The Creative Soccer Platform: New strategies for stimulating creativity in organized youth soccer practice

Creativity is essential in soccer due to the unpredictable and complex situations occurring in the game, where stereotypical play gradually loses its efficiency. Further, creativity is an important psychological factor for the development of soccer expertise, and valuing creativity increases satisfaction and well-being. Although creative players are highly desired by coaches, the subject of cultivating creativity is mostly ignored and traditional training settings may even hamper the players' creativity. The purpose of this article is to introduce a novel approach for enhancing soccer players' creativity, The Creative Soccer Platform (TCSP), and to demonstrate the implications of applying it in youth soccer practice, by means of soccer-specific creativity exercises. TCSP encompasses four theoretically based didactic principles (task focus, parallel thinking, horizontal thinking, and no experienced judgment), shown to increase creativity in educational settings. Creativity is defined as unlimited application of bodily-kinesthetic knowledge, which refers to players not being limited by professional, social and cultural constraints in soccer. Analysis of qualitative data obtained during three training sessions where TSCP was implemented at a youth team indicate that the application of TCSP exercises establishes a playful, judgment-free and autonomy-supportive training environment, where soccer players are able to unfold their creative potential. The creative environment helped the youth players in the intervention engage in unfamiliar activities that they did not dare to do in normal training sessions (i.e., performed difficult, new and playful technical skills), which developed creative abilities important for game performance (i.e., idea generation abilities and not fearing mistakes).