The pre-match talk: A multiple-method examination of youth-elite football coaches’ motivational content

Abstract

Pre-match meetings are popular scenes in team sports, with coaches typically gathering the full squad within the dressing room and sharing their thoughts before the warm-up and/or competition. Whilst researchers have outlined the effects of informational or emotional talks, little is known about the actual verbal strategies that coaches adopt to influence their players. Therefore, this study examined the motivational content of football coaches’ verbal behaviours and underpinning perceptions of pre-match talks’ delivery. Five coaches (Mage = 36.2 years) working at a La Liga academy were involved in six pre-match talks (n = 30) and one semi-structured interview each. Talks were analysed using a two-stage coding process after adaptation of validated and motivationally relevant instruments, and interviews were assessed following thematic analysis procedures. Game strategy units were the most commonly employed topic across all coaches, which involved ‘neutral’ behaviours such as role description, game objective specification, and opposition statements. These were complemented with autonomy and competence supportive messages such as facilitating choices/opinions, offering rationales, supporting past performance, or ego-oriented and social climate support dimensions, depending on the coach. Data suggested that contextual factors could strengthen or attenuate the use of these verbal behaviours/dimensions. Build-up play contents were more likely to feature autonomy support game strategy comments than defending aspects, whereas lower-ranked and underdog opponents were associated with increased disapproving past performance and ego-involving statements compared to when facing higher-ranked opponents or playing derbies. Thus, it is suggested that the use of autonomy-, competence- and relatedness-supportive dimensions in addition to task-oriented messages should be reconsider by coaches if attempting to convey a need-supportive motivational climate.