What do you hear? The effect of stadium noise on football players’ passing performances

Abstract

Stadium noisecreated by spectators and fansplays a critical part in the reality of professional sports. Due to a lack of research on the impact of these auditory cues and multimodal environments on motor performance, it is currently unclear how professional athletes experience and perceive stadium noise and how this potentially affects performance in practice. In order to explore the effect of stadium noise on athletes' performance, this paper presents an experimental design using the unique and standardised football training tool known as the "Footbonaut". Specifically, fifteen skilled German football players engaged in a standardised football-specific technical training programme while subjected to four different auditory training conditions; these included both "positive" and "negative" stadium noise conditions, a "baseline" condition providing auditory guidance, and a "no (auditory) cue" condition. Performance data for passing accuracy and passing time were measured for training in each auditory condition. A repeated measures MANOVA revealed a significant main effect for passing time. Specifically, participants showed faster passing times in the baseline compared to the negative and no auditory cue conditions. Findings are presented and discussed from a constraints-led perspective, allied to principles of ecological dynamics and nonlinear pedagogy. Particularly, the use of representative training experiences (including multimodal sensory and emotional information) appears to underline training to refine expert athletes' adaptive coordination of complex motor actions.

Principles for technology use in athlete support across the skill level continuum

“…28 The assumption is that the orientation of eye movements in the practice landscape captures visual focus and attention. On the other hand, advanced training technologies, such as robotic (football) training machines like the 'Footbonaut' 29 or VR-based training systems 17 may allow researchers, coaches and athletes to manipulate various task and environmental constraints and co-design practice contexts, based on data from performance analytics. 2.…”

Social influence of sport spectators

“…Which were the driving mechanisms behind the results found by Bryson et al (2020) regarding the games behind closed doors and yellow cards? One explanation lies in the lack of stimuli from the spectators, but the correlation could also be attributed to athletes and their change in tactics due to the lack of noise (see e.g., the recent experiment on the distribution of yellow cards by Otte, Millar, & Klatt, 2020). On the one hand, the referee could be influenced by the spectators, on the other hand, however, the "away athletes" could also appear to be more aggressive and the referee's decision would thus be a necessary and logical, undistorted consequence to ensure game control and management (cf.…”

The Effect of Different Sounds on Youth Football Players’ Pass Rates: A Pilot Study

“…Tests were done with three sounds: negative, positive, and silence. Similar to Arıkan's (2010) study, the vuvuzela sound was the negative sound and the sound of fans cheering was the positive sound, following Otte et al (2020). Sounds were amplified in a sound system at 80 dB.…”

“…In a study on this subject, Arslan et al (2002) revealed that the most annoying types of sounds and noise for athletes are the cheers of the fans (34.8%), the sounds made by the fans with sound makers (30.5%), and the collective whistling sounds of the fans (29.8%). In a study conducted by Otte et al (2020), football players pass faster while listening to negative sounds and silence than positive sounds.…”

“…Participants performed tests with negative sounds, positive sounds, and silence. Sounds were selected following Otte et al (2020) and Arıkan (2010) and played over the sound system at 80 decibles (dB), a measure of sound intensity. Before each test, players did a standardized 15-minute warm-up program of 5 minutes of jogging and 10 minutes of active stretching.…”