“Character Is the Most Important Thing in Soccer”—A Pilot Study on the Development and Effectiveness of a Character Building Program in High-Performance Youth Soccer
Background: Strength of character plays an important role in high-performance soccer. Yet little attention is paid to the character development of
young athletes in most youth programs. Objective: The purpose of this
pilot study was to describe the development of a new character building program
and to evaluate its effectiveness on strength of character domains and implicit
theories of intelligence and talent in a high-performance youth soccer club in
Germany. Methods: A pre-post mixed-methods pilot study was conducted
with 42 youth players. The intervention group (n = 14) was compared with
a club-internal control group (n = 14) and one control group from an
amateur soccer club setting (n = 14). The Implicit Theories of
Intelligence Scale was used to measure the player’s incremental beliefs about
intelligence and talent and a new designed questionnaire was used to measure
the strength of character. The quantitative analysis included Mann-Whitney-U
and Wilcoxon tests. For the qualitative analysis, essays of the intervention
group were thematically coded. Results: At baseline, the implicit
theories of talent scores and the strength of character scores were higher in
the intervention group compared with the amateur club players, whereas implicit
theories of intelligence scores were non-significant. In the intervention
group, scores on implicit theories of intelligence (p = 0.003) and strength of
character (p = 0.004) were significantly
higher at the end of the program compared with baseline. Conclusions:The
character building intervention increased the incremental beliefs about
intelligence and the strength of character in the young players of a high
performance youth soccer club.
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