The culture of shouting in the world of football

Managing a group is always a complicated task, but the difficulty increases as the age of the group in question decreases. In football or sport in general, we see every weekend that a recurring resource of the coaches towards this end is usually the shout; not only to transmit instructions, but also to correct, motivate... However, shout to teams of soccer players in formationis it motivating? Is it ethical? It is effective?

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The culture of shouting in football

It is true that, in football, there is a certain "culture of shouting", that is, that the players themselves often claim that character from the coach To stay focused or motivated. However, yelling, by itself, doesn't have to have any effect on anyone's motivation. from a biological point of view, but, in any case, quite the opposite (no one likes to be shout). Therefore, the relationship between motivation (or intensity, or concentration) and shouting would be learned.

Either way, that scream culture doesn't seem to be accessible to any player. There are individual differences between all people, and also between children. Thus, we can find introverted children and extraverted children. The main difference between the two is the base physiological activation.

For this reason, extraverts, with low basic physiological activity, tend to seek situations involving high sensory stimulation, that provide them with that amount of activation that their body lacks. Thus, they tend to have a higher risk tenure, a greater tendency to seek new sensations (travel, try new restaurants, meeting new people), a preference for loud music, a tolerance for disorder, conflict…

However, introverted people are at the opposite pole, with a high base activation and, therefore, external stimulation can collapse them, so tend to prefer controlled, predictable environments and tend to avoid potentially stressful situations.

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The differences between introversion and extraversion

It should be clarified that the examples presented here to define both behavior tendencies are simplifications that have the objective to facilitate the understanding of concepts, but that personality is made up of many more factors that all interact with each other. Yeah.

In any case, given this individual differentiation between people, we can infer that it will occur among athletes, and among young athletes. Football, as a team sport that it is, should appeal to extroverts, and that's often how we find it. However, if we analyze the different categories of grassroots football (from lollipop to youth) we see how yes we can find greater heterogeneity among the youngest, and a high tendency to extraversion among the greater.

We could argue that this is because, when boys and girls reach a certain age, they begin to choose for themselves. their favorite extracurricular activities, then manifesting their introverted "phenotype"... but it could have further.

If we look at the general, normally only a minority of introverted players who make it to a youth team usually have remarkable performance within your own team. In the elite, we find Zidane, Messi, Iniesta... exceptional players, with this introverted profile.

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Do not hinder talent

We could come to think that, in their training process, these players already stood out at an early age, performing at high levels for their age and making fewer mistakes. Therefore, it is possible that these introverted players received less shouting and therefore their physiological activation was not exceeded, and they did not generate rejection or discomfort by going to the training.

If this were the case, we could be facing a natural selection of extroverts in soccer and grassroots sports, who do not like a little stimulation in the form of shouting. would bother, running into the hackneyed argument of "if he can't stand being yelled at, he's not good for football", but what about the introverts who stay for the path? Could we be classifying the potential talent of great athletes ahead of time? Do they deserve to lose the multiple benefits that sports practice brings to their physical, mental and social growth?

We would still have to investigate the scientific literature to discuss whether shouting has a motivating effect on players, but what we do know today is that there are alternative motivating and communicative techniques that, perhaps, allow us to better adapt to the individual differences of our players, and that, ultimately, is the management of groups.