Sports are often performed in front of an audience, which can help or hinder motor performance. Strauss (2002) argues that tasks which require strength, endurance and speed should profit, while tasks that require coordination should suffer when spectators are present (for a recent review, see van Meurs et al., 2022). Soccer consists of a mixture of motor abilities (e.g. coordination, speed), so spectator effects may be difficult to disentangle in real-world scenarios.
In a repeated measures design, 27 soccer players (age = 19.1 ± .7 years) performed a timed dribbling parcours (coordination, speed) and a 30-m sprint (speed). A subsample of participants also juggled a ball (coordination). Every participant completed the tasks alone, in front of others (4 to 5 team members), and in the presence of a group of 7 virtual spectators. The virtual spectators were projected onto a screen as a video, and the participants were informed that they were being observed live. Data were analysed with repeated-measures ANOVAs with spectator condition as independent variable, for each task separately.
Spectator effects were only observed for the sprint task, with participants running faster when being watched by their team members. The presence of spectators had no influence in the dribbling parcours and the juggling task. This indicates that spectator effects may require a real audience, and may be larger for tasks that require speed than for pure coordination tasks and tasks combining coordination and speed. Future research needs to replicate these effects in larger samples, and across different sports.