Caught up

JOURNAL OF SPORT 10.1177/0193723504268730 SCOTTISH PROFESSIONAL & SOCIAL ISSUES FOOTBALLERS / February 2005

CAUGHT UP IN AND BY THE BEAUTIFUL GAME A Case Study of Scottish Professional Footballers David McGillivray Richard Fearn Aaron McIntosh Drawing upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu, this article illustrates how a group of young, predominantly working-class men come to possess a doxic knowledge of the value of the game of football and its stakes. Drawing on a survey of Scottish football players, the article concludes that young participants are guided from an early age toward sporting careers that, although offering the hope of transcending their objective conditions, invariably deceive them with optimism. In the perilous financial climate facing the Scottish professional game, players are being discarded bereft of the exchangeable, readily transferable skills necessary for a future in an alternative employment field. Overreliant upon a constantly depreciating bank of physical capital, these players face precarious futures once this asset reaches exhaustion and their working bodies are deemed surplus to requirements.

Keywords: Bourdieu; Scottish professional football; education; capital

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he realm of elite sport attracts mass popularity and incessant media interest across the globe. In the United Kingdom, professional football takes pride of place, labeled the “beautiful game” and representing a surrogate religion for millions of adoring participants and spectators alike (Faulkner, 2001). Although at the upper echelons of the professional game earnings have grown exponentially thereby ensuring that elite performers live out lifestyles befitting celebrity idols (Whannel, 2002), little attention has been given to those who are left behind, their careers threatened by unstable economic labor market trends. In fact, over the last 2 years in particular, the U.K. professional football labor market has been revolutionized with increased financial stringency, precarious employment forecasts, and the ensuing threat of several clubs folding.

There are numerous social and economic variables contributing to this changing professional football labor market. Although the Bosman (I and II)1 rulings bestowed on players greater freedom of movement (and promises of riches), this was accompanied by a sharp downturn in broadcasting Journal of Sport & Social Issues, Volume 29, No. 1, February 2005, pp. 102-123 DOI: 10.1177/0193723504268730 © 2005 Sage Publications

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revenues, one of the primary funding streams buttressing the U.K. professional game. This article takes as its focus the Scottish professional leagues (i.e., Premier League, First, Second, and Third Divisions) where, in the summer of 2002, close to 500 players were released from their clubs representing more than a third more than the previous year’s total (Gordon, 2002). Furthermore, an increasing number of clubs are signing players on either parttime or shorter contracts (Bell, 2002; Drysdale, 2002; Gordon, 2002). This fragile labor market has left scores of players either out of work or facing insecure futures (Fisher, 2002). The fallout from the industry has led to growing interest in matters of players’ education and personal development catalyzed through the work of the Professional Footballers Association (PFA) in England and its Scottish counterpart, the Scottish Professional Footballers Association (SPFA). These trade unions now direct much of their effort (and finance) toward the preparation of professional players for a postfootball identity—an increasingly important role given the precarious futures facing lower league professional players in the post-Bosman era.

Given the bleak forecasts for the future of the game, this article explores why professional football players continue to conscript themselves for entry to an employment field that offers them, at best, little more than 10 years secure tenure and no occupational pension. Drawing on a Bourdieusian conceptual framework, the article extends the analysis beyond crude economic arguments to understand how the beautiful game essentially becomes inculcated into the very bodily capital of its participants so that it comes to possess them. It will also identify the implications for those players caught up in and by the game once their short careers reach a conclusion.

A FOOTBALLING EDUCATION: PLAYING (IN) THE FIELD In developing a conceptual framework with which to explore the field of Scottish professional football and, in particular, its relationship with the educational field, it is worth drawing upon contributions from both the sociologies of education and sport for direction. The French social theorist, Pierre Bourdieu (1984, 1986, 1990a, 1990b, 1996, 1998) contributed to sociological endeavors and has been particularly influential in exploring the role of formal education in reproducing social inequalities and existing dominant social relations. Bourdieu’s work also extended to provide an analysis of how sport is a site of distinction reflecting particular taste signifiers (Bourdieu, 1984). In fact, as Jarvie and McGuire (1994) argued, “research on sport, leisure and the body occupies a central place” (p. 183) within his project. Subsequently, others have drawn on his work to examine various sports-related phenomena (e.g., Jarvie & McGuire, 1994; Shilling, 1993; Wacquant, 1995a, 1995b). For this particular study, some of Bourdieu’s influential ideas are applied to the Scottish professional football context by focusing upon its players and their attitudes toward formal learning.

First, it is necessary to consider Bourdieu’s “forays into the field of education” (Webb, Schirato, & Danaher, 2002, p. 105). Although Bourdieu

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viewed education as having transformative potential, in evaluating the role of formal education (and also sporting practices), Bourdieu drew heavily upon the central concepts of capital, field, and habitus to document how schools tend to reproduce inequalities (Bourdieu, 1996; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Bourdieu, Passeron, & de Saint Martin, 1992). These three concepts are the most significant and successful attempt to make sense of the relationship between objective social structures (institutions, discourses, fields, ideologies) and everyday practices (what people do, and why they do it). (Webb et al., 2002, p. 1)

