theoretical knowledge. By fostering such reflective competence, coaches can contribute to a more nuanced and effective coaching methodology, ultimately benefiting the holistic development of youth players.

Investigating Painkiller Use in Amateur Football: A Coach's Perspective.

Painkiller use in amateur sports and, especially, in football is increasingly being discussed, but the scientific data on this field are very limited. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the prevalence of painkiller use in amateur football from the perspective of coaches, as well as to determine how and to which extent coaches can influence their teams in terms of painkiller use and prevention. Using an online questionnaire, a cross-sectional analysis of painkiller use in German amateur football from the 4th league to the lowest amateur classes was carried out from the perspective of team coaches. A total of 628 participants were contacted, and 400 (63.7%) completed the questionnaire completely and were therefore included in the evaluation. Of the 400 participating team coaches in amateur football, 369 (92.3%) were male and 31 (7.7%) were female. The coaches reported that 36.2% (SD = 29.1) of their players have used painkillers at some point due to football-related pain in their career. The majority of coaches believed that the use of painkillers is not compatible with competition (74%), and even more believed that it is not compatible with football training (90.8%). Furthermore, 56.2% of the coaches themselves had already taken painkillers in their own football career for football-related pain, and 64% had already bought over-the-counter painkillers without a prescription. The use of painkillers increased in the higher playing levels. The availability of painkillers in first aid kits was reported by around 60%, but they were reported as freely accessible in the dressing room by only 10% of the coaches. This is the first study to describe the painkiller use in amateur football from the perspective of coaches. The prevalence of painkiller use in this study was found to be significantly lower than what is indicated in the data from the existing literature. The majority of coaches see the use of painkillers during games and training as incompatible, even though there is a large proportion of coaches who have already bought over-the-counter painkillers for football-related pain. As the first scientific analysis of team coaches, this study provides fundamental data for the prevention of excessive painkiller use in amateur football.

Investigation of Superstitious Behavior Tendencies of Professional Football Players and Coaches

This study aims to elucidate the superstitious behavior tendencies of professional football players and club coaches. The research group consists of 22 football players and 9 football coaches selected through the "Criterion Sampling" method. The research is considered as basic qualitative research. These are qualitative research studies in which data are collected through documents, interviews, or observation analyses. The research design employed in this study is phenomenology (phenomenological research design) which is a qualitative research design. In this research, “Superstitious Belief” has been selected as the phenomenon and the meanings attributed to this phenomenon by football players and coaches are attempted to be revealed. Semi-structured interview forms have been prepared to identify the superstitious behavior tendencies of players and coaches. In this context, open-ended questions are asked to the participants to determine their superstitious behavior tendencies. The data obtained have been analyzed using the content analysis method. According to the findings, the Superstitious Behavior Tendency comprises a theme, a sub-theme, and six categories. Under the sub-theme of superstitious behavior tendencies among professional football players and coaches are the categories of Clothing-Appearance, Lucky Objects, Pre-match Ritual, In-match Behavior, Team Ritual, Faith and Prayer. The opinions of players and coaches regarding the questions prepared for this theme are presented. Word clouds have been created illustrating prominent codes under the identified categories based on data obtained from interviews with participants. In conclusion, beyond effective preparation and training phases for performance enhancement, it is discerned that some superstitious behavior tendencies exist among players, contributing to elevating their motivation and self-confidence to higher levels.

Effects of training repetition on young footballers’ tactical and physical performances: free and conditioned large-sided games

