Charlotte Behlau’s research while affiliated with University of Münster and other places

Crises are prevalent and constitute challenges all around and also within sports, although limited research attention has been paid to crises in sports so far. The manifold faces of crises in sports draw through all macro, meso, or micro levels with the general understanding of a crisis being that, regardless of the outcome, the present experience of a crisis is negative, possibly harmful or threatening, and requires attention. This chapter provides first a general introduction into crisis in the broader context as well as in sports. Second, a generalized overview of the structure and highlights of the book are presented. We divided this edition “The Psychology of Crises in Sports: Causes, Consequences and Solutions” to understand and see the manifold faces of crisis into the themes: Theory and Concepts, Performance, Communication, Health, and Society. This chapter describes each theme, the general content as well as shortly presenting a summary of the overall chapters. In general, this book gathers the current knowledge on crisis in sports and thereby provides direction for future research of crises in sports.

This chapter introduces crisis decision theory (CDT, Sweeny, Psychol Bull 134(1):61–76, 2008), as one of the few fitting psychology theories addressing crisis with applicability to sports. The focus of CDT lies in the responses to crises and in factors determining the response. It is based on the transactional model of stress (Lazarus and Folkman, Stress, appraisal, and coping, Springer Publishing Company, 1984) and the self-regulation model of illness (Leventhal et al., Illness representations and coping with health threats, Routledge, 1984), combined with research on decision-making. Originally, CDT addressed responses to different forms of crises with a specific focus on responses to illness diagnoses. The focus of this chapter is to apply the theory to sports. In the applied part of this chapter, a common example of a response to such a crisis is elaborated, the hiring and firing of coaches. A few teams of the English Premier League are examined more carefully. In many cases, the coach seems to be held responsible for poor team performance and is therefore let go. While firing the coach is often chosen as a response to poor performance, it may not always be the most efficacious and certainly not the only option. The present chapter aims to convey, in line with CDT, more response options need to be considered to deal with poor performance.