International youth football research developments: A CiteSpace-based bibliometric analysis

With the vigorous development of football, research on youth football has garnered significant attention from scholars, leading to an increase in published findings. However, there is currently no comprehensive retrospective study that examines the status, hotspots, and trends of research in this field. This study employed Cite Space, a visual bibliometric software, to systematically review and analyze 1637 articles from the Web of Science (WOS) and China Knowledge Infrastructure Project (CNKI) databases up to January 2024. The primary objective was to examine the sources, authors, institutions, regions, citations, as well as keywords, and clustering of these articles to identify the global research hotspots and trends in youth football. The study concluded that the number of research articles in this field has been decreasing annually, and the research hotspots are exhibiting a gradual downward trend. The primary research institutions are comprehensive universities, supplemented by research centers and hospitals. The United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, and China have produced substantial research results in this area, and collaboration among researchers is relatively strong, indicating a positive development trajectory. Current research hotspots include sports monitoring and evaluation, sports injury and risk, talent identification and development, sports performance, the integration of sports and education, school football, and youth training systems. This finding provides a comprehensive overview of the research landscape in this field and presents opportunities for researchers to pursue further in-depth investigations.