In first considering capital, Bourdieu argued that within the series of cultural fields, various class groupings possess different levels of capital that “have value and can be traded or exchanged for desired outcomes within their own field or others” (Webb et al., 2002, p. 109). Possessing the desired “cultural capital” (Bourdieu, 1984) conferred by the educational field normally enhances individuals’ opportunities for distinction (the division between the holders of cultural and financial capital and the different dispositions they display toward culture itself). For example, in the formal educational field, exhibiting “an educated character” based on “knowledge, refined accents and disposition to learn” (Webb et al., 2002, p. 110) confers higher levels of cultural capital than those forms of learning associated with more practical, embodied practices (e.g., excelling at football). For Bourdieu (1984), it is the inequitable distribution of this valuable cultural capital that favors those who have access to the socially legitimated and valued ways of knowing that accrue distinction and social privilege. As a result, not being in possession of legitimated and valued ways of knowing (i.e., cultural capital) leaves particular individuals devalued and uncomfortable in this formal educational field (e.g., football players). In other words, they occupy the role of a fish out of water.

Nonetheless, Bourdieu was also always concerned to identify exceptions to this relatively universalizing and deterministic portrayal. His work on the field (Bourdieu, 1990a) stressed that capital accrued in one social arena does not necessarily confer value in another. For example, the cultural capital conferred in the educational field has an exchangeable value within the professional fields of law or medicine, because in these professions, the value of educational cultural capital is recognized and shared. So, fields essentially have their own logic and taken-for-granted structure (Jarvie & McGuire, 1994, p. 194). For example, in the relatively autonomous professional football field, the cultural capital ascribed to academic qualifications is of little value to prospective employers. In fact, possession of such cultural capital is often deemed unwelcome and threatening in an industry perceived to promote an anti-intellectual culture (Williams, 1995). In the struggle for dominant positions within this field, “practical labour” (Wacquant, 1995a, p. 73), the “exercise of an intelligence which comes into its own in

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communication with the concrete and actual realities of its natural setting” (Bittner, 1973, p. 253), is valued more highly than the cultural capital conferred in the formal educational field. This focus on a practical or “embodied competence” (Wacquant, 1995b, p. 504) is not unique to professional football, but football players are heavily reliant on their incorporated capital (a form of Bourdieu’s cultural capital), which is practically implanted through direct embodiment and not transferred via theory associated with formal educational qualifications. As a result, within the footballing field, dominant or subordinate positions reflect access to those valuable, embodied dispositions thus downgrading the value of formal educational theory as a marker of success in the game. As the forthcoming empirical component explains, professional football players utilize valued bodily capital to attain positions within their field, yet they always face the prospect of losing this position once their bodily capital is exhausted.

Bourdieu’s (1986) concept of habitus provides further elucidation of how the educational system reproduces social relations. As the set of durable dispositions that people carry within them that shapes their attitudes, behaviors, and responses to given situations (Bourdieu, 1986), the habitus is as much unconscious as conscious and is embodied in the sense-making apparatus of individuals. In an educational sense, through the habitus, the “values and relations of the school are inculcated and reproduced through the child” (Webb et al., 2002, p. 114) thus reinforcing particular (narrow) cultural trajectories. However, the educational field does not have a monopoly over the development of this habitus, as students arrive at school shaped by home and family life: There is a two-way relationship between habitus and field, where the field as a structured space, tends to structure the habitus, while the habitus tends to structure the perception of the field. (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 784)

With reference to the professional football field, the habitus (the set of durable dispositions) of young professional footballers (predominantly deriving from working-class backgrounds) plays an important role in structuring, but not determining, the relative perception of the value of schooling vis-à-vis playing football (low value). Similarly, the field of professional football structures the embodied habitus of its recruits so that the football club plays an influential role in their dispositions toward formal educational attainment. For Bourdieu, the children of those who have occupied relatively privileged social class positions are more likely to share the values, dispositions, and cultural capital of the school, whereas those from relatively underprivileged social class positions are likely to find school an alien environment that works through a very different set of values and expectations to their home and family habitus. Add in the fantasy element of Scottish football culture for those affected by class-determined social immobility, and the allure of the game becomes even more enticing.

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It is perhaps unsurprising that young footballers perceive a strangeness in the formal educational field while feeling like a “fish in water” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 127) in the football field. The football field constructs, promotes, and reinforces a particular set of dispositions or values that correspond more closely with their formative habitus, further reinforced by their anticipatory socialization (Musgrave, 1967) toward their chosen career path thereby amplifying dissociation from formal secondary education. Using Bourdieu’s (2001) notion of doxa, those unquestioned social conceptions that acquire the force of nature (Fowler, 1998), the values and meaning of the club are communicated to its young recruits from an early age. Doxa essentially “works to distinguish the thinkable from the unthinkable” (Webb et al., 2002, p. 120) and makes it possible to see how, through the competing educational and sporting fields, youngsters are made aware of and incorporate the cultural trajectories available to them.

For many of the participants in this study, football has been embodied in them from a formative period thus representing a major part of their identity and reinforced by their relatives, peers, and neighbors (Wacquant, 1995b). Academic pathways are deemed unthinkable (Bourdieu, 2000) as students from working-class backgrounds misrecognize their place in the educational hierarchy as given through a particular doxic knowledge (Fowler, 1998). In comparison, sports participation is both thinkable and achievable, and through their formative habitus, the game is viewed as a panacea, as second nature, and not as something that they have to consciously reflect on because of the repetitive articulation they have experienced through their family, home, and school habitus. In few other employment fields, perhaps with the exception of dance (see Thomas, 1995; Turner & Wainwright, 2003) or singing, is the future labor market tapped at such an early age and attempts made to tie recruits, both emotionally and contractually, to the organization. Football clubs essentially position themselves at the epicenter of their young recruits’ lives by promoting a set of dispositions toward football participation, which devalues formal educational attainment in favor of the game (see also Coakley, 1998; Kremer, Trew, & Ogle, 1997; Whannel, 2002).

