Investigating Skilfulness in Youth Soccer

William John McCalman

doi:10.25918/thesis.442

Academy soccer coaches are crucial to identifying talented players’, deciding their likelihood of transitioning to senior professional football and succeeding. One attribute coach’s view favourably is players’ skilfulness, spending significant time observing and developing it. Still, despite considerable research, there is limited agreement on what it is (i.e., conceptualisations) and how to measure it (i.e., operationalisations). The lack of consensus impacts the availability of valid and reliable assessments, leaving coaches to rely solely on their intuition. Therefore, this thesis aims to engage with research end-users by exploring experienced academy soccer coaches’ views of skilfulness, culminating in a conceptual model. Chapter 1 outlines research on talent identification in youth soccer, finding issues with the assessments used, and presents the thesis objectives, suggesting involving coaches in the research and assessing players’ skill. Chapter 2 offers a narrative review of skill conceptualisations in the literature and examines how it is operationalised. It finds contrasting views stemming from theoretical differences, which might explain researchers' various assessment design approaches. Chapter 3 justifies the thesis's philosophical and theoretical assumptions, methodology, and methods. Chapter 4 (Study 1 – McCalman et al., 2023) explores 11 coaches’ perceptions of players’ skills for identifying talent through semi-structured interviews. Coaches see skilful players as technically proficient, adaptable, effective decision-makers, and influential, and their perspectives on these determinants change in situations and contexts. Specifically, coaches focus on younger players’ skill potential and older players’ skill performance. Chapter 5 (Study 2) used an in-situ mixed-methods (quan + QUAL) design to explore this, unpacking 15 coaches’ perceptions via an online survey. They were more comfortable evaluating players’ skill performance as they needed further background information to assess their potential. Coaches also see players’ technical proficiency and decision-making as foundational, and they need a robust technical foundation before becoming adaptable or influential. Chapter 6 (Study 3) combined supplementary data from Studies 1 and 2 on coaches’ views on designing skill assessments, suggesting creating small-sided games with a specific focus. Chapter 7 discussed the thesis findings, presenting a conceptual model of soccer skilfulness and operational definitions of its sub-dimensions. Coaches’ pragmatic or agnostic perceptions on soccer skill questions the practical utility of previous conceptualisations. This thesis offers a foundation to support researchers and coaches in operationalising skill, by designing assessments for talent identification. Researchers can build on this work by establishing if existing measures generate practically relevant information for coaches and working with them to co-design assessments.

Investigating Skilfulness in Youth Soccer

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Investigating Skilfulness in Youth Soccer

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