Life Skills Training for Anxiety and Football Performance in Adolescent Players

Overview

This randomized behavioral study will evaluate whether an eight-week life skills training program will reduce cognitive sport anxiety and improve football performance in non-elite adolescent football players in China. A total of 160 players aged 14 to 17 years from 16 teams will be allocated individually within team-by-gender strata to either a life skills training group or a usual-training control group. The intervention will include 16 small-group sessions delivered twice per week for 45-60 minutes. Assessments will be conducted at baseline, immediately after the eight-week intervention, and four weeks later. The primary psychological outcome will be cognitive anxiety derived from the Worry and Concentration Disruption subscales of the Sport Anxiety Scale-2. The primary performance outcome will be a baseline-referenced Football Performance Index derived from passing accuracy, shooting accuracy, dribbling time, and agility time. The study hypothesis is that life skills training will reduce cognitive anxiety and improve football performance, and that greater reduction in cognitive anxiety immediately after the intervention will be associated with better football performance at follow-up.

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.