This study evaluated the consequences of repeating the same large-sided games, playing free or conditioned, during several training sessions on young footballers’ tactical and conditional performances and their variabilities. Thirty-two U14 and U16 developmental male footballers participated in the study. Both teams, divided into two balanced groups (free play and conditioned), faced each other during three eight-a-side games (seven vs seven, plus goalkeepers) during three training sessions. The free-play groups played as they pleased, while the conditioned groups played the games conditioned by tactical instructions. Tactical performance was assessed by central tendency and normalized approximate entropy measures of the distance of each player to the team centroid (m) and the distance of each player to their mean position (m), while the conditional performance was assessed by total distance (m) and walking, jogging, running, and sprinting distances traveled (m), and number of accelerations and decelerations performed. Whereas players’ average tactical and conditional responses scarcely varied between sessions, inter- and intra-player variabilities were always considerable (coefficient of variation >10%) regardless of the task conditions and the age group. In addition, all footballers’ conditional variability was substantially higher at faster speeds (jogging, running, and sprinting distances) than at slower ones (total distance and walking distance traveled), and for accelerations and decelerations performed. Implementing large-sided games with or without tactical instructions may be an appropriate training strategy to ensure stable and constant average responses for the team. Nevertheless, academy football coaches should bear in mind and manage the variability between and within players.

NCAA football coach compensation and non-price competition for football players

ABSTRACT College football coach salaries at big-time programmes have increased substantially in recent years. We investigate non-price competition for incoming athletes as a source of salary increases. The NCAA cartel ensures that athletes receive compensation limited to the cost of attending college, which prevents football programmes from competing for athlete’s services on a price (compensation) basis. Non-price competition frequently emerges under these conditions. We develop evidence that increases in head football coach salaries cause increased football recruiting success using an instrumental variables approach to control for correlation between salaries and unobservable institution-specific factors affecting recruiting success. Results from a sample of 90 FBS schools over the period 2006–2015 support the presence of non-price competition for college football players. Each $1 million increase in head coach salary increases the quality of the incoming class of football recruits by about one standard deviation.

A Project-Led Framework for Coach Development in English Men’s Professional Football: A Premier League Case Study

Coach education and development programmes are central to the professional development experiences of sport coaches. Typically, these programmes are structured and sequenced in a linear pathway, and present an opportunity for certification which can be a prerequisite to practice and/or employment. Increasingly, as learning becomes viewed as part of a coach’s lifeworld, versus simply as a means to an end, education and development provision is beginning to reflect this. This article introduces and explores the Coach Development Institute Programme, part of the Premier League’s Elite Coaching Plan, which seeks to improve the quality of football coaching in English boys’/men’s football by engaging coaches in a 2-year work-based learning opportunity. Built around a core of project-based learning and assessment, coaches are supported as they examine a series of meaningful performance problems in their unique practice environments. Through this work, we demonstrate how theories, concepts, and principles from the adult education and assessment as learning literature might work as they are applied in a coach education and development context. With such sparsity of case-based examples like this within the peer-reviewed literature, we intend that our contribution could inform, promote dialogue, and raise questions about authentically supporting coaches beyond a minimum standard of practice.

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Football coach sues for wrongful firing Student‐athletes, university fail to reach settlement in Title IX suit Coach sues university for vacating wins Faith & Sports Institute partners with Baylor athletics

Nurturing Football Talent: A Conceptual Framework for Talent Development Environment

ABSTRACT The environment is believed to play a crucial role in developing sport talents. Over the past two decades, a great deal of research has been carried out on sport talent development environment (TDE). However, few theoretical frameworks are dedicated to helping understand the TDE in a particular sport. Seeking a better understanding of the TDE in football, also known as “soccer” in North America, this study proposes a novel environmental framework that takes particular account of the situational characteristics of football, using a conceptual framework analysis. The framework is organized hierarchically with two main factors: sport and non-sport domains. The sport factor is further divided into four sub-factors: football coach, interaction with teammates, football training, and football competition. Academic and family support are identified as two sub-factors of the non-sport factor. This two-domain and six-factor TDE framework can help improve the understanding of the application of the TDE factors in the football context and thus optimize the football talent development practice.

An Empirical Estimation of NCAA Head Football Coaches Contract Duration

Abstract While previous research on head coach dismissals finds that team performance and managerial characteristics impact employment survival, these studies ignore the impact of contract modifications. Using an accelerated failure time survival model with hand-collected college head football coach contract data, I find that race/ethnicity affects the hazard rate of contract modifications but not the hazard rate of a head coach’s dismissal. Additionally, analysis of employment duration ignoring contract modifications may result in erroneous conclusions with respect to the effect that race/ethnicity has on a head coach’s dismissal.

