Soccer players inescapably live under stress during the sportive career, and many real-life aspects of soccer situations operate in the ongoing performance. This study’s main objective was to elaborate the List of Stressors in Professional Indoor and Field Soccer, a self-report instrument designed to measure the impact of 77 soccer situations upon the sport performance. Participants were 138 indoor and field soccer players from the Brazilian Premier League. Each situation was evaluated on a 7-point scale, ranging from the most negative (−3) to the most positive (+3). Data were analyzed according to the players’ perception of the items: distress or eustress and its intensity, and after that, situations perceived as plus −1 and +1 were compared by time in which they were experienced and distributed among five categories established by the literature: Expectations about the Performance, Personal Factors, Competition Aspects, Training Demands, and Relationship with Significant People. Narratives of athletes’ experiences were also used to discuss the results. An Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling using Bi-factorial (BI-ESEM) was employed to assess the factor structure. For the total participants, 49 situations were perceived as distress and 28 as eustress. Using the criteria established a priori, the distribution was among the five categories in the remaining 32 situations. Differences in perception between less and more experienced players were found in 11 situations. The results revealed that Brazilian professional soccer players experience various stressful situations. These events are important representations of environmental demands and could predict the performance as they are perceived as eustress or distress. Some of these stressful situations are inherent in sport and others adjacent to the sports system or environment. Coach pressure to win and conflicts with teammates are examples of stressors in-sport, family problems and disputes with press or fans are examples of stressors external to the team, also called peripheral opponents, and showed the relative social influence of significant others in soccer performance. We can conclude that the knowledge of the direction of a given stress situation has important practical implications in preparing athletes and helping them face the performance stressors that are part of soccer daily life.

The coach-created motivational climate refers to the environmental factors that influence the athletes’ emotional, cognitive, physical and social experiences and could be more or less empowering. The present study aimed to determine the connection between the empowering and disempowering motivational climate (EDMC) with other variables, from several sports (328 males and 118 females; M age = 17.60 years; SD = 6.27) completed questionnaires assessing perceptions of coach-created motivational climates, burnout, fear of failure and grit. Structural equation modeling revealed that the empowering motivational climate is negatively related with burnout and with fear of failure. In addition, the disempowering motivational climate is positively related with burnout and with fear of failure. In turn, the grit dimension, perseverance of effort, was not significantly associated with burnout; it showed, however, a significantly negative association with fear of failure. The EDMCs were not related with grit-perseverance of effort and grit-consistence of interests. Overall, this study suggests that creating empowering environments can play a crucial role in mitigating emotional and physical exhaustion, as well as the fear of failure that athletes often experience in the context of sports.

Recently, the skill to play games has led to the professionalization of the activity in the form of “eSports” (electronic sports). Despite the popularity of eSports, little is known about its professional players from a psychological perspective. Given the importance of the coach-created environment in the athletes’ motivational processes, this study aimed to investigate the key psychological dimensions of the coach-created climate in 75 Brazilian professional players of League of Legends (LoL) considering the Self-Determination Theory (SDT) and Achievement Goal Theory (AGT). Fourteen hypotheses were tested, of which seven were confirmed. The empowering climate was a predictor of basic psychological-needs satisfaction and indirectly influenced autonomous motivation. The need satisfaction had a significant impact on both autonomous motivation and on lack of motivation, which, in turn, explained 56% of the variance in well-being and the intention to keep playing eSports. The disempowering climate was a predictor of psychological-needs thwarting but had no significant impact on autonomous motivation or lack of motivation. The results obtained support SDT and AGT in the context of eSports and were similar to those conducted with athletes from traditional sports, indicating that the empowering-and-disempowering-coaching-climates conceptualization applies not only to traditional sports athletes but also to professional eSports players.

The objectives of this study were to assess the psychometric properties of the Coach-created Empowering and Disempowering Motivational Climate Questionnaire (EDMCQ-C) by testing four different hypotheses. A procedure of translation and adaptation of the instrument between different languages and cultures was carried out. A total of 350 national level Brazilian athletes (aged between 15 and 17 years; mean = 17.0, SD = 1.7) completed the questionnaire. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Exploratory Structural Equation Modelling (ESEM) were performed. Consistent with previous work on the EDMCQ-C, all solutions failed to achieve suitable levels of fit for a hierarchical model represented by five climate dimensions (autonomy-supportive, controlling, task-involving, ego-involving, and socially-supportive) and two global dimensions (empowering and disempowering). The 2-ESEM solution provided a satisfactory fit for the first-order model with two global factors supported. The 2-ESEM version of the questionnaire showed adequate predictive and discriminant validity, good internal consistency, and invariance across gender. Such results suggest that the EDMCQ-C is a promising scale to assess Brazilian athletes’ perception of the over-arching empowering and disempowering features of the coach-created motivational climate.

The purpose of this study was to assess the psychometric properties of the Burnout Inventory for Referees (BIR) in Portuguese in a sample of professional soccer referees and to explore the nomological validity of the inventory through concurrent validation. The analysis showed a factorial structure of burnout for the referees with one second order factor and three first order factors; physical and emotional exhaustion, reduced sense of accomplishment and sport devaluation. A cross-validation procedure showed that the factor structure was replicable, and the inventory demonstrated internal reliability as well as convergent and discriminant validity. In addition, the study assessed the concurrent validity of the inventory by examining the correlation between the scores of the Burnout Inventory for Referees and the scores of the Profile of Mood States (POMS). The subscales of burnout and total burnout were positively correlated with tension, depression, anger, fatigue and confusion and negatively with vigor, as expected. In conclusion, the Portuguese version of BIR presents good evidence of validity and reliability in the assessment of referees who may be at risk of suffering from burnout.

Introduction: the importance of the study lies in understanding the relevance of burnout as a detriment to the quality of life and performance of high performance athletes. Objective: Identify and describe the dimensions of resilience and optimism that could act as protective variables against the possibility of suffering burnout. Methodology: The study was conducted with a sample of 194 Uruguayan athletes who participated in the ODESUR 2022 games. Four instruments were used: The Resilience Scale (ER; Ruíz et al., 2012), the Life Orientation Scale-Revised (LOT-R; Scheier, et al., 1994), the Sports Optimism Questionnaire (COD; Batista, 2022) and the Burnout Inventory for Athletes (IBD-R; Garcés et al., 2012). Results: Athletes present a moderate level of resilience, a high optimism profile and a moderate level of pessimism. Regarding Burnout, 65.5% presented symptoms of Emotional Exhaustion, 67% had symptoms of Depersonalization and 62.9% had symptoms of Reduced Personal Accomplishment. The SEM model explained a very high percentage of the variance in emotional exhaustion scores (79.1%) with resilience being the predictor variable, mediated by the protective role of optimism. Discussion: The percentages found are shocking and are very similar to those found in Uruguayan athletes previously evaluated, as well as in other research with elite athletes. Conclusions: The findings allow us to visualize the fundamental role of Resilience and Optimism as protective factors that could reduce the risk of burnout in high performance athletes.