The evaluation of mental training characteristics and recovery level of professional and amateur football players

Football is one of the most common sports branches played at professional and amateur level in the world. It is followed closely by millions of football fans on all continents. With the new developments in sports sciences, it has been the subject of numerous studies with the help of science disciplines such as biomechanics, biochemistry, physiology, biology, psychology, sociology in order to increase the performance level of football players. The success of the coaches in football, with the shift of the coaches to the modern training methods based on scientific evidence, instead of the traditional training methods, has led to the fact that science and technology are more involved in football. In the light of this information, it was aimed to evaluate the mental training characteristics and recovery knowledge levels of athletes playing professional and amateur football in terms of different variables. The research population consists of professional and amateur football players in the 2020-2021 football season. The research sample group consists of Turkish Football Federation 3rd League 2nd Group and 3rd League 4th Group professional teams who are actively licensed athletes in the 2020-2021 football season, and 534 footballers who are active in the Regional Amateur League and Local Leagues of Adıyaman. As a data collection tool in the research, "The Sport Mental Training Questionnaire (SMTQ)" developed by Behnke et al. (2017) and adapted into Turkish by Yarayan and İlhan (2018) and " Sports Recovery Knowledge Level Test " which developed by Aydemir et al. (2020) was used. It has been determined that 38.38% (205) of the football players participating in our research play football professionally in Turkish leagues, and 61.61% (329) of them play football as amateurs. Of the football players participating in the study, 10.11% (54) were aged 18 years or younger, 34.08% (182) were between the ages of 19-23, 27.34% (146) were aged 24-28, 18.91% (101) were in the age range of 29-33, and finally 9.55% (51) of them were in the age range of 34 and over was determined. As a result of the research, a significant difference was found in the recovery knowledge test scores according to the amateur and professional status of the research group. Significant 8 difference was observed in favor of professional football players in the recovery physiology and recovery methods sub-dimensions of the recovery test (ttphys=3.611 p=.001; ttymethods=2.627, p=.000). As a result, it was determined in the research that the level of recovery knowledge increased with the increase in education level. Professional footballers' knowledge levels and frequency of use of recovery techniques were found to be significantly higher than amateur footballers. It was determined that there is a strong positive relationship above the middle between the mental animation, talking to yourself and mental performance skills, which are also the sub-dimensions of the mental training scale, of the football players with a high level of recovery knowledge. It has been concluded that mental training practices and recovery knowledge are very important especially for beginners in the process of teaching a new skill and reflecting it to the competition environment. In this regard, athletes should not think that success is limited to training overloads only. After these loads, they should realize that with proper recovery, the body reaches a pre-training state, and even a better level of performance (supercompensation = extra compensation) than the pre-training state. It is predicted that not only physical training is sufficient for the athlete in football, but also the use of mental training techniques in addition to physical training will increase the success and performance of the athlete. Keywords: Footballer, Mental training, Recovery knowledge level.