Life Skills Training for Anxiety and Football Performance in Adolescent Players

The study will use a two-arm parallel longitudinal randomized design with three assessment points: T0 at baseline, T1 immediately after completion of an eight-week intervention, and T2 four weeks after T1. Participants will be 160 non-elite football players aged 14-17 years from 16 teams. Individual randomization will be conducted within team-by-gender strata using a computer-generated random sequence, targeting 80 participants per condition.

The life skills intervention will consist of 16 sessions delivered over eight weeks (two sessions per week; 45-60 minutes per session; approximately 8-10 players per small group). Content will include goal setting, self-management, emotional regulation, problem solving, decision making, communication, teamwork, time management, coping with mistakes, and transfer of skills beyond sport. Control participants will continue usual football training without the structured life skills program during the study period. Attendance, possible control contamination, and concurrent psychological training will be recorded.

Cognitive sport anxiety will be assessed using the 15-item Sport Anxiety Scale-2. Worry will comprise items 3, 5, 8, 9, and 11; Concentration Disruption will comprise items 1, 4, 7, 13, and 15; Somatic Anxiety will comprise items 2, 6, 10, 12, and 14. Cognitive Anxiety will be defined as Worry plus Concentration Disruption. Football performance will be assessed using passing accuracy, shooting accuracy, dribbling time, and agility time. These components will be standardized using fixed baseline reference parameters, with time-based measures reverse-directed, and combined into a T-score Football Performance Index in which higher values indicate better performance.

Primary intervention effects will be evaluated with linear mixed-effects models using condition, time, and condition-by-time fixed effects, while accounting for repeated observations within participants and clustering within teams. Secondary outcome contrasts will be adjusted using the Holm procedure. The longitudinal indirect pathway will be evaluated as intervention allocation → T1 cognitive anxiety reduction → T2 football performance. The indirect effect will be estimated with 5,000 team-cluster bootstrap resamples. Sensitivity analyses will include per-protocol attendance, control contamination, concurrent psychological training, complete T2 cases, multiple imputation with 20 imputed datasets, and alternative FPI scoring.

Inclusion criteria

• Age 14 to 17 years at enrollment.
• Current membership in a non-elite/non-professional football team.
• At least one year of prior football participation.
• Regular participation in team football training.
• Ability and willingness to attend study assessments and, if allocated to the intervention, the life skills training sessions.
• Written informed consent from a parent or legal guardian and age-appropriate assent from the adolescent participant before study participation.

Exclusion criteria

• Current membership in a national football team.
• Current professional football contract.
• Current membership in a first-tier professional football academy.
• Any medical, musculoskeletal, or psychological condition that, in the judgment of the study team, would make participation in football-performance testing or the behavioral intervention unsafe or inappropriate.
• Inability to complete baseline assessment or comply with essential study procedures.