Motivational climate, self-determination, burnout, and mindfulness in adolescent football players from a professional academy in virtual settings

TL;DR

This study explores how virtual training during the pandemic affects adolescent football players' motivation, burnout, and mindfulness, emphasizing the role of empowering coaching and mindfulness practices.

Contribution

The study identifies extrinsic motivation as a central factor in psychological networks and highlights mindfulness as a buffer against burnout in virtual sports settings.

Findings

An empowering climate is linked to intrinsic motivation and mindfulness, while a disempowering climate is associated with extrinsic motivation and burnout.

Mindfulness acts as a bridging node that reduces the spread of demotivation toward exhaustion in adolescents.

Extrinsic motivation was found to be the most central node in the psychological network model.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic shifted sports training to virtual formats, impacting athletes’ motivation, well-being, and mental health. In this context, motivational climate, self-determined motivation, mindfulness, and burnout are key factors for understanding adolescents’ psychological adjustment in football.

This study employed a cross-sectional design, with all variables collected at a single time point during mandatory virtual training. This cross-sectional study surveyed 154 adolescent football players (M = 15.9 years) from a Peruvian professional academy during mandatory virtual training. Participants completed the EDMCQ-C, SMS, MAAS-5, and ABQ. A psychological network analysis was performed in R using non-regularized partial correlations and bootstrapped stability estimates.

An empowering climate was positively associated with intrinsic motivation and mindfulness, whereas a disempowering climate was linked to extrinsic motivation and burnout. Extrinsic motivation emerged as the most central node in the network, and mindfulness functioned as a bridging node that buffered the spread of demotivation toward exhaustion. The model showed adequate stability (CS = 0.44).

Empowering motivational climates and mindfulness protect adolescents’ psychological wellbeing, whereas controlling coaching and extrinsic motivation heighten the risk of burnout. These findings support incorporating autonomy-supportive coaching and brief mindfulness practices in youth sport training and coach education programs.

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