Las necesidades formativas del entrenador de jóvenes futbolistasanálisis de la situación actual y propuestas de intervención

Abstract

We know that football is the most practiced sport in the whole world and it is also the most followed. So, it is one of the sports with more potential to influence society and the coach is its most influential person by the leadership action that he promotes near those surrounding him, especially if we are talking about children and young people. The coach is the one who can maintain the practice of football on the positive side, where it is intended to be and where it should remain, to foster educational values and to learn the sport in a harmonious way. Considering the importance of this figure in sports in general and in football in particular, it is essential for training to be a fundamental aspect of his qualities, namely because many other skills can emanate from this training, skills which may influence the young player in a favourable way in all its dimensions. Thus, the study on the football coach’s training, which usually plays an important part on our young people’s training, is not only important in the sports chapter but also in the social chapter. We have started our work by looking at the theoretical basis of the theme. In the first part, we started with a global framework concerning the recent legislation governing the coach and his training, we reviewed all the international and national documents on the training of coaches and their skills, collecting the relevant information. In a second, more specific part, we gradually approached the characteristics that a coach must have, in terms of the concepts of education and training needs among other aspects developed. One of the main objectives of this research was the development of a valid and reliable tool for the study of coach’s training, which might allow its subsequent application in Portugal and that might allow for the replication of the study in different contexts. For that purpose, we have created a questionnaire that started from the study by Abad (2009) and we have submitted this tool to a validation process with the aim of analysing the training of base football coaches in the clubs of the Beja Football Association. We have designed a questionnaire that, at the end of the validation process, included 121 items grouped in 8 dimensions (Sociodemographic Characteristics, Sport Experience, Personal Aspects, Training as a Coach, Continuous Training, Teaching Conception, Planning and Programming, Training Needs). We have carried out a qualitative and quantitative analysis that was performed through the evaluation of 12 specialists. The validity of the content was analysed through the Aiken V coefficient, establishing a 99% confidence interval and the coefficient of variation. To establish reliability, the questionnaire was applied to 20 coaches from four different clubs in the region in two different times, the internal consistency was analysed by Cronbach's Alpha method (0.915) and the test-retest reliability using the intra-class correlation coefficient resulting in 0.890 (p <0.01). The results show that the questionnaire gathers enough psychometric properties to be considered a valid and reliable tool to study and analyse the training needs of football coaches (Paixão, Abad & Giménez, 2019). In a second moment, the questionnaires created were applied to 124 coaches from the region of Beja, who were working with children and youth in football training. This sample represented 91% of the total study population and, through a descriptive and inferential analysis, it allowed us to analyse the profile of the coach, his training and his intervention in the different domains and parameters. We highlight some results, such as the fact that most coaches still do not even have the title of coach and that only a minority holds a higher education in the field of sports; on the other hand, the pleasure involved in training and teaching is the reason why coaches are in football training; as far as continuous training is concerned, the preferred strategies are: the creation of working groups between coaches, the visualization and analysis of games and video training, and the participation in practical workshops; we also emphasize that there is still a division between the directive methods and the discovery methods, among other interesting results. We conclude with the achievement of the general and specific aims, the presentation of the implications of the study, we present some improvement proposals, we show the limitations of the study and, finally, we indicate perspectives for the future.