Bourdieu (1978) also argued that attitudes to the use of the body are class related and influence both the patterns of sport participation and their status: Class habitus defines the meaning conferred on sporting activity, the profits expected from it. (p. 835)

Bourdieu’s (1986) concept of physical (or incorporated) capital is again relevant to this discussion. He depicted the body as a commodity, especially relevant for professional sports participants. The footballer, like the boxer (Wacquant, 1995a), is his body, “the template and epicentre of their life” (Wacquant, 1995a, p. 66). They work on it and with it as their main exchangeable asset. As the embodied form of cultural capital, physical

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capital can be converted/exchanged into economic capital (Shilling, 1993).

However, class groupings convert this capital differently with the working classes being deemed to have a more instrumental, functional relationship to the body as evidenced by their conversion of physical capital into economic capital via entry to sporting careers (Shilling, 1993). In this sense, the power, speed, and agility invested in the body become the object of exchange value. However, importantly for this article, the long-term conversion of physical capital is limited, especially as injury or illness can prematurely curtail a sportspersons career (Jones & Armour, 2000; Shilling, 1993). To this end, there are clear dangers in young players rejecting educational cultural capital in favor of investing everything in their (always degenerative) physical or bodily capital (Bourdieu, 1986; Wacquant, 1995a).

Footballers depend heavily on their embodied assets and are prone to comparable threats of occupational obsolescence through an erosion of their bodily capital. In the desire to preserve their valuable assets, they are encouraged to follow practices of abstinence and sacrifice, subordinating deleterious lifestyle behaviors to the imperatives of bodily care. Clubs play the panoptical (Foucault, 1977) role for their young recruits by institutionalizing sacrifice and self-denial for the good of the club. The relatively autonomous footballing field, then, represents a self-contained territory with its own inner logic, rules, and way of being in the field. In essence, the professional footballer is “inhabited by the game he inhabits” (Wacquant, 1995a, p. 88) and finds it difficult to see without its logic, language, and aspirations.

In this sense, formal educational attainment inhabits an incommensurable universe diagrammatically opposed or incompatible (Parker, 2000) with that valued in the game. The game is their education. Here is the inculcation of the footballing illusio, “the half-inarticulate, quasi-organismic belief in the value of the game and its stakes” (Wacquant, 1995b, p. 492). This belief in the value of the game is illustrated by Parker’s (2000) analysis of English professional football traineeships: The vast majority of trainees featured viewed full-time professional player status as an occupational inevitability and because of this many simply dismissed the whole notion of “further” educational pursuit or post-career vocational training. (p. 62)

Here, Parker demonstrates an unconscious submission to the inevitability of professional footballer status and a parallel unconscious rejection of the alien further educational field. Here, the aspirations of young footballers are clearly directed toward the dream-world phantasmagoria (Rojek, 1995) of professional football despite the objective evidence of increasingly insecure labor market conditions. This objective evidence points to occupational insecurity, as illustrated by Monk’s (2000) comment that only a quarter of football apprentices in England will make it in professional football thus representing a three quarters attrition rate for the industry. These comments, allied to the relatively short career of a professional football player, suggest

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that occupational continuation is anything but inevitable and downward social mobility a real possibility. Moreover, as Shilling (1993) reiterated, the high risks and opportunity costs associated with converting physical capital into other resources affects the working classes more than others. This is because the short-term functionality and instrumentality of physical capital does not endure. Apart from those elite-level players who maximize career earnings to ensure financial security, most players are required to consider a second, postfootball career in an alternative field where possession of the educational cultural capital of a university degree or other formal qualifications is valued and transferable. Supporting this view, Bynner and Parsons (2001) argued that in the modern labor market, employability is bound up with the possession of human capital in the form of skills and qualifications. Those without these attributes are likely to experience increasing difficulty in obtaining and retaining employment. As such, whereas professional sports offer their participants dream-world aspirations and the hope of using their bodily capital to achieve relative autonomy and transcendence “from their oppressive circumstances” (Wacquant, 1995b, p. 501), for most, the glamorous aura of sports stardom represents a transitory rather than permanent state of social mobility.

However, despite this rather bleak portrayal of the future for professional football players and their dependence on degenerative physical assets, it is necessary to understand how alternative careers remain implausible. As such, to analyze devotion to the beautiful game objectively, merely in employment opportunities, is to underestimate the life-world colonization that takes place. As Wacquant (1995b) argued, for sports stars, their sport is not “just something they do” as with other occupations. Instead, it represents an integral colonization of one’s life-world. . . . It is what they are: it defines at once their innermost identity, their practical attachments, and everyday doings, and their access to and place in the public realm. (Wacquant, 1995b, p. 507)

In this marriage of sport and identity formation, it is little wonder that Holt (1989), Gearing (1999), and Jones and Armour (2000) each argued that football players are often unable to detach themselves from the game once their careers come to an end. A footballing illusio becomes part of their very being, and it is understandable why players near to or in retirement often express a desire to remain in the game in some form or other. As with boxing, the sport becomes so entangled in their sense of self, “so intricately braided into the emotional and mental fabric of individuality that they simply cannot envision life without it” (Wacquant, 1995b, p. 509).

