‘Goalkeepers are players too’: key attributes coaches’ look for in talented youth soccer goalkeepers

Abstract

Objective

Currently, there is a gap in knowledge on what the key goalkeeper attributes are during talent identification and selection in soccer. Hence, the objective was to investigate South African coaches’ perceptions regarding key attributes of talented youth soccer goalkeepers.

Design

Cross-sectional survey.

Methods

A total of 173 soccer coaches (130 men and 43 women; M_age = 36.6 ± 10.4 years; M_{coaching experience} = 8.4 ± 7.3 years) were purposively recruited to participate in the study. All of the participants completed the Talent Identification Questionnaire in Soccer – Goalkeepers (TIDQS-GK).

Results

The six-component solution identified by the principal component analysis accounted for 68.96% of the total variance. Coaches deemed psychological (e.g. concentration, bravery, self-discipline), physical (e.g. speed, flexibility), social (e.g. coachability, communication), technical (e.g. catching the ball, first touch), tactical (e.g. defensive organisation against set plays) and perceptual-cognitive skills (e.g. decision-making) as important factors in identifying talented goalkeepers.

Conclusions

The study offers new insights into the key attributes that soccer coaches look for in talented goalkeepers such as concentration, bravery, speed, coachability and decision-making and could direct coaches towards more objective evaluation strategies for informing their decisions.

Introduction

Talent identification and development programmes have become central to the operations of youth soccer academies globally, with sports science spearheading the process of identifying key attributes of youth players that may predict their future success [1, 2]. The process of talent detection, identification and selection is important for the development of future elite-level players [3], whereby the central premise of this process is to identify and select the most promising young talents to focus resources on their development [4]. Within the applied context, soccer member associations and professional clubs have a general belief that early talent identification and selection is essential to ensure clubs focus resources on player development and reduce potential attrition rates. However, researchers have indicated only a small proportion of players in professional development programmes reach the professional level [4,5,6,7]. Therefore, talent identification and development programmes should focus their limited resources on players who have the best potential for future elite performance [8].

The general objective of talent identification is to identify players who demonstrate the potential to excel at an elite senior performance level [3, 9, 10]. Traditionally, talent identification decisions are made by coaches / scouts observing players during a game or training session [11]. A limitation of this method is the subjectivity and potential influence of biases related to the assessors preconceived notion of what constitutes a talented player [12–13]. Hence, there is a growing use of objective measures in talent identification or the combination of subjective and objective assessments (see Barraclough et al. [14] for a review of methodological approaches to TID). Therefore, with the importance of these decisions on the organisation and the player, it is imperative to understand what specific characteristics youth coaches and scouts consider important when making talent identification decisions. Researchers have explored this, highlighting recruiters (i.e., coaches, scouts and technical directors) consider technical (i.e., finishing, first touch, heading, striking the ball and tackling), tactical (i.e., creativity and decision-making), psychosocial (i.e., coachability, communication and self-discipline), and physical (i.e., speed and stamina) attributes when assessing potential talent [1, 3, 7, 15]. While the findings do provide some insight into the factors which may guide talent identification decisions, a key limitation of the data is they are focussed on the attributes of outfield players, with little to no discussion of goalkeeper attributes.

The lack of information on goalkeeper attributes significantly constrains the knowledge on talent identification and selection in soccer. Goalkeeper attributes are worth exploring because goalkeepers are an essential component of soccer teams and their skill set differs significantly from that of their outfield counterparts. For instance, goalkeepers alternate between low-intensity activities like walking or jogging [2, 16] and high-intensity ones like diving, stopping shots and managing one-on-one situations [2]. The lack of goalkeeper-specific information for youth soccer talent-identification efforts limits recruiters’ ability to reliably identify promising players in that position [2]. This study provides novel data on the attributes South African coaches consider when identifying promising goalkeepers and provides a baseline for future research on desirable soccer goalkeeper attributes.

Methods

This study used a cross-sectional survey. A total of 200 soccer coaches was targeted in the Gauteng Province of South Africa. A purposive sample of 173 soccer coaches (130 men and 43 women; M_age = 36.6 years, SD = 10.4 years; M_{Coaching−experience} = 8.4 years, SD = 7.3 years) took part in the study, which yielded an 86% response rate. The inclusion criteria included having worked in youth soccer talent identification programmes for at least a year and having a formal role in identifying, recruiting and selecting talented young soccer players. Institutional ethical approval was granted for this study, and all participants provided informed consent prior to participating.