Football-Generated Rent Sharing and Expenditures on Women’s Intercollegiate Athletics

Recent research contains evidence of rent sharing in intercollegiate athletic programs from revenues generated by football and men’s basketball and regulations restricting compensation to athletes. Title IX mandates equal opportunities for male and female college athletes, clearly impacting athletic department budgets. These factors create a rich environment for analyzing athletic spending decisions. We analyze spending on women’s sports for about 120 NCAA public FBS athletic departments. Results from instrumental variables models that account for the endogeneity of the rent proxy variable, head football coach salary, indicate the presence of rent sharing from football-generated rents to spending on women’s sports.

Louis P. DeFilippo: An Italian American Football Coach

Louis P. DeFilippo: An Italian American Football Coach

The Finishing Space Value for Shooting Decision-Making in High-Performance Football.

Football players' decision-making behaviours near the scoring target (finishing situations) emerge from the evolving spatiotemporal information directly perceived in the game's landscape. In finishing situations, the ball carrier's decision-making about shooting or passing is not an individual decision-making process, but a collective decision that is guided by players' perceptions of match affordances. To sustain this idea, we collected spatiotemporal information and built a model to quantify the "Finishing Space Value" (FSV) that results from players' perceived affordances about two main questions: (a) is the opponent's target successfully reachable from a given pitch location?; and (b) from each given pitch location, the opposition context will allow enough space to shoot (low adversaries' interference)? The FSV was calculated with positional data from high-performance football matches, combining information extracted from Voronoi diagrams (VD) with distances and angles to the goal line. FSV was tested using as a reference the opinion of a "panel of expert" (PE), composed by football coaches, about a questionnaire presenting 50 finishing situations. Results showed a strong association between the subjective perception scale used by the PE to assess how probable a shot made by the ball carrier could result in a goal and FSV calculated for that same situation (R2=0.6706). Moreover, we demonstrate the accuracy of the FSV quantification model in predicting coaches' opinions about what should be the "best option" to finish the play. Overall, results indicated that the FSV is a promising model to capture the affordances of the shooting circumstances for the ball carrier's decision-making in high-performance football. FSV might be useful for more precise match analysis and informing coaches in the design of representative practice tasks.

Individual psychological characteristics of under-17 football players in Indonesia and Malaysia: sport psychology approach

Football is complex because it involves physical aspects, technical competence, the ability to understand tactics, and psychological conditions. This study focuses on exploring the psychological characteristics needed by U17 football players in Indonesia and Malaysia to become professional football players in the future. The researcher used a qualitative method with a grounded theory approach to find these psychological characteristics. The researcher conducted interviews, observations, and document analysis to collect data from 25 football coaches in Indonesia and Malaysia who already have a football coaching license and have at least five years of experience as U17 football coaches who were participants in this study. The license and knowledge of the coaches are expected to be valuable sources of information in this study. The data collected were analyzed through several steps, starting from open coding, axial coding, and selective coding, to find themes that emerged from the coach's information. In addition, to facilitate data grouping, the researcher also conducted data analysis with the help of software in qualitative research, namely NVivo 14. This study found five psychological characteristics that can help U17 football players to rise professionally. The first characteristic is the cognitive aspect of the player's intellectual ability, goal setting, imagery, focus, and willingness. Second, affective factors involve self-confidence, happiness, motivation, and self-control. Third, behavioral factors include discipline, attitude, commitment, and respect. Fourth, personality factors include courage, adaptability, and mental toughness. The last factor is the spiritual aspect, which requires players to have ritual and social worship. The psychological element is not the main factor in the success of football players, but it is a determining factor. With the development of scientific collaboration for football, football coaches or stakeholders in Indonesia and Malaysia can use the results of this study as a basis for creating programs for the development of football in both countries. Keywords: individual, psychological characteristics, developmental pathways, football, Indonesia, Malaysia

Heed guidance from student‐athlete's suit against school over NIL dispute

It was just a matter of time before a name, image, and likeness arrangement ended up in litigation, and now the first of these lawsuits is upon us. Specifically, Jaden Rashada, a highly sought after quarterback coming out of high school, filed a lawsuit against the University of Florida, the head football coach, a former football staff member who ran the team's NIL program, and a major Florida athletics booster, along with his company, over an NIL deal that went bad.

