The perception of talent development environment in football: Scale development and psychometric testing

Talent development environment (TDE) has been a key focus in sport as sport talents need proper development to transfer their potential to elite performance. The environment is increasingly recognised as a controllable factor in talent development. While several scales have been developed to measure TDE for general sport contexts, relatively few have been specifically designed for particular sport (e.g., football). This study developed a scale for measuring TDE in football and validated its psychometric properties. The participants (N = 551) were football talents (aged between 11 and 17 years) who were recruited from Chinese football specialised schools participating in the Chinese national youth football league. The participants included 377 males and 167 females, with seven participants not specifying their gender. Three phases were adopted: (a) item generation using a deductive approach based on a literature review and subsequent questionnaire design; (b) exploratory factor analysis (EFA; n = 270); and (c) confirmatory factor analysis (CFA; n = 200). Consequently, a six-dimensional scale was proposed (football coach, interaction with teammates, football training, football competition, academic support and family support) with 30 items. The results indicate that the scale has a sound overall model fit ( χ 2 / df = 1.84, CFI = 0.93, IFI = 0.93, TLI = 0.92, RMSEA = 0.07, and SRMR = 0.06), as well as convergent (AVEs ranging from 0.51 to 0.75) and discriminant validity (no inter-dimensional correlations exceeding their respective squared root of AVEs). In the future, it is recommended that the scale be further validated and optimised using samples from different regions with different socio-cultural backgrounds.