Playful sport design among young soccer players: A diary study exploring links with sport engagement and performance

Playful sport design is a proactive strategy through which athletes themselves integrate fun and competition into their training to make activities more interesting and challenging. Using proactivity and play theories, we argue that soccer players can improve their sport engagement and indirectly improve their performance by proactively redesigning their training activities to be more playful. We tested our research model using a sample of 128 young soccer players who completed short daily surveys after each training session over two weeks (total number of observations is n = 724). Results of multilevel analyses provided partial support for the hypothesized effects. Playful sport design is positively related to sport performance through sport engagement, with distinct effects on self-rated and coach-rated performance. Particularly designing competition (versus designing fun) seems to improve performance via sport engagement; however, this indirect effect was only significant for self-rated performance (not for coach-rated performance).