Organized and self-organized football activity and motivational regulation among boys and girls in a Norwegian youth talent pathway: A descriptive cross-sectional study

In talent pathways that formally include both sexes, it remains unclear whether boys and girls selected into the same pathway accumulate comparable football activity. This study aimed to (1) describe sex-stratified self-reported weekly football exposure and motivational regulation among 103 players (51 girls, 52 boys; 13.8 ± 0.9 years) selected for one regional division of a Norwegian national youth talent development program, and (2) describe age-cohort patterns across the ≤13-, 14- and 15-year cohorts. Players reported weekly football hours and sessions during the preparation period and competitive season. Because the dataset lacked club- and training-group identifiers, observations could not be assumed independent; the study is therefore descriptive and exploratory: sex-stratified exposure and motivational regulation are summarized as median [interquartile range, IQR], age-cohort exposure as mean ± SD, and between-sex patterns as differences in central tendency rather than as hypothesis tests. In this sample, boys reported higher total weekly football exposure than girls (median 10.8 vs. 7.0 h), with a proportionally larger difference for self-organized than organized activity. Boys reported slightly higher intrinsic motivation and identified regulation, whereas girls reported slightly higher amotivation, external regulation and introjected regulation; these differences were small relative to the scale range, and both groups reported high intrinsic motivation and low amotivation in absolute terms. Because players were drawn from shared but unmodeled development environments in a cross-sectional design, the findings are descriptive only: equal formal selection did not coincide with equal football exposure, particularly in self-organized activity, generating hypotheses for future cluster-aware studies.