To assess the participants’ perceptions of attributes relevant to identifying promising goalkeepers, the Talent Identification Questionnaire in Soccer – Goalkeepers (TIDQS-GK; see supplementary file), was developed following a review of the current literature on goalkeeping performance [3, 7, 17, 18]. The questionnaire contained 61 items related to technical (16 items), tactical (8 items), physical (13 items), perceptual-cognitive (4 items), psychological (12 items) and social (8 items) attributes of goalkeepers. All items were anchored on the Miller’s Scale Battery of International Patterns and Norms [19], which is a 9-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (not important) to 9 (very important). The scale uses three reference points with a bandwidth of three points each: 1–3 points (least important), 4–6 points (moderately important 4) and 7–9 points (most important), and has been used in previous talent identification studies [3, 20]. The Cronbach’s alpha coefficient values were 0.87 for perceptual-cognitive skills, 0.91 for social skills, 0.93 for tactical skills, 0.94 for physical skills, 0.95 for technical skills and 0.95 for psychological skills, demonstrating that the questionnaire is reliable [21].

The Gauteng Sports Council was contacted to gain access to youth soccer coaches who were actively involved in identifying, selecting and recruiting youth goalkeepers. Eligible coaches were contacted during training sessions, coaching seminars and workshops and informed of the study’s aims and methods. Participants were then given a hard copy of the TIDQS-GK along with the associated definitions and explanations of each attribute (see Table 1) [3, 15, 17, 18, 22, 23]. Participants were instructed to complete the questionnaire on their own in a quiet, private area before returning their responses to the researcher. The TIDQS-GK took 10 to 15 min to complete.

Table 1 Attributes and descriptions

All data were transferred to Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS, version 28) for statistical analysis. Descriptive statistics for each attribute were reported as means (M), standard deviations (SD), frequencies and percentages. Principal component analysis (PCA) was used to reduce the number of items and group them into meaningful subscales [24]. The following were the extraction criteria used in the PCA: (1) significant (p < 0.05) Bartlett’s test results for sampling adequacy and sphericity with a Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling greater than the threshold of 0.60; (2) eigenvalues greater than 1.0, indicating that a component explained more variance than any single item; and (3) factor loadings greater than or equal to 0.30 [25, 26].

Results

The 61 items of the TIDQS-GK were evaluated for the factor structure and for how well they represented the underlying latent variables using PCA with an oblique oblimin rotation [24]. Bartlett’s test of sphericity showed significant results (x² = 12627.75; df = 1830; p < 0.001), and the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin statistic was 0.89, exceeding the 0.60 threshold [27]. The TIDQS-GK correlation matrix was therefore deemed appropriate for the PCA. The six-component solution identified by the PCA accounted for 68.96% of the total variance. The first component, psychological skills, had 12 items with an eigenvalue of 30.86 with a variance of 50.59%. Coaches deemed concentration (M = 7.12, SD = 1.61), bravery (M = 7.11, SD = 1.45) and self-discipline (M = 7.11, SD = 1.38) to be the most important psychological attributes for goalkeepers.

The second component, physical skills, had 13 items with an eigenvalue of 3.58 and accounted for 5.87% of the variance. Coaches rated flexibility (M = 6.82, SD = 1.58) and agility (M = 6.71, SD = 1.76) as important attributes. The third component, social skills, had eight items and an eigenvalue of 2.58 and accounted for 4.23% of the variance. Soccer coaches identified coachability (M = 7.23, SD = 1.32), communication (M = 7.07, SD = 1.46) and character (M = 7.02, SD = 1.34) as the most important social attributes for goalkeepers. The fourth component, technical skills, had 16 items with an eigenvalue of 1.88 and accounted for 3.08% of the variance. Coaches rated catching the ball (M = 6.88, SD = 1.50) and first touch (M = 6.74, SD = 1.72) as the most important technical attributes for goalkeepers.

The fifth component, tactical skills, had eight items with an eigenvalue of 1.70 and accounted for 2.79% of the overall variance. Coaches identified defensive organisation against set plays (M = 6.85, SD = 1.61), defending in one-on-one situations (M = 6.84, SD = 1.83) and ability to come off the line and deal with high balls (M = 6.78, SD = 1.58) as the most essential tactical skills for goalkeepers. The final component, perceptual-cognitive skills, had four items with an eigenvalue of 1.47 and accounted for 2.40% of the variance. Soccer coaches rated decision-making (M = 6.96, SD = 1.55) and game awareness/sense (M = 6.91, SD = 1.61) as important perceptual-cognitive attributes in goalkeepers (Table 2).

Table 2 Item loadings, eigenvalues, percentages of variance, and descriptive statistics for the TIDQS-GK

Discussion

The purpose of this study is to investigate the attributes youth soccer coaches in South Africa perceive as important in identifying promising youth goalkeepers. The findings indicate that coaches deem concentration (i.e., ability to maintain focus throughout a game), bravery (i.e., ability to take calculated risks) and self-discipline (i.e., ability to motivate themselves to do what is right) to be the most important characteristics in goalkeepers. These results complement those of previous studies on talent identification that concluded that psychological and mental attributes are important in selecting youth players [3, 12, 20]. Previous studies have highlighted the importance of qualities like bravery, presence, focus, concentration and the capacity to deal with mistakes in making talent-identification decisions [17, 18, 28]. These characteristics are crucial in defending the goal and preventing the opposition from scoring [17].

