Mental Toughness: Exploring Applications for High Performance in Football

Football is body contact and long duration playing game which needs mentally strong and tough players to win matches and championships. Due to paramount importance of mental toughness in sports and particular in football that present paper focussed to compare the mental toughness between medallist and non-medallist football players and find out the best group among medallist football players of schools, colleges and clubs. The data of three hundred (N=300) football players was collected from Schools, Colleges and Clubs. One hundred (N=100) football players each from schools, Colleges and clubs were randomly selected as subjects for this study. Mental toughness was checked by Dr. Alan Goldberg (2004) Mental Toughness Questionnaire. The means and standard deviations are calculated through SPSS. Test of significance (t-test) was applied to check the significant difference between medallist and non-medallist football players. The significance level was checked at 0.05 levels. The findings of this research paper showed that medallist football players have significantly better on mental toughness as t-value 4.23 of school, 6.11 of college and 7.20 of club level football players found in favour of medallist players. Keywords: - mental toughness, high performance, football, medallist