From immediate recognition to judgement stability: assessing declarative tactical learning in youth football

Background In youth football, coaches and educators frequently rely on players’ immediate recognition of tactical content as an indicator of learning. However, such recognition may reflect momentary accessibility rather than stable pedagogical integration. Distinguishing between immediate recognition and judgement stability is therefore critical for evaluating instructional effectiveness.Purpose This study examined young football players’ explicit recognition of previously taught tactical actions and the short-term stability of these judgements using a double-pass assessment protocol.Methods 225 male youth football players from professional academies (U-13, U-15, U-18) completed a recognition task involving 40 tactical actions commonly addressed in training. Each action was assessed twice within the same session: first through an immediate judgement (single pass, SP), and then through a repeated judgement after a short delay (double pass, DP), without additional instruction. Analyses combined continuous recognition scores, threshold-based indicators of declarative integration, and action-level profiling.Results Across all age groups, recognition was systematically lower in the DP condition than in the SP condition, indicating that immediate recognition overestimated stable learning. Although the SP-DP discrepancy decreased with age, suggesting improved metacognitive calibration, declarative stability remained limited even among older players. Recognition profiles also varied substantially across tactical actions, highlighting strong content-specific effects.Conclusion Immediate recognition provides a fragile basis for evaluating tactical learning. Repeated assessment procedures offer a more conservative and pedagogically informative indicator of declarative integration and judgement stability.