The forthcoming presentation and analysis of empirical data further explore the extent to which the formative habitus of Scottish professional football players and their ownership of capital within both the educational

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and sporting fields leaves them tied to an employment field with little longterm future.

RESEARCH METHOD Bourdieu championed the use of a variety of research methods in his own empirical investigations. He was critical of theoreticians for their abstraction and sought to challenge that dualism between theory and empirical work often found in Anglo-Saxon social scientific approaches. For example, in an interview given in the early 1980s, he claimed to have “combatted untheoretical empiricism vigorously enough to be also able to reject the unempirical conceptualisations of the pure ‘theoretician’” (Honneth, Kocyba, & Schwibs, 1986, p. 39). He therefore sought to straddle the disparity between overly empiricist, atheoretical approaches and overly philosophical, theoretical approaches to social inquiry. This was part of his attempt to overcome overtly objectivist and subjectivist accounts of the social world (Fowler, 1998): In utilising a range of quantitative as well as qualitative research methods, Bourdieu also challenges the crude formulations found in objectivity and subjectivity research debates. (Jarvie & McGuire, 1994, p. 185)

Hence, Bourdieu’s interest was in the relationship between objective social structures and subjective practices. He wanted to explore how social practices operate, how they act as processes through which individuals live out their daily lives. Empirically, he was particularly concerned with exploring how embodied actions structure how an individual thinks, feels, and acts and how these actions become incorporated into an individual’s psyche so that they act unconsciously and intuitively. However, he was also interested in resistance and how the practical and strategic dimensions of everyday life were played out. In doing so, he tried to avoid attributing actions to either pole of fixed determinism or flexible elasticity. In taking Bourdieu’s philosophy of research into an operational context, the study from which this article draws sought to explore both the objective, material relations (objective regularities) and subjective practices—how people use, “inhabit, negotiate or elude” (Webb et al., 2002, p. 35) objective regularities. In operationalizing this philosophy, the research process was divided into three distinct areas of investigation: (a) an institutional context, (b) clubs, and (c) players.

This article concentrates on part (c) of this strategy, namely, an investigation of the views of Scottish professional football players on their experiences within both the educational and footballing fields. The other areas of

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investigation are the subjects of forthcoming articles. A questionnaire survey was the research instrument used to investigate attitudes toward educational attainment, current occupational status, and future career aspirations of a sample of Scottish professional football players. The intention was to gather baseline data largely absent from understandings of the makeup of the Scottish professional football industry. For example, few if any previous investigations have secured access to the professional football industry in Scotland. It was therefore felt that the use of a postal questionnaire, accompanied by a letter from the player’s trade union (the SPFA), would help secure data on the lifestyles, educational attainment, and future career expectations of a group of full-time professional football players.

In total, 600 questionnaires were circulated to clubs across the Scottish Premier, First, Second, and Third Divisions, with the exception of Scotland’s two largest clubs, Celtic and Rangers. Although the contribution of their players would have provided some interesting results, both clubs indicated a reticence to be included in the survey. In retrospect, the inclusion of responses from relatively high-earning players would have skewed the sample and provided an unrepresentative picture of the Scottish professional football industry. As it was, a total of 137 unspoiled responses were received representing a 20% response rate. This was deemed satisfactory given the previous reluctance within the profession to engage with this type of study.

Of these 137 responses, 78 were from full-time players. It is these data that form the focus of attention in the proceeding presentation of results and analysis, because it was felt that this group was more likely to have reason to think about their postcareer options and might have been expected to make some preparations for this eventuality. Survey questions were focused around a number of specific themes represented in Table 1. Players were asked to provide comment on both aspects of their objective regularities (e.g., where they came from, their fathers’ occupational status), the influence of their formative habitus on formal schooling (e.g., qualifications gained, barriers to educational attainment), their current experience of the field of professional football (e.g., current income, length of contract remaining), and their preparations for a life in an alternative field (e.g., aspirations, level of preparations, further education taken). In covering this territory, the research process was designed to explore both objectivist and subjectivist accounts of the professional football field.

RESULTS: A FOOTBALLING NARRATIVE The forthcoming presentation of empirical data and analysis is structured under several emerging themes/issues. The principal focus rests upon the themes laid out in Table 1. Tables 2 through 5 illustrate the principal results derived from the questionnaire survey. Drawing on the key Bourdieusian concepts outlined earlier, a picture of the modern Scottish professional footballer is presented starting from their objective conditions at birth through their formative years to their current hopes and aspirations (cultural trajectories). Although the discussion in no way provides an

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TABLE 1 Analysis Specification Theme Player’s background

Variable Age

Place of birth Marital status

Child dependents

Father’s occupation

Experience School leaving of formal age schooling

Barriers to Attitudes toNumber and Reflection attainment ward upon level of level of schooling qualificaattainment tions

Football career

Full-/ part-time status

Number of clubs

Length of contract left

Time left in game

Income from football

Preparation Postfootball Preparations Reasons for Type of fur- Club advice/ ther educa- support for lack of made for career for career postfootball aspirations postfootball preparation tion taken outside career career football

objective account of the Scottish professional football industry as a whole, it does present a fascinating snapshot of the full-time Scottish professional football game, as well as highlighting profitable avenues for further research.

