Prognostic relevance of motor tests in elite girls’ soccer: a five-year prospective cohort study within the German talent promotion program

ABSTRACT

Introduction: While research has provided valuable information about talent predictors, there is a gap regarding female soccer. This study analyzed the prognostic relevance of motor tests for players’ future selection level in female soccer and assessed the role of sex as a moderator variable.

Methods: Within the German talent promotion program, N = 499 U12 girls participated in motor diagnostics (sprint, agility, dribbling, ball control, shooting). Five years later, 14.2% of them made the youth national team (NT), 18.8% the regional association team (RA), and 66.9% were not further selected (NS). The tests’ predictive validity for achieving one of these levels was analyzed using ANOVAs with post-hoc tests and logistic regressions. Subsequently, results were compared to data from previous research with N = 22,843 male U12 players.

Results: Girls’ performances in the motor diagnostics significantly discriminated between all three selection levels. Future NT players outperformed NS (d = 1.04) and RA players (d = 0.55), who, in turn, performed better than NS players (d = 0.47). Exception for dribbling, the motor tests demonstrated predictive validity independent of sex.

Discussion: Although diagnostics are not sensitive enough to determine individual decisions for talent selection, they provide objective information to supplement coaches’ work.

KEYWORDS:

• Female youth football
• predictive validity
• speed abilities
• talent diagnostics
• technical skills

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the staff of the DFB (in particular Thorsten Becht, Jörg Daniel, Thomas Hauser, Claus Junginger, and Tobias Kieß) for the provision of data and their valuable support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In line with the terminology of recent reviews (Johnston et al. 2018; Sarmento et al. 2018) and TID studies in soccer (e.g., Gonaus and Müller 2012; Deprez et al. 2015; Sieghartsleitner et al. 2019), the term ‘agility’ is considered here as a speed-related motor ability that does not include cognitive aspects such as reactive decision-making. However, it should be noted that there are inconsistent definitions of agility. For example, several authors have expanded the understanding of agility to include a physical (change of direction speed) and a cognitive aspect (perceptual and decision-making skills;Sheppard et al. 2014; Young et al. 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This study is part of the research project ‘Scientific support of the DFB’s Talent Development Program’, which was granted by the German Soccer Association (Deutscher Fußball-Bund, DFB).