Tactical skill in Australian youth soccer: Does it discriminate age-match skill levels?

Abstract

Objectives Football Federation Australia (FFA) has identified that Australian athletes are proficient physically, however often lack the technical and tactical skills to excel internationally. The aim of the current study was to assess if a video-based decision-making test could discriminate different age-matched skill levels of talent in Australian soccer. Design Cross-sectional observational. Methods Sixty-two youth male soccer players completed a video-based decision-making test. Results An ANOVA test showed that the video-based test significantly discriminated between all three groups, with the national elite athletes selecting more correct responses than the state elite (65.3 ± 8.1%; 56.0 ± 9.1%, respectively). The state elite were more accurate than the sub-elite (45.9 ± 8.8%). Conclusions Results suggest that a video-based test may be a suitable tool to use in the selection of athletes as a measure of decision-making skill. The low accuracy scores, even for the national elite cohort, suggest that decision-making skill at the youth level has room for improvement and should be prioritised as an area for development.

Decision-Making in Youth Team-Sports Players: A Systematic Review

“…One study [38] was more dedicated to a comparison of verbalized knowledge. Six of them compared the movement and response accuracy of the youth players [6,27,[39][40][41][42]. Five of the studies were conducted in association football (i.e., soccer), two in handball, one in Australian football, and one in baseball.…”

“…Using a different approach to characterize talent players, a decisions score methodology was employed in two studies [27,41]. Both studies followed similar methodologies [27,41]. Specifically, attacking video clips from the sport (football and Australian football) were given to three expert coaches, who used the clips to rate players' decisions.…”

“…After, players watched the videos and provided their scores. The decision-making scores of players were then used to compare talented and non-talented players in Australian football [41] and sub-elite, state elite, and national elite players in football [27]. In the case of Australian football, the decision-making scores were used to identify talented players after watching the clips [41].…”

“…The authors mentioned that integrating decision-making skills and tactical behavior into talent identification processes might improve the capacity of coaches to foster the development of their players [3]. Thus, over the past decade, due to the importance of decision-making, the decision-making abilities of youth athletes have received increased attention from the scientific community, and the body of literature investigating the decision-making abilities of youth athletes has grown in many sports [25][26][27][28]. Specifically, researchers have studied several decision-making-related variables, such as decision time [25,26] and response accuracy to a stimulus [27,28].…”

“…Thus, over the past decade, due to the importance of decision-making, the decision-making abilities of youth athletes have received increased attention from the scientific community, and the body of literature investigating the decision-making abilities of youth athletes has grown in many sports [25][26][27][28]. Specifically, researchers have studied several decision-making-related variables, such as decision time [25,26] and response accuracy to a stimulus [27,28]. Other studies have evaluated the effectiveness of several programs in enhancing players' decision-making abilities [29,30].…”