OBJECTIVE CONDITIONS: A FERTILE BREEDING GROUND Earlier discussions focused on the importance that Bourdieu placed on objective social structures (e.g., institutions, discourses, fields, and ideologies) and their effects upon individual life trajectories within particular cultural fields. Here, Bourdieu was interested in understanding everyday individual practices within the context of existing social structures or objective conditions (e.g., his work on the habitus as a set of durable dispositions).

To this end, it is initially worth demonstrating the objective social structures within which this sample of the Scottish professional football workforce is drawn. Perhaps not unexpectedly, the emerging picture is of a predominantly urban and working-class breeding ground for Scottish professional football players. In measuring these objective social structures, both newspaper readership and father’s occupation at the time of school leaving were utilized. Bourdieu related habitus to “a material or structural position” that supplies a “regulated set of perceptions and actions” (Fowler, 1998, p. 18). In this sense, the contention is that the objective conditions from which these professional football players emerge play an important role in structuring their perceptions and actions—in other words, their life chances. The analysis of newspaper readership (Table 2) provides a clear picture of a population of Scottish professional footballers emerging predominantly from lower income, working-class communities. For example, of

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TABLE 2 Your Background Variable Those who regularly buy a Sunday newspaper (n = 78) Type of newspaper (n = 78) Father’s occupation (n = 78)

Marital status

Dependents

Response Yes No Tabloids Broadsheets Manual Supervisory Professional/managerial Self-employed Nonresponse Married Living together as married Single (never married) Separated or divorced Yes No

% Responses 83 17 73 27 65 7 19 4 5 42 8 48 2 32 68

those respondents who read a Sunday newspaper (83%), the overwhelming majority (73%) read tabloids. The 2001 National Readership Survey indicates that newspaper readership patterns provide a useful indicator of social class. Tabloid readership is skewed toward those further down the social hierarchy depicted in the ABC1 social classification scale. Although a relatively crude form of classification, the ABC1 scale is a well-used tool that, in this context, reinforces the impression that the Scottish professional football field is populated by young men of working-class origins.

Father’s occupation at the player’s school-leaving age was also identified as a useful measure of the objective conditions of the footballers surveyed. As Table 2 illustrates, manual occupations represented nearly two thirds (65%) of responses with skilled manual employment being the largest individual grouping. The lower- to middle-income background implied by these results again points to the predominantly manual working-class origins of respondents and concurs with most other studies that have taken the professional football field as their subject (Coakley, 1998; Gearing, 1999; Parker, 2000; Whannel, 2002; Wilson, 2002). Bourdieu argued that if the parents of children themselves possess relatively low levels of educational cultural capital, then their children were also more likely to embody a particular set of perceptions and actions vis-à-vis education. In this sense, as Fowler (1998) suggested, his work can be seen to possess a fatalistic consequence whereby he depicts the subordinate class as having a habitus that “is simultaneously defensive and the product of a colonised sense of inferiority” (p. 4).

The data suggest that this sample of professional footballers emerges from a set of predominantly urban, working-class objective conditions. The following sections illustrate the extent to which these conditions frame

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trajectories within the cultural field of education and their impact upon attitudes toward their chosen profession and beyond.

THE CULTURAL INITIATION OF SCHOOLING Earlier discussions illustrated how social inequalities tend to be reproduced within the formal educational field (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977) thereby directing students into particular cultural trajectories according to their relative ability to succeed. Looking to achievements in and, perhaps more important, dispositions toward formal education, the data accrued on professional football players’ formal schooling provide a fascinating picture of the Scottish professional football labor market.

The emerging picture (Table 3) is of an employment field consisting of young men with relatively low levels of human capital (Bynner & Parsons, 2001) reflected in skills and qualifications (excluding their physical capital).

For example, nearly two thirds of respondents (64%) had left school by the age of 16, and almost all (93%) had left by the age of 17. Yet, these statistics provide an incomplete portrayal of these players’ levels of educational attainment and academic potential. Rather than being incapable of achieving at school, it appears that, more often than not, these young men failed to capitalize on the qualifications achieved during compulsory schooling. More than three quarters of respondents (83%) achieved at least one or more standard grade or the equivalent qualification, but less than a half (45%) had credentials at Scottish Higher or equivalent (e.g., A Level). Early school leaving ages certainly contribute to this failure to progress along the formal educational pathway, although Bourdieu’s concept of the illusio (Wacquant, 1995b) of the game might also be a contributory factor in diverting attention away from this crucial educational phase. The picture is not one of a group of young men devoid of academic potential. Instead, a more plausible argument is that academic potential is sidelined in favor of immersion in the footballing dream world where the game shapes the attitudes, behaviors, and responses of its young recruits to the detriment of formal educational attainment. Players’ own reflections on their lack of educational attainment further illustrate the influence of the game and its individual clubs on formal schooling. Evaluating the results presented in Table 3, respondents were clear that their commitment to the football field had restricted success in the educational field. For example, the majority of respondents felt that they could have done better at school, and nearly two thirds of these (64%) identified commitment to football as a significant barrier to academic success. A similar proportion said that they did not work hard enough, whereas only a third were disinterested at the time. Few respondents identified a dislike for school, the negative influence of friends, or a lack of academic ability thus reinforcing the theme of failing to capitalize on potential. There is little doubt that the “cultural initiation, which is compulsory state schooling” (Robbins, 2000, p. 33), is extremely influential in structuring future aspirations. For most of the respondents, commitment to training and playing football, the mental energies expended in the process, and the influential role of

