Power, discourse and symbolic violence in professional youth soccer: The case of Albion Football Club

Abstract

This 10-month ethnographic study investigated the interplay between players, coach, and context within professional youth football. It remains one of the few to utilise a Bourdieuan framework to theorise the coaching environment. The findings centred on how the largely authoritarian discourse used by coaches, whilst being structured by and structuring the coaching context, was also misrecognised as legitimate by both coaches and players. This interpretation of coaching as a power-ridden endeavour holds the potential to better illustrate the relational nature of coaching, thus giving coaches an improved grasp of why they do what they do.