Sportsmanship and violence assessment in youth football

Abstract

Taking into account the gained relevance of the sport in the current society, particularly focusing on football since early age, it is necessary for the di!erent competition managers to have tools designed for assessing fair and unfair play behaviors observed in football context.
This research introduces the implementation of a protocol to continuously assess the fair-play during football matches along three seasons. 64 teams, 1192 players, 64 coaches and 292 referees took part within this study, all corresponding to #rst cadet category of Football Federation of Álava (FFA).The tool employed to gather information was the so called “A record of football match evaluations” (RFME) (Gimeno, Sáenz, Ariño y Aznar, 2007). The results show the following: positive punctuation related to fair-play of referees, coaches and players along the studied seasons; greater frequency of fairplay attitudes in comparison to unfair ones; greater fair-play perception on those local teams which won the match; and #nally, a negative correlation between fair-play perception and amount of warnings cards shown by referees. As conclusion it can be a%rmed that the developed tool allow: 1. Employment of a speci#c tool to assess fair-play in school age football; 2. Evaluate fair-play during the whole season.; 3. Identity the agents which trigger inadequate behaviors when practicing football and propose the most appropriate countermeasures.