Martin Roderick

A very precarious profession

Based on semi-structured interviews with 47 present and former professional footballers, this article explores the uncertainty that is a central feature of the professional footballers workplace experiences, contributing to sociological understanding of insecurities stemming from the social relations of this type of work.The professional football industry has always been marked by a competitive labour market, and players quickly grasp the limited tenure of contracts, the constant surplus of talented labour, and their vulnerability to injury and ageing.To deal with the feelings of insecurity that arise from these working conditions, players develop networks of a) friends to whom they can turn if they perceive their status to be under threat, and b) dramaturgical selves(Collinson, 2003) in order to maintain stable, masculine workplace identities. Addressing feelings of uncertainty is an everpresent dimension of their working lives.

From identification to dis-identification: case studies of job loss in professional football

Taken from a broader study of the careers of professional footballers, this article uses two player stories of job loss to offer contrasting experiences of cynical dis-identification. I examine how in research on the careers of sports workers, athletes so often express discontent yet maintain an apparent dedication and commitment to their craft. In contrast to the overwhelming focus on the construction and shaping of workplace identity, this article introduces the notion of dis-identification to explain how athletes resist coach/managerial domination in an occupation in which high commitment is assumed by expressing cynical and instrumental attitudes to their jobs: cynical athletes dis-identify with dominant cultural prescriptions so as to distance themselves from ideological rhetoric, a process in which subjectivities are ‘externalised’. Although cynical athletes may feel like autonomous agents, nevertheless, they still perform managerial norms and rituals.

An Unpaid Labor of Love: Professional Footballers, Family Life and the Problem of Job Relocation

This article presents qualitative findings which cast light on experiences of job-related geographical relocation for professional footballers and their families. Job relocation is an issue for players and partners, as labor market migration is commonplace in this profession. Although cultural expectations often lead to personal sacrifice, initial research findings indicate that many partners are deciding against relinquishing control over their own prospects and identities, and exercising influence in relation to negotiations concerning living arrangements. Professional footballers are an interesting group to examine for their work contaminates the lives of significant others. Based on interviews with 49 professional footballers, the data presented illuminate the interdependence between home and work and illustrate how decision-making processes and subsequent outcomes impact on the organization of, and living arrangements for, family members.

Domestic moves: An exploration of intra-national labour mobility in the working lives of professional footballers

This article investigates the domestic, intra-state labour mobility of professional footballers. Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with a snowball sample of 49 male professional footballers who represent a range of career trajectories; the specific object of 19 interviews was to examine meanings and experiences tied to job relocation. An interactionist perspective was employed to highlight the ways in which players came to define, control and negotiate their workplace social realities. The article explores the working contexts that lead players to find new employment and appreciate the temporally oriented workplace situations that colour their experiences. The interview data illuminate the way ‘work’ opportunities are denied, how players are marginalised from the club’s central activity, and why these contexts lead to the dilution of feelings of job security. The conclusion argues that the spirit of community needs to be retained in professional football, and offers direction for further research for an activity that has become somewhat instrumental and expedient.

