Communicating under pressure: How coach–athlete communication structures shape creative decision-making in competitive sport

This study examined the impact of three different coach-initiated communication protocols–directive, dialogic, and constraint-based minimal–on the creative decision-making of elite and sub-elite male soccer players in a real-world training environment. Eighty-seven players (M age = 19.4 years, SD = 2.1) from six La Liga academy teams participated in a naturalistic cluster-randomized experiment embedded within regular training sessions. Creative decision-making was assessed during small-sided games using spatiotemporal tracking, with action originality, adaptive variability, and solution diversity as primary outcome measures. Communication structures were quantified through an interaction analysis of audio-recorded sessions, coding question-response ratios, turn-taking balance, and semantic openness. Data were analyzed using multilevel mixed-effects models that accounted for decisions nested within players and teams. Results indicated that dialogic communication produced significantly greater action originality (β = 0.47, 95% CI [0.28, 0.66]) and adaptive variability (β = 0.39, p = .002) than directive communication, with effects mediated by expanded perceptual-action coupling windows (indirect effect = 0.31, 95% CI [0.17, 0.48]). These findings contribute unique evidence that coaching communication functions as a cognitive scaffold restructuring perceptual-action search processes, complementing motivationally-focused frameworks by identifying cognitive scaffolding as an additional pathway through which coach-athlete communication shapes athletic performance