How to get a Collection in Doctrine2's query results

The getResult() always returns an array. If you want a collection, you must pass the array that is returned by getResult() to Doctrine's ArrayCollection

e.g.

use Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection;

$result = $this
    ->getEntityManager()
    ->createQueryBuilder()
    ->select('p')
    ->from('...\Player', 'p')
    ->getQuery()
    ->getResult()
;

$players = new ArrayCollection($result);