Retracing the steps towards professional football: practice engagement characteristics and performance attainment among Norwegian elite youth and senior players
Abstract
The overall purpose of this thesis is to identify characteristics that may explain why some players manage to progress to professional football while others do not. Specifically, I focused in this thesis on practice engagement characteristics throughout the career of male Norwegian elite youth and senior football players, and how such engagement relates to recommendations arising from prior research. The main research question for the thesis is: How and why does engagement in different sport activities contribute throughout the development of Norwegian male elite football players? The project has three parts: The first part of the project sought to provide an overview of available research related to the overall aim, resulting in a review-paper that guided further progression of the project (Article 1). In the second and third part, we addressed the engagement characteristics and perceived contributions of such engagement of Norwegian elite youth (Articles 2 and 3) and senior players (Article 4) through retrospective questionnaires and semi-structured interviews respectively. Paper I: Haugaasen, M. & Jordet, G. (2012). Developing football expertise: a football-specific research review. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 5, 177-201 Paper II: Haugaasen, M., Toering, T., & Jordet, G. (2014). From childhood to senior professional football: A multi-level approach to elite youth football players’ engagement in footballspecific activities. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 15, 336-344 Paper III: Haugaasen, M., Toering, T., & Jordet, G. (2014). From childhood to senior professional football: elite youth players’ engagement in non-football activities. Journal of Sports Sciences, 32, 1940-1949 Paper IV: Tatt ut av filen i Brage p.g.a. copyright-restriksjoner. / Not in the file in Brage because of copyright issues.
Description
Avhandling (doktorgrad) - Norges idrettshøgskole, 2015