Analysis of the football players' beliefs, superstitious beliefs and different behavioral trends before or during training / competition

Analysis of the Football Players' Beliefs, Superstitious Beliefs and Different Behavioral Trends Before or During Training / Competition Objective: It has been determined that athletes in various sports branches now use a variety of auspicious materials and prays in prayer. The aim of this study is to observe the situation of footballers before, during and after the competition and to improve the previous projects with the findings, to expand the existing research findings and to reveal the importance of the research. In addition, we aimed to investigate the relationship of belief, superstition and behavior tendencies according to variables such as league status, educational status, national sportsmanship and age. Materials and Methods: The study population contains professional football players play in Spor Toto 1st and TFF 2nd league of Turkey Football Federation 2018-2019 football season. Our sample is 60 players from Spor Toto 1. league and TFF 2. league football teams. A personal information form prepared by the researcher was used to determine the demographic characteristics of the participants. Superstitious Belief and Behavior Inventory in Sports which was prepared by Buhramn et al. (1982) with the original name as Superstitious Ritual Questionnaire and adapted for Turkey by Barut (2008) was used. The inventory is a 5-item Likert-type inventory of 37 items and consists of some separate categories. These are respectively; superstitious behaviors related to clothing and appearance, objects that are considered auspicious, behaviors used before the game and the encounter, behaviors used during the game and encounter, superstition and prayer used as a team. In terms of understanding how effective the questions under this category are in their own sports experiences; they were asked to response as (1) Not effective, (2) A little effective (3) Sometimes effective (4) Effective (5) Very effective. As a result; although satisfactory results are obtained in this study, it is thought that this study is open to improvement in the field with the contributions of various researchers, and it will provide benefits to sports psychology literature and also to everyone in the sport environment. Keywords: Sports, Football, Superstition in Sports, Competition, Sport Psychology, Training, Superstitious Behavior