Abstract

The aim of this study is to present the problem solving skill levels of sportsmen who play football professionally, and to determine whether problem solving skill levels differ according to sportsmen’s, sports club, age, marital status, parents’ educational status, father’s occupation, occupation in the game,  year of playing football professionally and age of starting sport. Totally, 80 sportsmen played at Bank Asya League. Twenty (20) who played at Akhisar Municipality Youth and Sports Club, 23 who played at Göztepe A.Åž., 21 who played at Çaykur Rizespor A.Åž. and 16 played at Konya Sports Club participated in the research. In order to get the aim of the research, Problem Solving Inventory which was adapted in Turkish by Åžahin and his friends and developed by Heppner and Peterson (1982) was used. The inventory was 6 Likert type which consisted of 35 items. Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) programme was used for evaluating frequency; t-test and one way variance analysis (ANOVA) were used for individual groups and Scheffe-F test was used for finding the group which was the reason for differences. Finding revealed that, professional footballers were beyond the mid-high level of problem solving skills (in the inventory, the least value is 32 and the highest value was 192 and the score found at the end of the search was  = 88, 91). While there were no meaningful differences in sportsmen’s marital status, education status, parents’ education status, father’s occupation, sportsmen’s problem solving level variables, occupation in the game, the year of playing football professionally and the age of starting sport, there were meaningful differences in their sports club and age variables.

Key words: Professional footballer, Bank Asya League, problem solving skill