Eras of Burnout Research: What Does the Past Tell Us About the Future of Burnout in Sport?

Abstract

In the first volume of our special issue on Burnout in Sport and Performance in the Journal of Clinical Sport Psychology, we provided our (and other experts in the field’s) thoughts on where burnout research and practice efforts in sport should go in the future. However, we cannot fully and most effectively talk about the future without a proper understanding of past efforts relative to burnout in sport and performance. As it has been approximately 40 years (e.g., Dale &Weinberg, 1990; Smith, 1986) since interest in burnout in sport began, now seems a prudent time for some historical reflection on the state of the field, especially given broader sports medicine calls for its relevance to holistic athlete health, and for youth and adolescent athletes in particular (LaPrade et al., 2016). As of May 2023, there are over 100 articles on athlete burnout on PubMed and over 47,000 listings on Google Scholar, highlighting the clear growth in this knowledge base in less than half a century. Moreover, in the occupational burnout research and practice space, we have seen the World Health Organization recently recognizes burnout as an “occupational phenomenon” in its 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (World Health Organization, 2019). As a result, it is certainly time to reconsider how research efforts have arrived at this current state, what the contributions and limitations of each “era” of athlete burnout research and practice are, and how we can use this information to inform the next generation of burnout scholars and practitioners in sport. We believe that considering these eras of athlete burnout historywill be beneficial to this special issue and inform future research and practice efforts. See Table 1 for an overview of the five eras presented herein.