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Examining the development environments of elite English football academies: The players' perspective

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-04-05, 09:11 authored by Andrew Mills, Joanne Butt, Ian Maynard, Chris Harwood
As a preliminary investigation, we examined elite youth football academy players’ perceptions of the quality of their development environment, at a crucial stage in their progression to the professional level. With institutional ethics approval, the Talent Development Environment Questionnaire (TDEQ) [1] was used to survey 50 elite players aged 16-18 (m 17.1, ± s = 0.6 years) recruited from the academies of Premier League and Championship clubs in England. Overall, the results suggest that elite player development environments are perceived to be of a good quality. However, while academies appeared strong in areas related to coaching, organisation, and sport-related support; they were somewhat deficient in areas related to athlete understanding, links to senior progression, and key stakeholder relationships. In addition to the importance of establishing well-integrated youth and senior teams and positive working relationships with parents; the findings underline the necessity for academies to pay close attention to the psychosocial environments they create for developing players. Theoretical considerations and applied implications for those involved in elite player development are discussed.

History

School

  • Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Published in

International Journal of Sports Science and Coaching

Volume

9

Issue

6

Pages

1457 - 1472

Citation

MILLS, A. ...et al., 2014. Examining the development environments of elite English football academies: The players' perspective. International Journal of Sports Science and Coaching, 9(6), pp. 1457-1472.

Publisher

SAGE © Multi-Science Publishing

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2014

Notes

This article was published in the International journal of Sports Science and Coaching [SAGE] and the definitive version is available at: http://spo.sagepub.com/content/9/6/1457

ISSN

1747-9541

Language

  • en

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