To play or not to play, that is the question: an interview study with amateur football coaches on perceptions of pain during sports participation

Amateur football coaches play a key role in preventing, assessing and treating pain among their players, as they are often the first point of contact and may be the main...

‘There’s nothing you can do’: multi-level factors affecting the careers of female football coaches in Poland

The main objective of this article is to examine the professional experiences of female football coaches in Poland. Existing research within the field of coaching science has highlighted a noticeable underrepresentation of women in this profession. However, the available data on this topic is limited to specific areas. By utilizing Brofenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, this study aimed to identify the primary obstacles female coaches encounter and the few factors that support women in this coaching realm. The findings of this study could potentially contribute to a more inclusive and diverse coaching landscape in Poland and beyond. Drawing from qualitative interviews (n = 7), the results illuminate a multifaceted array of challenges the participants face at different stages of their careers, varying in intensity. The findings underscore the remarkable resilience of Polish female coaches, who confront barriers predominantly emanating from socio-cultural presumptions prevailing within the football community. These challenges are compounded by perceptions of the game as inherently ‘masculine’ and Polish society’s conventional constructs of masculinity and femininity.

The Comparison of Position-Specific Match Performance between the Group and Knockout Stage of the UEFA Champions League

This study aimed to compare match performance in the group and knockout stage of the UEFA Champions League (UCL) for players in different playing positions. The information on physical and technical performances was collected during all UCL matches (n=125) in the 2022/23 season. Players’ observations (n=1387) were classified according to their playing positions as central defender (CD; n=471), fullback (FB; n=283), central midfielder (CM; n=376), winger (WM; n=137) and forward (FW; n=104). No differences in technical performance between the group and knockout stage were found for CDs, FBs, CMs, and WMs, while only FWs achieved significantly less shots on target (Cohen’s d (d=0.46), total passes (d=0.54), successful passes (d=0.49), and more duels (d=0.39) in the knockout compared to the group stage. The CDs, CMs, and WMs covered greater distance at moderate (d=0.46–0.63) and high (d=0.29–0.38) speeds in the knockout compared to the group stage, while no differences in physical performance between the group and knockout stage were found for FBs and FWs. This study demonstrated that (i) the technical performance of UCL players was in general stable irrespective of the competition stage, (ii) matches played in the knockout stage were characterized by greater match intensity compared to the matches played in the group stage of UCL for CDs, CMs, and WMs. These findings may help football coaches in the decision-making process when selecting the players for specific matches and designing training programs.

Players are positive regarding injury prevention exercise programmes, but coaches need ongoing support: a survey-based evaluation using the Health Action Process Approach model across one season in amateur and youth football

ObjectivesImplementation of injury prevention exercise programmes (IPEPs) in sports is challenging, and behaviour change among players and coaches is essential for success. The aim was to describe players’ and coaches’...

The Influence of Football Coach Competition on Athlete Achievement Results

Football is a very popular sport and in demand by people worldwide, including Indonesia. However, the current achievements of Indonesian football are not yet impressive. One factor thought to influence soccer athletes' performance is competition and the quality of coaches. This research aims to determine the effect of soccer coach competition on athlete achievement results. The research method used is a literature study by analyzing related literature. The research results show that soccer coach competitions have a significant influence on athlete performance results. The higher the level of competition the coaches participate in, the better the athlete's performance results will be. This is because coaches who have experience participating in high competition will have better knowledge, skills, and coaching abilities. The implication of this research is the need for efforts to increase the competence of football coaches through increasing the level of competition they participate in, as well as adequate support and coaching from related parties that Indonesian football achievements can improve.