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TABLE 3 School Education Variable Age of leaving school (n = 78)

Qualifications obtained at school (n = 78) Could you have done better academically at school (n = 78) Factors preventing better performance at school (n = 59)

Response 15 years old 16 years old 17 years old 18 years old O Levels/Standard Grade/GCSE/SCOTVEC modules Highers/A Levels/6th-year studies Yes No Commitment to playing football Was not interested at the time Did not like school Influence of friends Not very academic Did not work hard enough

% Responses 13 51 29 7 83 45 76 24 64 34 10 14 3 63

NOTE: GCSE = General Certificate of Secondary Education; SCOTVEC = Scottish Vocational Education Council.

club coaches and management clearly compete with compulsory state schooling to solidify aspirations and perceived cultural trajectories. When matched up against the consecrated space of the footballing world, it is unsurprising that school comes in a distant second.

These data illustrate an emerging narrative concerning the failure to maximize rewards in the formal academic field, which is reinforced by the role of professional clubs in these young players’ existence. Taking Wacquant’s (1995b) description of boxers as a guide, it could be argued that footballers are similarly bound to their profession “by a profound, multifaceted, sensuous relationship of affection and obsessive devotion” (p. 507).

This devotion is reinforced at a formative period in their lives by clubs seeking to win their “hearts and minds” (Peters & Waterman, 1982). These relatively poor levels of educational attainment are also the by-products of the young age at which players become connected with clubs. Boys are immersed in a masculinized game (Gearing, 1999) from their early teens, a game in which intellectual curiosity is accorded effeminate status (Dunning, 1999). Before having completed their compulsory schooling, players are invited to sacrifice their education on the sketchy prospects of making it as a professional footballer. Of course, for a few, the glamorous lifestyle and attractive financial rewards justify the choice, but the harsh realities indicate that few (and fewer) young players will reap the financial rewards enjoyed by a leading international footballer like a David Beckham or a Ronaldo. By moving into an anti-intellectual (Williams, 1995) site of exclusive masculinity (Wellard, 2002), young players are subjected to an

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environment that continues to discourage the continuation of formal learning thereby compromising the postfootball opportunities open to these young players once their bodily capital (Wacquant, 1995a) is exhausted.

However, before these postfootball identities are considered, it is worth exploring the role that players’ football careers have on their degree of social mobility or perceived trajectory within and outside the professional football field.

PLAYING THE GAME: THE FOOTBALL CAREER Having explored the formative period prior to embarking on a footballing career, it is now worth considering the impact of players’ subsequent career experiences upon their future trajectories. On the evidence of the empirical data and other analogous inquiries (e.g., Gearing, 1999; Parker, 2000), it is clear that football players have an endless supply of free time usable for undertaking additional qualifications and/or preparing for postfootball career pathways. However, players’ attitudes toward occupational inevitability (Parker, 2000) and the potency of the footballing illusio (Bourdieu, 1998) act to limit success in the educational field. The quasiorganismic (Wacquant, 1995b), unthinking commitment “to recognise the game and to recognise its stakes” (Bourdieu, 1998, pp. 76-77) acts to colonize the life-world of its participants. As Coakley (2001) argued, many elite sports performers have never lived outside the culture of elite sport. Similarly, Jones and Armour (2000) identified problems with disengaging from elite-level sport and argued that stars shape a life narrative exclusively around their bodies’ performance in sport. They concluded that those with such an intense involvement and commitment to sport (from an early age) are less likely to explore other career, educational, and lifestyle options. This lack of exploration into alternative career trajectories is borne out in the empirical data, especially the way in which players appear blind to the extent of their professional longevity. For example, Table 4 illustrates that although nearly all the players surveyed had a contract at the time of asking (97%), more than a third of these (44%) had less than 1 year remaining on their contracts, and more than two thirds (84%) had 2 years or less. Moreover, despite the ailing labor market conditions currently affecting the Scottish football industry with an increase in 6-month and 1-year contracts (Bell, 2002; Drysdale, 2002; Gordon, 2002), more than three quarters of the sample expected to be a full-time player in 3 years’ time. Similarly, others (44%) felt the end of their career was too far in the future thus overlooking the ever-present dangers posed by serious injury or adverse labor market conditions.

It is again worth drawing on Parker’s (2000) notion of occupational inevitability to help understand how players engage in processes of denial.

One explanation is that, instead of preparing for change and considering personal career options, sports professionals frequently invest themselves more fully in the quest for corporate survival and deceive themselves with optimism (Coakley & Donnelly, 1999). Football clubs contribute to this

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TABLE 4 Your Football Career Variable % Responses Age of signing for professional club (n = 78)

Number of clubs played for in career (n = 78)

Current contract (n = 78) Length of time left on contract (n = 77) Expected status in 3 years’ time (n = 78) Pretax annual income (n = 78)

Response 13 years old 14 years old 15 years old 16 years old 17 years old 18 years old 18+ years old 1 club 2 clubs 3 clubs 4 clubs 5 clubs 6 clubs 6+ clubs Yes No Less than a year 12-24 months More than 2 years Full-time player Part-time player Retired Less than £9,999 £10,000-£19,999 £20,000-£29,999 £30,000-£49,999 £50,000+

4 11 9 35 28 7 6 18 22 22 18 6 9 5 97 3 44 40 16 80 8 12 25 22 23 19 11

collusio—the collective illusion that with the necessary discipline, sacrifice, and dedication players will succeed in their chosen profession (Wacquant, 1995a). Clubs invariably denounce thoughts of the future in favor of the present, and players are similarly urged to prioritize the maintenance of their bodily capital (against the decay of time) over thoughts of a postfootball existence, even though they are able to transfer or discard players once their utility is at an end. In some respects, it could be said that the beautiful game possesses its participants, becomes their master “to the degree that they have acquired mastery of it, and thence their inability to desist from it” (Wacquant, 1995a, p. 88).

