When Your Child Blames The Coach, Teammates or Referee

After a difficult game, players often look for an explanation. The referee misses call. A teammate did not pass the ball. The coach changed their position or did not give them the minutes they expected. Sometimes the opponent was difficult to play against or the conditions made the game harder than usual. There may be truth in some of those frustration and the challenge begins when the explanation stops there.

A useful reflection gives the player room to recognize what happened around them while also helping them understand how they responded within the situation. That combination creates a more complete picture and gives the player somewhere to act.

Looking Outside Ourselves After A Difficult Result Is Common

Players are not unusual for focusing first on something outside of themselves after a disappointing performance. Research across organized sport has found a consistent pattern in how athletes explain success and failure. A systematic review and meta analysis involving 69 studies and more than 10,000 athletes found that athletes were generally more likely to attribute personal success to internal factors and personal failure to external ones. Similar patterns appeared at the team level, where success was more often attributed to factors within the group and failure to factors outside it (Allen et al., 2020).

When a young player says, “The referee cost us the game, “ they may be making sense of an emotional experience in the way athletes often do. It may also be their first explanation and with time, it can become a more complete one.

Start With The Experience

When a player is frustrated, beginning with an argument about whether their explanation is correct rarely creates much room for reflection. If the player says, “The referee was terrible,” a parent can recognize the first experience as “that call really bothered you.” The acknowledgment of what the player felt without immediately deciding whether the referee was right or wrong. The same principle can apply when the frustration involves a teammates or coach. The thought is to make the player feel heard and the conversation can eventually move toward understanding rather than becoming a debates about whose version of the game is correct.

Agency Gives The Player Somewhere To Act

Attribution research in sport has long emphasized the importance of how athletes interpret the causes of performance outcomes, particularly whether they view those causes as controllable or outside their control (Rees et al., 2005).

For young players, we can translate that idea into something practical. A player may have little influence over whether a referee changes a call; but can have more influence over how quickly they reconnect with the game afterward. Players cannot make a teammate choose a particular pass; but they can continue creating useful options and communicating. If they are frustrated with the decision of the lineup, they can prepare for the role they are given and seek clarity when they need it. These scenarios is where accountability becomes useful.

Coach, Teammate and REferee Frustrations Are Different

It can be tempting to treat every complaint as the same type of problem, but the next useful step depends on what the player is describing. For example, a frustration with a teammate exists inside an ongoing relationship. Players are learning how to communicate, depend on one another and manage situations where someone else makes a decision they would not have made themselves. To provide a next step, it may involve helping the player organize what feels unclear so they can have appropriate conversation within their environment.

Youth sport works best when players feel able to talk honestly about their experience. If a child repeatedly raises concerns about how they are being treated, communication that makes them uncomfortable or something affecting their welfare, those concerns deserve attention.

A developmental conversation should create more understanding, including understanding when an adult needs to become more involved. Some situations can be worked through by helping the player reflect on their own response. Others require clarification from the coach or club. Concerns involving player welfare should be taken seriously. Ownership and accountability work best when they sit alongside an environment where young people feel safe enough to raise legitimate concerns.

Team Sports Require Shared Responsibility

Blaming teammates can be especially complicated because soccer is built on interdependence. Every decision and action affects someone else; meaning the game often contains more information than one person can see. Learning to function inside a team includes recognizing that teammates will make mistakes, just as the player will. As time progresses, players can become better at separating a pattern that may need communication from a single decision in a fast and unpredictable game. As well as share responsibility without carrying responsibility for everything.

The Parent May Agree With the Complaint

The parent’s journey can become difficult when they watched the game and completely agree with the complaint. Now, the parent has to decide what part of their own interpretation will actually help the player. Joining the complaint can feel supportive because the player knows someone is on their side. At times, that may be exactly what the relationship needs. But repeatedly reinforcing an external explanation can also give that explanation more weight than it deserves.

On the other hand, the parent may need to process their own frustration somewhere else before deciding what belongs in the conversation with the child.

Either way the complaints needs to become more developmental and the player needs to be at a stage where they have some agency. That shift is important because young players are gradually learning to evaluate their own experiences and take greater responsibility for their development.

Research with elite youth soccer players continues to identify self regulated learning processes such as reflection, planning and regulation of effort as meaningful parts of how players engage with their own development (Hamoud et al., 2024).

Perspective Grows With Experience

Young players often experience games from their own immediate point of view. As they mature, they can gradually begin seeing more of the context around a moment. A coach is balancing the needs of an entire group, teammates may have seen different information and a referee has one angle and make a decision quickly. Understanding those perspectives does not require agreeing with every decision; it simply gives the player a more complete view of the environment they are navigating.

That ability can help them communicate more effectively and respond with greater maturity when the game becomes frustrating.

A Final Thought

There will always be external factors in soccer and learning different realities is part of understanding the game. Maturity grows as players become capable of recognizing what happened around them while still finding the part of the experience where they have agency.

Parents can help by listening before deciding whether to agree or correct. They can help the player move forwrad a fuller explanation and recognize when a concern belongs in a conversation with the appropriate people in the environment.The player does not have to carry responsibility for everything that happened. They can learn to take responsibility for what they do next.

Reflection

When your child focuses on the coach, a teammate or the referee after a difficult game, what happens when you allow the frustration to be heard before helping them look at the rest of the situation?

Can they identify where they still have some agency?

References

Allen, M. S., Robson, D. A., Martin, L. J., & Laborde, S. (2020). Systematic review and meta analysis of self serving attribution biases in the competitive context of organized sport. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 46(7), 1027-1043. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167219893995

Hamoud, M., Sæther, S. A., & Bjønebekk, G. (2024). Self regulation and performance among elite youth soccer players: The role of approach avoidance motivation. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, Article 1416931. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1416931

Rees, T., Ingledew, D. K., & Hardy, L. (2025) Attribution in sport psychology: Seeking congruence between theory, research and practice. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 6(2), 189-204. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2003.10.008