The Work of Professional Football

A Labour of Love?

Martin Roderick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134324903
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Along-term study providing rare insights into the precarious career and ordinary working culture of professional footballers. Away from the celebrity-obsessed media gaze, the work of a professional footballer is rarely glamorous and for most playersa career infootball is insecure and short-lived.

A former professional, Martin Roderick's familiarity with the world of football is the foundation for this privileged research into a world that is typically closed to the public gaze and ignored by media reportage and academic research which prefers to focus on a small, unrepresentative group of elite players. Key themes explored within the text include:

• the culture of work in professional football

• 
  
  

• the changing identity, orientation and expectations of players during their careers

• 
  
  

• the fragile and uncertain nature of professional sport careers

• 
  
  

• the performance and dramatic aspects of a career under public scrutiny

• 
  
  

• the role of relationships with managers, owners, support staff and partners

• 
  
  

• players' responses to the insecurities inherent in professional football such as injury, ageing, performance and transfer.

• 
  
  

The text deals with a wide range of issues of interest to sports students and academics, particularly those with a focus on the sociology of sport but also including sport development, sport management and coaching studies. The text will also be of interest to researchers in the fields of careers, industrial relations and the sociology of work.

Chapter 1
Professional football in context

Introduction: work and self

In industrialized societies most people spend their adult lives at work and that commitment to work can be a central feature of a person’s life (Grint 2005). There may be an intricate relationship between work and self such that the work in which people engage comes to be closely bound up with their conception of self – that is, who they have been, who they are and who they would like to be. Research on work (Grint 2005; Watson 1995) has revealed the profound influence of distinctive occupational cultures in terms of how people perceive, define and evaluate themselves and interact with their peers. As such, waged work can be a principal source of an individual’s self-confidence and self-fulfilment (Bain 2005). As Thomas (1999: v) notes,

work is a virtually inescapable part of the human condition. Many of us spend most of our working hours engaged in it. It absorbs our energies and preoccupies our thoughts. It involves us in close relations with other people and gives us our sense of identity.

In more elaborate terms, Glaeser (2000) argues that the ways in which the self derives meaning from work are associated with the activities of the process of work, the end products of work, the prestige associated with the work of a particular occupation, the prestige of the social contexts within which work occurs, and the position that work is allocated relative to other pastimes. In football, these dimensions feature strongly, for individuals in the professional game derive a sense of self not only from the work in which they are engaged but also from a shared workplace culture – as such, the culture of work in professional football features centrally in this book. For many followers of the game also, there is a high degree of prestige attached to football, for players are idealized as members of a ‘sacred profession’ (Simpson 1981) and this idealization is rooted in part in a romanticization of their creative abilities. Such romanticized attachments are not solely confined to the thoughts of spectators. There is a strong sense of ‘special-ness’ imbued in the identities of players who are often told that, as an activity, football holds the prospect of being a source of satisfaction, gratification and pleasure. It is assumed by many bound up in the football industry that, in some ill-defined sense, players are ‘out of the ordinary’ and that, if offered an opportunity, ‘you should be playing football because you love it’.

Themes of this kind are central to a study undertaken by McGillivray et al. (2005:102) who suggest from a Bourdieusian perspective that players become ‘caught up in and by the beautiful game’. Although they examine Scottish professional footballers, they make three points (among others) which have direct relevance for the contemporary English players examined in this book. First, employing the work of Wacquant (1995a) on the careers of boxers as their primary point of departure, McGillivray et al. (2005:107) argue that:

The relatively autonomous footballing field … 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: 88) and finds it difficult to see without its logic, language, and aspirations.

For McGillivray et al. (2005:108) this ‘life-world colonization’ is total and complete since, for many players, football is the only thing they have ever done and the only thing they know how to do. Second, they develop the relationship between professional football and ‘the body’ with respect to the labour which players-as-workers ‘do’ on and for their bodies (Shilling 2005), in order to earn a living in this physical occupation: hence, a professional footballer’s identity is rooted in his body. They focus in particular on the ways in which the culture of the game comes to be ingrained into the very bodily capital of its participants ‘so that it comes to possess them’ (McGillivray et al. 2005:103): following Wacquant (1995a), they argue correctly that football is an embodied practice. Thirdly, McGillivray et al. (2005) make the important point that, even if players were offered alternative career choices, most would still select the life of a footballer as the game holds out the possibility of a way of escape (Rojek 1993) from an insecurity and ontological obscurity they would otherwise have faced. For the working-class players who, they posit, continue to populate the game, professional football may still enable them to transcend the objective conditions in which they grew up (McGillivray et al. 2005).

So, McGillivray et al. (2005) imply that the structures of football engulf players to such an all-encompassing extent that they unwittingly collude in fashioning for themselves blindness to alternative sources of self-identity and self-enhancement: Merton (1957) refers to this process as ‘trained incapacity’. The chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association and former player, Gordon Taylor, similarly hints at a form of colonization of self in the foreword to a study of the history of professional footballers entitled Living to Play (Harding 2003). Focusing on the way in which the culture of the professional game may come to be part of the very essence of a player, Taylor argues the following point:

It can safely be said of heroes past and present, as well as of the many thousands of paid players who have graced our football pitches down the years, that not one of them would have swapped their football career for any other and that nothing in their lives since football has ever quite lived up to the thrill of being a player.

