Educational Paradigms and Philosophy of Football Coaching: a Theoretical and Practical Perspective

The main goal of this study is to reflect upon both the role and the function of the sports coach as an educator as well as upon coaching as an educational practice. This will be done from a philosophical perspective grounded in empirical research. Football coaches are professionals who require critical skills and awareness of the worldviews that guide their practice. Nonetheless, coaching in football is commonly perceived as a non-educational practice. This means that it focuses solely on technical issues regarding how to teach the skills of the game. In contrast to this common trend, we shall present and expose five philosophical paradigms in the tradition of Western philosophy of sport which conceive of the sport coach as an educator of youth. These paradigms are the pragmatist, the idealist, the positivist, the existentialist and the socio-critical, which we shall derive from the results of a questionnaire built to detect the preferences of football coaches in relation to the philosophical profiles linked to them. This questionnaire also shows that the philosophical profile of youth football coaches depends on variables such as the age and the context of training. After reflecting upon these philosophical educational profiles of youth football coaches, we will sketch a philosophical profile of the football coach as an educator in order to highlight the importance of philosophy as a pedagogical means of education which can contribute to the development of sport coaching as a human science and as an educational practice.