Objectives: Football Federation Australia (FFA) has identified that Australian athletes are proficient physically, however often lack the technical and tactical skills to excel internationally. The aim of the current study was to assess if a video-based decision-making test could discriminate different age-matched skill levels of talent in Australian soccer. Design: Cross-sectional observational. Methods: Sixty-two youth male soccer players completed a video-based decision-making test. Results: An ANOVA test showed that the video-based test significantly discriminated between all three groups, with the national elite athletes selecting more correct responses than the state elite (65.3±8.1%; 56.0±9.1%, respectively). The state elite were more accurate than the sub-elite (45.9±8.8%). Conclusions: Results suggest that a video-based test may be a suitable tool to use in the selection of athletes as a measure of decision-making skill. The low accuracy scores, even for the national elite cohort, suggest that decision-making skill at the youth level has room for improvement and should be prioritised as an area for development.
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