In the present study, we investigated the relationship between the position and velocity of professional assistant referees and the quality of their offside judgements during actual match play. To this aim, we identified potential offside situations in four top-league football matches and examined the position and velocity of the assistant referee at the moment of passing in relation to whether there was a violation of the offside rule and whether the assistant referee flagged or not. The assistant referees were frequently positioned away from the offside line when judging offside, which they did correctly in 94% of the selected situations. The type of error made in the remaining 6%of the selected situations depended on whether assistant referees were leading or trailing the offside line. It further appeared that assistant referees were almost always in motion when they judged offside, with speeds varying from walking to sprinting. More errors were made when assistant referees were running than when they were standing still, walking or jogging, indicating that, in addition to positioning, speed of locomotion also affected the quality of offside judgements.

Although sport psychologists regularly use the term “team culture” (Martens, 1987; Yukelson, 1997) no instrument has been developed to assess a team’s culture. The authors propose a concept of team culture based on organizational culture and develop a reliable and valid instrument to measure team culture. Team culture is defined as the extent of values shared by team members. Using qualitative research in baseball teams to establish items pool, and quantitative research in three separate samples to summarize and confirm these items supported 4 dimensions of the Team Value Questionnaire: Perseverance, Compliance to Coaching, Togetherness within Other TeamMember, and Competitive Desire. Results establish preliminary support for the concept of team culture.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the interconnection between athletic identity and athlete’s personality. It included 330 athletes which could be categorised into world, international, perspective and state class. There were 229 males (69%) and 101 (31%) female athletes participating, and the following inventories were used: the Slovene version of the Big Five questionnaire, Competitive motivation questionnaire, Self – motivation inventory, Sports orientation questionnaire, Athletic identity scale and STAI X1 and STAI X2 questionnaires, which were used to measure anxiety as a personality trait and state. We found no statistically significant differences in athletic identity with respect to the level of success of the participating athletes, although athletic identity seems to be the strongest with the most successful athletes, but it is quite high also in the case of athletes without categorization. The identification with the role of athletes seems to be so strong due to social status, power and rewards, which appear in sports (again, the differences are not significant). There are no differences in athletic identity with respect to gender. We found connections between athletic identity and motivational characteristics of athletes – athletic identity is connected with the dimension of win orientation, with competitiveness and positive competitive orientation. We also found that athletic identity of an athlete can be quite reliably predicted through the information of the dynamic component of his or her personality, above all through the motive of win orientation and positive competitive motivation. Competitiveness and negative competitive motivation are more important for predicting the female athlete’s athletic identity, whereas win orientation and positive competitive motivation contribute the most to predicting the male athlete’s athletic identity.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects work experiences (i.e., job variety, job autonomy, and job feedback) and organizational support (i.e., affective and financial) on job satisfaction. Data were collected from 167 assistant coaches of university athletic teams. Regression analysis revealed that work experiences and affective organizational support held significant, positive associations with job satisfaction. Further, the influence of work experiences on job satisfaction was qualified by a significant work experiences ×financial organizational support interaction. Simple slope analyses showed that, when work experiences were poor, coaches with high financial support were more satisfied than were coaches with low financial support; however, there were no differences in job satisfaction when work experiences were positive. Results are discussed in terms of theoretical advancements and practical implications.

This questionnaire study was designed to assess the relative impact of six social-psychological predictors of fan support in a merger context. Respondents were 93 fans of two Belgian soccer teams that were about to merge. The results indicated that a distinction had to be made between the fans’ current support for the merging process and their self-predicted future support for the new merger team. Fans’ support for the merging process was predicted best by the perceived necessity of the merger, whereas their support for the merger team was predicted best by the anticipated status of this merger team. Pre-merger identification was positively related to fans’ support for the merger team, but it was negatively related to their support for the merging process. The managerial consequences for preparing a merger between sport teams are discussed.