Which factors disrupt football players’ concentration? A qualitative investigation into the opinions of national youth team coaches

The aim of this study was to identify the key situations during a football match that are most likely to disrupt the players' concentration. The twelve head coaches of all French national youth football teams were interviewed to obtain their expert views and identify the situations considered to have the most significant impact on match outcomes. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the U15 to U20 men's and U15 to U23 women's head coaches. An inductive thematic analysis of the qualitative data was conducted to produce a structured categorisation of the situations described. In total, six main categories emerged from the data corpus: 1) match tempo (e.g. match interruptions), 2) individual factors (e.g. substitute role), 3) daily training (e.g. routine during the week), 4) context (e.g. match importance), 5) fatigue (e.g. end of match), and 6) situational factors (e.g. score status). The match tempo category should notably be examined in greater depth since it accounted for more than half of the elementary units of meaning cited by the coaches. These findings offer new perspectives for research by highlighting the need to explore the underlying attentional processes and to develop intervention programs to optimise players' concentration especially in these specific match situations.