This study’s results highlight that coaches perceive other physical qualities, such as flexibility and agility, as important in identifying promising goalkeepers. Coaches may value these attributes because they enable goalkeepers to manipulate and control their bodies to make diving saving, or also perform several dives in succession during continuous attacks by their opponents [29]. This study’s findings highlight that coaches perceive speed (i.e., greater top speed than peers at the same stage of development) as the least important attribute for goalkeepers. This result contrasts Otte et al.’s [18] finding that speed is a key factor in goalkeepers’ performance. A possible reason for this finding may be because goalkeepers may only perform two sprints during a match, and often over a short distance (generally less than 10 m) [30, 31].

Coaches rated coachability (i.e., receptivity to coaching; willingness to learn) as the most important social attribute for goalkeepers. According to Larkin and O’Connor [3], coachable players are receptive to instructions and motivated to learn new things. Empirical evidence has demonstrated that players who are deemed coachable and have positive attitudes are more likely to have a growth mindset [32]. Contrastingly, players who are judged to lack openness to being coached or a positive attitude can detrimentally affect a team’s dynamics and performance [33]. The results also indicate that coaches perceive other attributes like communication as important. A goalkeeper’s ability to communicate may be useful in coordinating their actions with the defensive players on their team and modifying the defensive strategy to counter the opposition’s efforts to score goals [34].

The technical attributes coaches identified as important in selecting promising goalkeepers were catching the ball. This result is not unexpected, given that goalkeepers’ primary responsibility is protecting and defending the goal from opposition shots [16]. Previous research has revealed that 19.42% of goalkeepers’ actions involved protecting the goal (on average, 7.75 actions per game per goalkeeper) and 7.39% of their actions involved defending crosses and sweeping (on average, 2.95 actions per game per goalkeeper) [35]. To provide more representative and beneficial assessment regimes for potential goalkeepers, scouts and coaches should consider designing simulated game-situation tests in pressurised conditions to evaluate goalkeepers’ technical proficiency (e.g., shots saved).

Coaches ranked defensive organisation against set plays as the most important tactical attribute for goalkeepers. This is an important finding considering that goals scored from set pieces have increased considerably over time [31]. This may indicate that goalkeeper coaches should spend considerable time preparing goalkeepers to respond effectively to the set plays prevalent in modern soccer. Coaches also rated the ability to defend in one-on-one encounters and to come off the line and deal with high balls as important skills. Goalkeepers’ contributions to the implementation of the team’s game plan include more than remaining in the goal box to block shots [34].

Coaches identified decision-making and game awareness/sense as the most important perceptual-cognitive skills for goalkeepers. These results support those of previous research that found that coaches regard decision-making attributes as the most crucial skill set for goalkeepers [17]. Goalkeepers’ performance is closely related to their game understanding since they must be aware of the potential consequences of their decisions and actions as the game progresses [18]. Goalkeepers must choose which precise movement strategies to employ in order to accomplish an outcome (e.g. saving a close-distance shot at the goal). Goalkeepers must be knowledgeable about tactical game scenarios and aware of pertinent information as it emerges during play. Game knowledge and awareness enable goalkeepers to react tactically to different circumstances (for example, speaking with teammates or changing their position and body orientation with respect to the goal or ball) [18].

Limitations and future research

While the findings provide some insight into the attributes associated with talented goalkeeping performance, there are few limitations that should be considered. The results cannot be broadly generalised to the entire population due to the small sample size and restriction to a single province in South Africa. Additionally, the study neglected objective measurement (i.e., fitness testing) by using a subjective method that relied on a coach’s judgement to identify talent. Further research is needed to fully understand this process and to corroborate the current findings in an applied environment. Future studies should therefore employ a larger sample size and a combination of subjective and objective measurements to identify talented youth soccer goalkeepers. Research could use qualitative interviews to gain greater depth and nuance understanding of coaches perceptions on talent development, alongside longitudinal research which tracks potential talented goalkeepers through their development over time. Finally, other areas which might influence talent identification of goalkeepers, such as relative age effects should be investigated further.

Conclusion

Youth soccer coaches consider numerous attributes related to goalkeeping performance, including psychological (e.g., concentration, bravery, self-discipline), physical (e.g., flexibility, agility), social (e.g., coachability, communication), technical (e.g., catching the ball, first touch), tactical (e.g., defensive organisation against set plays, defending in one-on-one situations, ability to come off the line and deal with high balls) and perceptual-cognitive (e.g., decision-making) attributes, when identifying promising goalkeepers. The results show coaches consider psychological attributes as important in identifying potentially talented goalkeepers. The findings may provide coaches with an understanding of what attributes to consider when identifying potentially talented goalkeepers. The results may guide talent development programmes’ training considerations for goalkeepers.