Introducing sport in films

This special edition of Sport in Society is dedicated to the analysis of films and documentaries in which a sport, a sporting occasion, or an athlete is the central focus. It is our belief that sport offers everything a good story should have: heroes and villains, triumph and disaster, achievement and despair, tension and drama. Consequently, sport makes for a compelling film narrative and films, in turn, are a vivid medium for sport. Yet despite its regularity as a central theme in motion pictures, constructions and representations of sport and athletes have been marginalized in terms of serious analysis within the longstanding academic study of films and documentaries. It seems unusual that so little attention has been paid academically to such an endeavour given that both sport and film occupy such dominant positions in contemporary social life. We agree with the sentiments of King and Leonard who point out that films with a sporting focus are rarely taken as serious pieces of visual art worthy of critical examination. For us, the intersections of sport and film demand serious study because of their centrality as popular cultural forms. The experts in the field approached for the purpose of contributing to this edition were encouraged to undertake a critical analysis of a film, a category of films or non-fictional documentary that could be understood by all readers and not just those already interested in analysing, comprehending and evaluating the techniques of film production. We hope that the essays which comprise this collection enable readers, but in particular students of sport and the cinema, to begin to view and place films with a sport theme within their historical and social context, and to be able to grasp the relationship between a film – its structure, style and narrative – and particular aspects of reality outside it. The idea for this collection originated from an undergraduate assignment we set students in which they were asked to analyse critically the ways in which social problems are represented in, what we tentatively refer to as, ‘sport films’. Our students embarked upon this assignment with enthusiasm; however their initial momentum was gradually diminished by the lack of available scholarly literature from a film studies tradition that deals directly with issues in sport. Indeed, with the exception of the excellent work by Aaron Baker and a small (but growing) number of academic articles, the intellectual study of sport in film by scholars of film studies has been relatively limited. Furthermore, on the basis of our students’ experiences, few of these scholarly works make for easy, introductory level reading for novices to the study of film. Thus, we hope this collection will identify for students the main types of critical tools scholars employ to analyse films. Of course films, like all forms of visual culture, are texts comprised of images, words and sounds that bestow meanings. The film text is complex, produced and ‘encoded’ by

Disciplinary mechanisms and the discourse of identity: The creation of ‘silence’ in an elite sports academy

Organization studies research exposes the need to examine power relations embedded within the design of organizations, the construction of normative behaviour, and the production of socially constructed meanings that lead to the removal of employee voice. Drawing upon 21 qualitative interviews with Premiership football academy members, this article examines the regulation, control and ‘silencing’ of young English professional footballers. Building upon two existing literatures concerning the institutional dynamics of footballing traineeship, and the concept of organizational ‘silence’, the article explains how characteristics associated with surveillance mechanisms and the perpetuation of institutional norms lead to the configuration of a climate of silence. Utilizing the work of Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman, the article addresses the call for an understanding of the interplay between social actors and the confines of their structural context as an example of restrictive practice and for providing insight into the ‘how’ of silencing.

Recovery from addiction and the potential role of sport: Using a life-course theory to study change:

To date, sport has played little part as an adjunct or alternative to adult alcohol and drug treatment programmes. However, research into natural recovery (overcoming addiction without formal treatment) identifies that sustained, meaningful activities located within the community, supportive social networks and new identities are a key part of desistance. This article draws on longitudinal data which tracked substance-misusing offenders engaging in a community-based sports programme – Second Chance – as part of their journeys of recovery from alcohol and other drug problems. Employing a life-course theory of informal social controls, the study identified that Second Chance offered participants a space for the opportunity for change, within which an identity transformation was occurring for some respondents. The identity transformation, and subsequent desistance, was facilitated through a confluence of meaningful routine activities, informal social controls and personal agency, both within and outside of Second Chance. This article analyses the life stories told by two Second Chance players, focusing on the meanings they attached to the programme in the context of their recovery and located in their day-to-day lives over 12 months. In doing so the authors highlight the complex nature of recovery from addiction, how structure and agency interrelate in this context and possible implications for sports-based interventions seeking to support disadvantaged adults.

‘The whole week comes down to the team sheet’ : a footballer’s view of insecure work.

This ‘On the front line’ article focuses on the work and employment situation for an insecure, individualized sports worker whose main job task is fundamentally and publically collaborative. The narrative offers a realistic and nuanced understanding of the material conditions of work for a journeyman footballer and defies sociological ideas associated with attachment and identification to work, which are frequently and implicitly connected to this profession. So while physical and skilful dimensions are commonly foregrounded, the testimony of (now retired) professional footballer James Schumacker lays bare not only the uncertainties and instability of this job, but also specifically the constant tension between securing fixed-term employment and being selected for first team games: making the ‘team sheet’.