The inability to desist from the game is evidenced by the lack of preparation for and acceptance of life beyond professional footballer status found in the empirical study. For example, one might have expected that those respondents with less than a year of their contracts to run would be actively planning for a career outside the footballing field. With nearly half of respondents either as married or living together as married (50%) and a

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further third with dependents (32%), future career planning would seem important. This is amplified given that nearly three quarters of respondents (70%) earned £29,999 or less per annum, and the vast majority (89%) earned less than £50,000 (see Table 4). Although to many these salaries represent adequate remuneration levels, when the short career span of a professional football player is factored in, they provide an inadequate income stream necessary to maintain a comfortable lifestyle. Realistically, outside the higher reaches of the Scottish professional labor market, most players will need to secure alternative gainful employment once their football careers are over.

Furthermore, given the perilous state of Scottish football’s economic base, most clubs are reducing rather than increasing their salary outlays. In other words, given the “temporal finitude” (Wacquant, 1995a) of players’ bodily capital, it is unlikely that their career earnings will permanently alter their original objective conditions. Football might then represent little more than a temporary “means of escape and mobility” (Coakley & Dunning, 2000) for its participants, a largely “disempowering environment” (Giulianotti, 1999) from which players exit with fond memories of past glories but devoid of the readily transferable skills necessary for a struggle for social position within an alternative field. Transitory social mobility and prestige pale into insignificance once ex-players have to turn to alternative careers devoid of the glamour associated with professional footballer status (e.g., Drawer & Fuller, 2002; Gearing, 1999). In exploring the fears associated with postfootball identity, the final section considers football players’ preparations for life outside the game.

POSTFOOTBALL IDENTITY: “IT’S IN THE BLOOD” Gearing (1999) identified the protective and encompassing nature of football clubs as one of the principal cultural and occupational features of the professional footballer’s world. For young footballers, the club represents a significant part of their existence from their midteens (perhaps earlier) until their early to mid-30s. The requirement for a “disciplined and collective” (Gearing, 1999, p. 47) approach from players is facilitated through a series of rules and codes of behavior implemented on behalf of the club.

Clubs express ownership of their players both within and outside the institution by using formal rules and sanctions to ensure orderly behavior. The restrictions on autonomy and individuality in favor of a collective approach have implications for their postfootball identities. However, as Coakley and Donnelly (1999) argued, the inculcation of a footballing illusio is troublesome when players face transitional experiences such as those brought on by serious injury, being released by their club, or voluntary retirement.

These transitional experiences often bring a dramatic change of lifestyle and identity transformation for which players are unprepared. Players are then left in a void, in a nowhere land, hiding behind their fading sporting identities and unable to open their eyes to the glare of a future in an alternative field where they may occupy a less elevated social position (Coakley & Donnelly, 1999).

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This portrayal tends to be reinforced by the empirical data (see Table 5). For example, although nearly all respondents had either “often” (59%) or “sometimes” (35%) thought about their future career prospects, a large number remained unsure of the career they would like to pursue (42%). Furthermore, echoing Coakley and Donnelly’s (1999) view, the majority of those who did know indicated a desire to remain in the footballing field in some capacity (e.g., in commercial departments, refereeing, coaching, or management).

Similarly, large numbers had or were in the process of undertaking Scottish Football Association coach education courses thereby illustrating the relatively fixed trajectory envisaged. Less than a fifth (17%) indicated a desire to follow an unrelated career path. These results exemplify the continuing seduction and romance of the game for its participants. It also perhaps demonstrates the inculcation of a footballing illusio in the value of the game and its stakes, which “is inscribed deep within the body through progressive incorporation of its core tenets” (Wacquant, 1995b, p. 492). The game is essentially in them and has offered them an (albeit temporary) avenue out of their oppressive circumstances, an opportunity to fashion an autonomous future from a largely dependent past. It is little wonder, then, that participants appear unwilling to relinquish this opportunity in favor of the relative mundaneness of an alternative employment field. Yet, as Giulianotti (1999) contended, despite the allure of staying in the game, for the majority, the gilded option of moving into management, coaching, or media work remains unattainable. Despite knowing the game and indicating a desire to remain within the comfort zone it represents, nonplaying opportunities are unlikely to represent the panacea envisaged.

