Toward Improved Triadic Functioning: Exploring the Interactions and Adaptations of Coaches, Parents and Athletes in Professional Academy Soccer Through the Adversity of COVID-19

Soccer's AI transformation: deep learning's analysis of soccer's pandemic research evolution

Introduction

This paper aims to identify and compare changes in trends and research interests in soccer articles from before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods

We compared research interests and trends in soccer-related journal articles published before COVID-19 (2018-2020) and during the COVID-19 pandemic (2021-2022) using Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) topic modeling.

Results

In both periods, we categorized the social sciences into psychology, sociology, business, and technology, with some interdisciplinary research topics identified, and we identified changes during the COVID-19 pandemic period, including a new approach to home advantage. Furthermore, Sports science and sports medicine had a vast array of subject areas and topics, but some similar themes emerged in both periods and found changes before and during COVID-19. These changes can be broadly categorized into (a) Social Sciences and Technology; (b) Performance training approaches; (c) injury part of body. With training topics being more prominent than match performance during the pandemic; and changes within injuries, with the lower limbs becoming more prominent than the head during the pandemic.

Conclusion

Now that the pandemic has ended, soccer environments and routines have returned to pre-pandemic levels, but the environment that have changed during the pandemic provide an opportunity for researchers and practitioners in the field of soccer to detect post-pandemic changes and identify trends and future directions for research.

Impact and control of the COVID pandemic in an elite sports club: Real Madrid

The incidence and risk factors for poor outcome in patients with COVID are well known, as are the protective measures in high-risk populations. In contrast, the epidemiological and clinical behavior of this disease in the population of elite athletes who are the paradigm of good health is poorly understood. Data on COVID in athletes are scarce and have focused preferentially on the consequences on sports performance of confinement measures and on the pathophysiological risks of infected athletes. Real Madrid is a large elite sports institution with facilities in the City of Madrid where 600 athletes train daily. The incidence of COVID during a study period of 671 days of observation in athletes, professional or amateur, working in the institution has been 0,74 per 1,000 days of exposure. The disease has been asymptomatic or oligosymptomatic in all athletes and did not require any hospital admissions. The different teams did not have to suspend any of its sportive commitments for COVID during the study period and there was no evidence of outbreaks of internal transmission between members of the different teams.

Sport parenting during the COVID-19 pandemic: Perceptions of parents and youth in Australia

Understanding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on parental involvement in youth sport is largely unknown. The objective of the study presented in this paper was to understand parental involvement in relation to their child's participation in organised sport during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using an interpretive descriptive methodology, online qualitative interviews and online focus groups with parents and youth (15-18 years) (n = 29) were conducted during June 2020. Following a rigorous reflexive thematic analysis, four themes illustrated the nature of sport parenting during this stressful and uncertain period: (a) reshaping sport parenting identity, (b) the unexpected growth of sport parenting responsibilities, (c) responding to children's loss of sport, and (d) policies impact family commitment and attitudes to returning to sport. The findings are discussed considering Harwood and Knight's (2015) postulates of parenting expertise in sport and offer potential ideas to better support parents and children situated in unexpectedly stressful situations.