Strategies for improving communication between coaches and parents – a case study: Romania vs. UK

In the game of football, maybe more than in any other sport, the coach-parent relationship is not always positive. There are quite a few situations when it even becomes toxic, which unfortunately mainly affects the player. The psychological impact on the development of children who play football can be decisively influenced by the coach-athlete-parent triad. If the relationship between adults is not appropriate, then the triangle will be oriented with the tip (specifically, the child) down, which is undesirable in a high-level activity. Not infrequently, taking into account the negative perceptions that the two parties have of each other, they try to avoid any kind of communication or interaction. However, our experience in the field and the literature review prove otherwise. In this paper, we want to highlight the extremely important role that communication can play in solving all existing problems between coaches and parents, and through the comparative analysis between the United Kingdom (UK) and Romania, we will try to see whether there are similarities and differences in addressing this issue. The responses to the questionnaire applied to coaches from the two countries mentioned above can establish new strategic directions for solving problems with the help of communication.