The empirical data also demonstrated a lack of knowledge among players about alternative educational and career options thereby reinforcing the importance of the game and the club above all else. So, despite nearly two thirds of respondents (61%) having taken steps to prepare themselves for a postplaying career and nearly three quarters being aware of (74%) and a third having used (35%) the SPFA Educational Trust, other structural and cultural factors seem to prevent players from maximizing the learning opportunities available. Certainly, the lack of advice emanating from clubs themselves is noticeable. For example, more than three quarters (77%) of respondents indicated that none of the clubs they had played for had ever offered advice or help toward their postfootball lives. This absence of career advice reinforces the results of other studies in this field (Monk, 2000; Parker, 2000; Stewart & Sutherland, 1996; Weiss, 2001) and demonstrates the unwillingness of football clubs to invest in the intellectual capital of their workforce. These findings chime with Parker’s (2000) analysis of youth training schemes in England where he argued that the footballing environment carries a plethora of assumptions and commonplace practices that collectively ostracize those who wish to supplement their everyday workplace provision by pursuing educational development. Kew (1997) agreed, arguing that although individuals do make and implement life-changing strategies, the systems of sport production continue to restrict investment in

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TABLE 5 Preparation for Career Outside Football Variable Frequency of thoughts about postfootball career (n= 78) Future career ideas (n = 78)

Any steps taken to prepare for career after playing (n = 78) If yes, what sort of steps (n = 48) If no, reasons why (n = 30)

Further education or training undertaken since leaving school (n = 78) Advice or help offered by clubs on planning for postplaying career (n = 78) Awareness of SPFA Education Trust (n = 78) Used the SPFA Education Trust (n = 78)

Response

% Responses

Often Sometimes Never Don’t know Football-related (including coaching/management) Unrelated occupation Yes No Football coaching courses or related area Other FE/HE courses Too far in the future Never given it a thought Don’t know what to do Haven’t had any advice Will not need to work afterwards Cannot afford it Lack of qualifications Too busy with leisure activities Lack of confidence Cannot be bothered Too busy with family commitments Yes No

59 35 6 42

64 36 43 10 37 37 0 3 3 10 3 10 10 58 42

Yes No

23 77

Yes No Yes No

74 26 35 65

41 17 61 39

NOTE: FE/HE = Further Education/Higher Education; SPFA = Scottish Professional Footballers Association.

alternative, unproductive (i.e., nonfootballing) interests. As a result, sportsmen and women often accrue only a limited set of life experiences and instead form a personal identity restricted to their sports role. They concede personal control to coaches and management from an early age and are left increasingly vulnerable to career transition difficulties and problems associated with disengagement from elite-level sport (Jones & Armour, 2000).

Seduced by the allure of the game, players give their entire selves to the cause only to be left in a state of doubt once their primary asset, “the body and the abilities it harbors” (Wacquant, 1995b, p. 501), reaches a state of obsolescence. Although professional football promises to be the glamorous profession that brings symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1990b) to its participants,

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the symbolic loss associated with depreciated bodies can have a deep and lasting effect on the young men it possesses.

Even though this study has illustrated that few Scottish professional football players will derive adequate income streams from the game to significantly alter their cultural trajectories, it is likely that most would follow the exact same path given the opportunity again. They may be left devoid of those readily transferable skills (Wacquant, 1995b) useful for alternative occupational futures, but their professional experiences have enabled them (albeit temporarily) to formulate a way of escape (Rojek, 1993) from the insecurity and “ontological obscurity” (Wacquant, 1995b, p. 510) that they may otherwise have faced. For this reason, the footballing dream will, no doubt, remain the profession of choice for members of the urban, working-class youth.

CONCLUSION This article has provided a worthwhile, albeit restricted representation of the Scottish professional football field and its members. Drawing upon the work of Bourdieu (1984, 1986, 1990a, 1990b, 1996, 1998), it has illustrated how a group of young, predominantly working-class men come to possess a doxic knowledge of the value of the game and its stakes. The picture presented is of young men guided from an early age toward sporting careers that, although offering the hope of transcending their objective conditions, invariably deceive them with optimism. In the perilous financial climate facing the Scottish professional game, players are potentially being discarded bereft of the exchangeable, readily transferable skills necessary for a future in an alternative employment field. Reliant at first on an appreciating bank of physical capital, these players face precarious futures once this asset depreciates and their working bodies are deemed surplus to requirements. However, to these young men, the football field comes to represent more than an instrumental activity and instead colonizes the lifeworld of its participants as they are caught up in and by a game that becomes inseparable from their “innermost identity” (Wacquant, 1995b, p.

507). The footballing field itself contributes to the footballing collusio to leave relatively young men in a space of doubt once their careers are terminated. Unprepared for life outside the inner logic and rules of the game, their lack of educational cultural capital is revealed in mainstream employment fields where human capital in the form of skills and qualifications prevail.

NOTE 1.

Jean-Marc Bosman was an out-of-contract player in the 2nd division of the Belgian league. He wanted to move to Dunkerque in France. Dunkerque did not offer his Belgian club enough of a transfer fee, so the Belgian club said he could not go.

In the meantime, he was on reduced wages because he was no longer a first-team player. He took his club to the European Court for restraint of trade. After many months, he won his case and the right for all European Union players to a free transfer at the end of their contracts.

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AUTHORS David McGillivray, Ph.D., is a lecturer in the Division of Media, Culture and Leisure Management at Glasgow Caledonian Universtiy. His research interests include the aestheticisation of labor, elements of organizational wellness, and the professional sport labor market. Aaron McIntosh is a researcher in the Division of Media, Culture and Leisure Management at Glasgow Caledonian University. His research interests include workforce development in sport and analyses of spectators as stakeholders in the governance of sport. Richard Fearn, Ph.D., is head of the Effective Learning Center at Glasgow Caledonian University. His research interests include continuing professional development for the professional football industry.

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