Exploring the Connection Between Soccer and Social Development

Abstract

Social development is the advancement of variables to help a person progress socially. There has been a progressive academic conversation into the idea of whether team sports, such as soccer, can help a player develop socially. This study seeks to further this academic conversation by seeing if a cooperative play, such as passing, in a traditional game of soccer can demonstrate social development within the game and to see if more soccer experience plays a role. A quantitative study was done by counting the number of passes between each team with differing levels of experience and seeing if more soccer experience explains the differing number of passes. To further investigate experience, a survey was conducted and completed by each player in the soccer matches to see if players were aware of their experience and social development skills. This study’s findings were that in the soccer games, there seemed to be no significant difference in the amount of passing between the teams of different experience levels that was due to differences in social development but seemed to only be due to a difference in skill level. This study presented a different approach and finding to the academic conversation. Looking towards the future, it is recommended that further research should have a set strategy to determine experience to make the experiment clearer.