“Focus on What?”: Applying Research Findings on Attentional Focus for Elite-Level Soccer Coaching

Abstract Despite increased publications on the topic of mental skills (i.e., over 1,200 peer-reviewed papers published in the last 20 years), minimal knowledge is translated into practical guidance for coaches. Expressions such as “Pay attention” and “Focus” are frequently heard in coaching, yet the meaning of these phrases is not easily understood nor applied. Therefore, we aim to help elite-level soccer coaches better understand what it means to pay attention and focus, while providing practical suggestions to improve athletes’ abilities to focus, refocus, minimize distractions and instances of choking, and forget about performance mistakes while in the moment. KEYWORDS: attentioncoachingelite-level soccerfocus Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank the reviewers for providing insightful comments regarding an earlier draft of this manuscript. This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) through the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship (766-2012-0656). Notes For a detailed account of the attentional systems, see Carr and Hinckley (Citation2012). This article focuses on findings that relate to the execution of well-learned skills by expert performers, rather than the learning process of novice performers. For a review of the findings on skill learning, refer to the work of Beilock and Carr (Citation2001); Beilock et al. (Citation2002); Ericsson et al. (Citation1993); Masters (Citation1992); Wulf (Citation2007); and Wulf, Höß, and Prinz (Citation1998). Jackson and Baker (2001) found that preparation time increases as task difficulty increases for rugby goal kicking. According to the authors, task difficulty in rugby goal kicking is influenced by two variables: (a) the distance of the kick and (b) its lateral angle. During the penalty kick in soccer, both variables are held constant. Therefore, task difficulty changes may not account for differences in preparation time for that specific task. For this and other self-paced skills, such as the basketball free throw, there is ”a fixed-level of difficulty defined by the unchanging parameters of the task„ (Jackson & Baker, 2001, p. 50). Having said that, even though the presence of a goalkeeper in a soccer penalty kick makes it slightly more complex than the basketball free throw, the variability in goalkeeping may not account for remarkable changes in task difficulty that would require greater preparation time from the kick taker. It should be noted that suppressing negative imaging impedes performance not only for novice but also for expert level performers. For example, Beilock et al.'s (2001) findings with novice performers are similar to Tedesqui's (Citation2013) work with expert-level players. Both studies found detrimental effects of attempting to suppress negative images, whether these images reside in potential mistakes (i.e., anticipation) of novice performers as in Beilock et al.'s (2001) work, or from previous mistakes (i.e., rumination) of expert performers as in Tedesqui's (Citation2013) work.

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