What is it about?
Being creative in sport performance can contribute to athletic success and therefore can be highly valued. Academy coaches and scouts are responsible for identifying and developing the next generation of players. This paper studies their understanding of creativity and how to develop it.
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Why is it important?
Our findings show that coaches and scouts recognise creativity as an original performed activity that must be effective in the context of the game. In contrast to creative thinking, for these coaches and scouts, the ability to perform is critical to creativity. The performance can involve only the individual (e.g., dribbling) but it can also be collective (e.g., two players combining to make a creative pass) and/or in relation to the opposition (e.g., reacting to or dictating an opponent's play). Therefore, rather than a purely individual characteristic, creativity is shaped by others.
Perspectives
This article enable us to gain insights about creativity from coaches and scouts working in 10 European professional football academies. Such access is difficult to achieve and we are indebted to the participants for sharing their perspectives with us. We hope that this article helps to demystify creativity and see it as a resource that can be developed for the benefit of sport performance and life.
Justine Allen
Northumbria University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: “Doing creative things at the right times”: Football academy practitioners’ conceptions of creativity and its development., Sport Exercise and Performance Psychology, November 2025, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/spy0000401.
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