Leadership Mapping in Amateur Football: Aligning Coaching Style and Player Personality

This article presents a practice-oriented framework for aligning coaching behaviour with individual player personalities in amateur football. Drawing on a mixed-methods study with over 200 players from Austria’s fourth tier and ten interviews with experienced head coaches, it combines Goleman’s emotional-intelligence-based leadership styles with Merrill and Reid’s four social styles. Quantitative analyses show that leadership alignment – the perceived fit between a coach’s style and a player’s needs – is strongly associated with player satisfaction, but only weakly with team cohesion and not at all with perceived performance. The article translates these findings into a compact Leadership Mapping approach that coaches can implement with minimal time and resources.