Female and Male Coaches in The Eyes of Female Elite Soccer Players

Abstract

What are female athletes’ expectations and evaluations of coaches? Is gender still important? These are the main questions discussed in this article. It is based on existing literature and on qualitative semi-structured interviews with 38 elite female soccer players from Germany, Norway, Sweden and the USA. The results showed that the following gender-related trends emerged cross-nationally. Male coaches are more often characterized by a ‘masculine’ style of interaction, and there is a feeling of not having been taken seriously by male coaches. The players seemed to have been more satisfied with female than male coaches, because of their female style of communication. They believed that ‘female coaches were better psychologists’, and some thought that women should not be coached in the same way as men. These results can be interpreted as mirroring the ‘old fashioned gender stereotypes’, but they also question whether there exists a ‘female coaching philosophy’.