Multimodal assessment of declarative tactical knowledge in youth academy football players: within-player structure and between-player alignment in U15 and U18

Abstract Background. How players' judgements about their tactical knowledge relate to actual retrieval is poorly understood. We examined familiarity-retrieval association and convergence of two retrieval modalities, each at between-player (aggregate coupling) and within-player (item-level) levels, by age group. Method. Forty-four male academy players at one Ligue 2 club (U15, n = 23; U18, n = 21) completed three item-matched tasks on a validated corpus of 32 tactical actions: prospective familiarity judgement (T1), spatial representation (T2) and animated-sequence naming (T3). Cross-sectional design; not preregistered. Results. Within players, judgement-retrieval resolution was substantial with no detectable group difference (T1-T2: γ = .75 vs. .76; T1-T3: γ = .41 vs. .35; all p < .001), nor did inter-modality item concordance differ (mean φ = .28 vs. .24); both are underpowered null comparisons, not evidence of equivalence. Between players, aggregate familiarity was strongly associated with both retrieval tasks in U18 (ρ = .70 and .69, both p ≤ .001) but not detectably in U15. This difference survived Holm correction for familiarity-naming (p = .024), as did the lower item-level disagreement in U18 (23.4% vs. 33.2%, p = .028); the spatial-naming difference (r = .60 vs. .04) did not. Raw performance did not differ. Conclusions. Within-player resolution and inter-modal concordance were already substantial at U15; the detected group differences concerned between-player alignment of aggregate levels, and may partly reflect differing score dispersion. Age group is confounded with practice volume, tenure, staff and cohort, so the source is unidentifiable. Replication in a larger, preregistered, multi-site sample is needed.