Football: Non-Verbal Communication Between Coach And Players

Non-verbal communication is all about communicating your ideas, messages and information via facial expressions, gesture or in simple words to communicate your thoughts without using the words. Players demonstrate their happiness, love, hatred, disappointment, anger by various facial expressions on the ground.

Football is no exception; the entire match is administered from start to end by the referees’ whistle, hand movements and indications. Players equally issue diverse body twists and movements spontaneously, impulsively or consciously to portray different moods and emotions.

Non-Verbal Communication between Coach and Players:
As a coach, one can say a lot without uttering a word: A frown, a look of disbelief, a disgusted shake of your
head, or a smile can communicate quite a bit. In fact, communication experts suggest that between 65% and 93% of the meaning of a message is conveyed through tone of voice and nonverbal behaviors (Johnson 2003). Thus, in addition to becoming aware of the words you use, it is essential that you become aware of your tone and nonverbal behaviors so that you understand the messages you are sending to athletes. Beyond gestures, communication also involves the emotional impact of the message on the athlete. How do an athlete perceives and react to the face reaction of the coach? Failure to recognize it correctly can lead to negative impact on the athlete and sometimes on the team as a whole.
Smoll and Smith spent hundreds of hours observing coaches and evaluating their impact on athletes (Smith 2001, Smoll & Smith 2006). In all, they observed more than 70 coaches, coded more than 80,000 behaviors, and surveyed nearly 1,000 athletes. They found that athletes responded positively to coaches who provided positive feedback after a good performance effort, corrective instruction and encouragement after a performance mistake, and technical instruction and a moderate amount of general encouragement unrelated to performance quality
In contrast, Smoll and Smith found that athletes responded unfavorably to coaches who failed to notice or reinforce good performance efforts, criticized mistakes, or provided instruction after a mistake in a critical fashion. This study was a mixture of both verbal and nonverbal communication observation but it clearly shows the impact of facial expression and gestures of coach on the building and destroying the team.
Coaches always have to replace verbal communication with nonverbal communication when distance is a big factor or when they don’t want the opposing team to know what they are going to do next. There is an offensive captain and a defensive captain, so through some body gestures a coach can tell one guy what play to run and that player tells ten other players what to do on the next play and this all happens in less than 30 seconds. We always see the coaches on the sidelines calling certain plays in close game situations by using secretive gestures that players have specifically been told beforehand.

Nonverbal communication as a Referee
Refereeing isn’t all about what we say, nor the countless disputed decisions we make. But this focuses more on the psychology of refereeing and in particular how nonverbal communication affects the game.
When telling a player to calm down the widely known and used gesture of using open palms complements being calm and non confrontational.
The open palms can be used a lot during a game.They can be used for telling players to leave by simulating a pushing action with one hand, and also used for telling a player to come over to you. By keeping your palms open it’s seen as non confrontational and shows that you’re the one that’s in control. Referee talks in sign language to communicate with players or with his team members sitting at the podium. His non verbal communication in the entire game plays a key role from the beginning of the game till end spanning from telling about the fouls, giving red cards, penalty, throw or time-outs to communicating key pointers to his tem sitting far
off.

Non-Verbal Communication between Players:
Nonverbal communication between the players plays a crucial role in winning or losing a game. Team members communicate amongst themselves to plan a strategy, direct the ball movement, to call for the ball, to tell their team members about who to defend, etc. They also use nonverbal communication to show their non-agreement with referee, if any. In addition, non-verbal communication is also seen at the play field when players of two different teams get into a tussle in the heat of the game.
The most used non verbal communication during the game is at the line of scrimmage before the ball is snapped.
The quarterback tries to read or guess what the defense is going to do; if they are going to blitz or if they are doing certain defense. Depending on what the quarterback thinks, he will use common non verbal signals and gestures to communicate to the receivers, running backs or tight ends. To indicate which receiver should be sent in motion from one side of the field to the other, the quarterback will either tap his left or right foot or tap the left or right side of the centers leg to let the receiver know which way to go. The receiver then will move in motion towards the other side of the field to set up and wait for the quarterback to hike the ball. “To get the center to hike the ball, in shotgun formation, the quarterback will use a “silent snap” by tapping his foot on the ground” (Goldberg 2010). Nonverbal communication is also seen between the players when they shoot a goal or when they commit a mistake. At each and every second of the play, we can see the nonverbal communication happening between the
players.