Study reveals how young athletes' values differ by country, age, gender and training level

A new study highlights how young athletes’ moral, status, and competence values vary across countries, age groups, genders, and training levels, shedding light on the cultural influences shaping behaviour in sport.

Young athletes’ value systems differ not only between countries but also by training level, age and gender, according to a study published in Frontiers in Psychology. The research, carried out under the European “Faith in the future of sports” project, looked at 381 athletes in Finland, Italy, Poland and Sweden and used the Youth Sport Values Questionnaire-2 to measure moral, status and competence values.

The questionnaire, which has been used in earlier sport research and adapted in several languages, is designed to capture how strongly athletes prioritise fairness, winning and self-improvement. In the newer study, the authors said the tool showed acceptable reliability across the four national samples, although some subscales performed more strongly than others.

Across the full sample, the clearest national differences appeared in status values, which reflect the importance attached to winning, superiority and public image. Italian and Polish athletes scored higher than Finnish and Swedish athletes, while Finnish participants recorded the lowest scores overall. Training tier also mattered: athletes classified as recreationally active placed less emphasis on competence than those in developmental or highly trained groups. The researchers said this suggests that as athletes move up the performance ladder, achievement and skill become more central to how they view sport.

Moral values, which include fairness and helpfulness, showed a more complex pattern. The study found an interaction between country, age and gender, with differences concentrated in specific groups rather than across all participants. Among 15- and 16-year-olds, Finnish boys reported lower moral values than girls of the same age, while Polish boys in the same age band reported higher moral values than Polish girls. The pattern partly reversed among older Finnish athletes, where boys again scored lower than girls.

The findings fit with earlier youth sport research showing that values can shape behaviour in sport. A previous study indexed by PubMed found that moral and competence values were linked to prosocial attitudes, while status values were associated with antisocial attitudes. The authors of the new paper argue that national sport systems, coaching environments and broader cultural expectations may all help shape how young athletes rank these values, and they call for more country-specific work to guide coaches and youth programmes.