Soccer academies are environments in which promising soccer players are trained and developed with the goal of becoming elite senior athletes (Crust, Nesti, & Littlewood, 2010 ). English academies pursue a dual sporting objective according to Isoard-Gautheur, Guillet-Ducas & Duda (2013), in which they aim to teach and help athletes master their skills, but also have an obligation to ensure that a number enough athletes enter the senior team. Academies train athletes aged 10 to 18 on a part-time basis, using elite coaches and elite competitions between other academies to improve their players' abilities (Crust, Nesti and Littlewood, 2010). Academies are widely used as a progressive filter, which starts with a large number of athletes from a young age, with a progressively reduced number of athletes in each age group as age increases (Crust, Nesti and Littlewood, 2010). Retention of an athlete for the following year is subject to player evaluation by coaches and academy directors, thereby requiring athletes to demonstrate skills and achieve success (Isoard-Gautheur, Guillet-Ducas & Duda , 2012; Crust, Nesti & Littlewood, 2010).Due to the stressful and high-achieving nature of this academy achievement environment, the question of how to ensure that athletes achieve their athletic potential without suffering from athletic burnout has become increasingly important (Isoard-Gautheur, Guillet-Ducas & Duda, 2012). Research on this process has highlighted various factors such as perfectionism (Lemyre, Hall & Roberts, 2008; Gould, Tuffey, Udry & Loehr, 1997) and stress coping techniques (Coakley, 1992) as being important in sports burnout, but also showed that certain motivational factors ( ) played an influential role...... middle of article......logy, 8, 36-50.Smith, RE (1986). Towards a cognitive-affective model of sports burnout. Journal of Sport Psychology, 8, 36-50. Smith, RE, Cumming, SP, & Smoll, FL (2008). Development and validation of the motivational climate scale for youth sport. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 20(1), 116-136. Smith, RE, Smoll, FL and Cumming, SP (2009). Motivational climate and changes in young athletes' achievement goal orientations. Motivation and Emotion, 33(2), 173-183. Conroy, DE, Elliot, AJ, & Hofer, SM (2003). A 2 x 2 achievement goal questionnaire for sport: Evidence for factorial invariance, temporal stability, and external validity. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 37(1), 42-56. Raedeke, T.D. and Smith, A.L. (2001). Development and preliminary validation of a measure of athlete burnout. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology.