Psychological Profiles, Stress, Sleep Quality, and Psychological Risk Indicators Across Teams and Competitive Levels in Elite Football Players

Psychological factors and sleep quality are relevant to athlete well-being and adaptation in high-performance sport, yet their distribution within the same elite football structure remains insufficiently understood. This pooled cross-sectional study described and compared psychological profiles and psychological risk indicators across 11 teams within a single elite football organisation and explored selected contextual variables. Participants were 376 elite football players (245 male and 131 female; aged 14–37 years) from teams competing at U16, U19, amateur, and professional levels. Assessment followed the Psycholight framework and incorporated selected dimensions from the CPRD, MIPS, STAI, DASS-21, and PSQI. Group differences were examined using nonparametric comparisons, Wilcoxon effect sizes, Fisher’s exact tests, and odds ratios with 95% confidence intervals. Psychological profiles and risk distributions varied across the studied teams, with heterogeneous patterns across psychological and sleep-related indicators. Given the close interrelationship between sex, age, team, competitive level, and season, these findings should be interpreted as patterns observed among the teams represented in the present sample rather than as independent effects of sex or competitive level.