Challenge and relief : a Foucauldian disciplinary analysis of retirement from professional association football in the United Kingdom

The aim of this study was to consider the retirement experiences of British male professional Association footballers by utilising Foucault’s (1991) analysis of discipline discussed in Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. Specifically, we drew upon Foucault to consider how, through the various techniques and instruments of discipline, the professional football context produces ‘docile footballing bodies’ and how this might influence a player’s experiences in retirement. We gathered our empirical material using a Foucauldian-informed interview framework (Avner et al., 2013) with 25 former professional male football players between the ages of 21-34. Our analysis suggested that retirement from football was both a challenge and a relief for our participants, and that their extended period of time within football’s strong disciplinary apparatus significantly influenced how they experienced their retirement

Understanding problematic sporting stories: Narrative therapy and applied sport psychology

In this paper we examine how postmodernism can inform the practice of sport psychology. More specifically, we will discuss how a therapeutic approach known as “narrative therapy” can enable athletes to reclaim control over their sporting practices and eliminate problem stories undermining their performance

Health and well-being implications surrounding the use of wearable GPS devices in professional rugby league: A Foucauldian disciplinary analysis of the normalised use of a common surveillance aid

Wearable GPS tracking devices have become commonplace coaching aids across professional field sports to enhance sports performances and reduce injury rates, despite the implications of the technology being poorly understood. This study looked at how GPS devices are used and the impact constant surveillance has upon the physical, psychological, and emotional health of rugby football workers. The disciplinary analysis of Michel Foucault was used to investigate how British Super League teams use wearable GPS technology, to investigate the dominant 'truth' that promotes surveillance technologies as 'universally beneficial' to athlete sports performance, health and well-being. Data was drawn from semi-structured interviews with three performance analysts/strength and conditioning coaches at three different Super League clubs across the North of England. Participants confessed data generated from wearable GPS is often totally ignored, despite being specifically produced to protect athlete health and wellbeing. When used, GPS data can become a 'disciplinary tool' to normalise and coerce players to comply with potentially unhealthy physical and psychological demands of a professional playing career. Importantly, regardless of how GPS data was used, the employment of wearable GPS devices was constantly and rigorously implemented. The constant surveillance experience by working players, when mismanaged or adopted as a coercive disciplinary tool, magnifies the uncertainty and fear of failure central to the predominant challenges that arise during a working football career. This leads to the acceptance of problematic norms damaging to physical, psychological, and emotional health. If GPS or other surveillance based performance analysis technologies are to be used in sport, coaches need to regulate or re-think their day-to-day use to avoid creating new harms to athlete health and well-being

'After the Dust Settles’: Foucauldian Narratives of Retired Athletes’ ‘Re-orientation’ to Exercise

One aspect of sports retirement that has been overlooked until recently is the manner in which retired athletes relate to, and seek to redefine, the meaning of exercise in their post-sport lives. In this article, three Foucauldian scholars present and analyze a series of vignettes concerning their own sense-making and meaning-making about exercise following their long-term involvement in high-performance soccer (authors one and two) and distance running (author three). In doing so, this paper aims to underline the problematic legacy of high-performance sport for retiring athletes’ relationship to movement and exercise, and to highlight how social theory, and Foucauldian theorization in particular, can serve to open new spaces and possibilities for thinking about sports retirement

Jogging not running: A narrative approach to exploring ‘exercise as leisure’ after a life in elite football

As research has shown, former elite athletes often struggle to adapt to aspects of their post-sport lives. This can include the management of their identities, dealing with the uncertainty of their new roles, and negotiating the changes that occur to their bodies. In this paper we discuss an under-reported challenge facing retired athletes: how to manage their ongoing relationship with exercise. To address this issue we adopted a narrative approach, based on the first author’s experiences as a former football player, to provide a socio-cultural reading of the various challenges involved in the transition from exercise as a vocation to a leisure activity. We suggest that these stories demonstrate that in retirement, former athletes’ docility, while seemingly advantageous, can also be a significant obstacle to developing alternative meanings for exercise, including as a potential re-creative or leisure activity that can become meaningful and important in its own right

Beat the Game: A Foucauldian Exploration of Coaching Differently in an Elite Rugby Academy

Problem-based learning along with other game and player-centred approaches have been promoted as valuable alternatives to more traditional, skill-based, directive, and leader-centric pedagogical approaches. However, as research has shown, they are not unproblematic or straightforward to apply. Heeding to calls for more empirical studies of game-centred approaches in coaching contexts, this study explored the impact of a unique problem-based learning (PBL) informed academy-wide coaching approach to athlete learning and development known as Beat the Game within a top-level rugby union professional club. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s ([1977]. Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Vintage) disciplinary framework, we specifically sought to critically examine whether, to what extent, and how a PBL informed academy-wide coaching approach challenges the dominant disciplinary logic of elite sport. Our data, based on observations and semi-structured interviews with three academy coaches and sixteen junior and senior academy players, showed a definitive loosening of disciplinary aspects in both training and game environments accompanied by a shift towards a less leader-centric, linear, and hierarchical understanding of leadership and decision-making. Despite these promising shifts, the application of a PBL-informed coaching approach within this elite development context also presented many challenges, not the least of which resulted from the non-alignment of academy and first team coaching approaches. Our analysis, therefore, indicated the need for more research which focuses on the short-term and long-term impact that such disconnects have on continued progression, performance, physical and mental wellbeing, and job satisfaction and longevity especially given the growing popularity of non-linear pedagogies in youth sporting contexts

Seeing the way: visual sociology and the distance runner's perspective

Employing visual and autoethnographic data from a two‐year research project on distance runners, this article seeks to examine the activity of seeing in relation to the activity of distance running. One of its methodological aims is to develop the linkage between visual and autoethnographic data in combining an observation‐based narrative and sociological analysis with photographs. This combination aims to convey to the reader not only some of the specific subcultural knowledge and particular ways of seeing, but also something of the runner's embodied feelings and experience of momentum en route. Via the combination of narrative and photographs we seek a more effective way of communicating just how distance runners see and experience their training terrain. The importance of subjecting mundane everyday practices to detailed sociological analysis has been highlighted by many sociologists, including those of an ethnomethodological perspective. Indeed, without the competence of social actors in accomplishing these mundane, routine understandings and practices, it is argued, there would in fact be no social order