Music can induce positive affect before football training, but is it maintained throughout training?

In a sport setting, affective states interact with other constraints to influence athlete skill acquisition and performance. The importance of affect in skill acquisition is given weight through the underpinnings of representative and affective learning design frameworks. However, there is currently a lack of understanding how the affective states of athletes change throughout training activities. This study aimed to understand how association football players’ affective states changed throughout training. Prior to four training sessions, positive and negative music was used as a treatment to induce affective states in 12 competitive-elite youth footballers (M = 17.36, SD = 1.11 years). During training, players participated in a series of six small-sided games, and their affective states (valance and arousal) were monitored prior to each game using the Affect Grid. RM-MANOVA revealed that the music treatment was able to effectively influence affective states. Further, positive affect remained high for some time throughout training, whereas affective states returned to pre-treatment levels at the beginning of training when athletes listened to negative music prior to the training session. Musical interventions may offer a suitable solution for practitioners to implement affective learning designs into their training.