Taylor goes on to quote Robert Louis Stevenson by way of summarizing his point: ‘If a man loves the labour of his trade, then regardless of any question of success or fame, the gods have called him’ (Harding 2003).

A theme of numerous football-related studies (Bower 2003; Conn 1997; McGill 2001) and a strong one among followers of the game is that the work of a professional footballer is a labour of love and that players have a calling to play. Professional football is such an all-consuming and physically demanding career that it is inevitable that self-identity is, essentially, determined by it. From a sociological point of view, one might well argue that professional football is a vocation or, perhaps, a calling. In the terminology of Max Weber (2002:312), whereas a job is simply a means of making a living, a calling is an end in itself that requires no further justification. Hall and Chandler (2005) define a calling as work that a person perceives as his or her purpose in life. Therefore, as Dobrow (2004:20) notes, people approach their work with a ‘subjective, self-relevant view of [the] meaning’ of career activities. Somebody with a religious vocation for example has been called out of the everyday world to undertake a special task or duty, a task that they experience as a compulsion. A calling is not exactly a personal choice, rather it is an obligation. Professional football as a vocation often assumes this compulsory character and therefore one can describe players as driven, single-minded and obsessed. This calling to play however involves more than the acquisition of exemplary technical ability. Obviously, football is something that a player’s ‘body’ can do, but being a professional footballer is also embodied (McGillivray et al. 2005). In other words, being a player is not just something that they do, it is something that they are.

Much of what has been said so far presupposes a degree of ability and talent possessed by players. In a manner similar to Becker (1982) who examined the work of artists, both players and spectators acknowledge that to ‘make it’ in the professional game requires a level of ability and athleticism which few individuals possess. Talent in football is accorded special value among certain groups in society and retains, for some, an aura of mystery: some players possess talent which is hard for others to fathom. The danger of romanticizing such ability however lies in that it can be situated outside of the realm of the everyday. Cashmore and Parker (2003:219) make the point that in spite of his manufactured image(s), England international David Beckham is revered in the first instance because of ‘his work, his labor, his productivity and his value’. Thus, without his ability to (re)produce his talent as a performer, Beckham’s value as a ‘consumable item’ would cease to exist. His ‘value’, in other words, is grounded in the waged labour he fulfils (Cashmore and Parker 2003). David Beckham is someone who has made full use of his abilities and he has earned ‘respect’ (Sennett 2003) through self-development. While displaying his talents may take only a moment, onlookers understand that the mastery of skills he exhibits is a slow, step by step process requiring dedication.

Someone who does not realise his ability, who does not fulfil his potential or who is considered to have wasted his talent does not command ‘respect’ (Sennett 2003). The football industry as an institution has developed mechanisms for rewarding the endowment of ability, for giving talent its due. For instance, ‘talent scouts’ who work for clubs search for young players with ‘potential’. Professional football has developed historically such that it is able to make playing careers in this industry ‘open to talent’ (Sennett 2003)¹. Role models from working-class social backgrounds such as Wayne Rooney, David Beckham and Rio Ferdinand are there to remind young promising players that ‘careers open to talent’ (Sennett 2003) are possible. Sennett (2003) makes the point however that ‘nature’ distributes (football) talent unequally: even so, careers open to talent are a way to honour that inequality. On the face of things, the football industry ‘appears’ as a meritocracy, for the sole criterion for reward is one’s own personal ability.

The prestige associated with professional status in the ‘beautiful game’ (McGillivray et al. 2005) is a well understood aspect of a rhetoric in which young footballers aspire to emanate local and national heroes and are won over, as McGill (2001) asserts, by ‘the chance to earn millions of pounds playing a game [they] love’. Adam Smith (1993:104) asserted that: ‘The chance of gain is by every man more or less overvalued, and the chance of loss is by most men undervalued.’ Smith’s statement rings true for many young aspirants who are seduced by the possibility of a career in professional football, even though they have little chance of success: Taylor indicates that three out of four players who join the game at the age of sixteen have departed from professional football by the time they are twenty-one years of age (Harding 2003: foreword). Even so, players understand that talent alone will not guarantee professional contracts in the long term. All players come in time to recognize, pace Becker (1982), that, as players, they are embedded in the social relations of the production and consumption of performances on the football pitch and that assessment of talent is socially determined by, in part, the behaviour of club managers and ‘coaches-as-employers’.

Yet, what sociologists might understand as a structured characteristic of social relationships may be understood in quite different terms by players entangled in those relationships. The former Newcastle United player Alan Gowling (1973) provides an interesting example in his consideration of the place of ‘luck’ in a professional footballer’s life. He suggests that if one listens to conversations between footballers off the field, a surprising amount of emphasis is placed on luck to assist explanations for those things that happen in games for which no explanation can be found in terms of players’ movements, skill or fitness. He quotes the following as typical of regular comments made by players: ‘we didn’t get the breaks … we didn’t get the run of the ball … you have to earn your luck’. Gowling suggests that players often explain their careers in similar terms and that it is widely believed that ‘getting to the top’ necessitates a considerable degree of good fortune. The following example illustrates this point:

To a certain degree, to be ‘spotted’ by a scout requires a train of events the causal explanation of which would be put down to luck by the footballer. For example, not only does one have to play reasonably well, showing skill and application, but the scout has to be there to see it, and usually more than once!

Similarly, to keep free of serious injury would require luck in the terminology of the pro. In reverse, they say that to receive a serious injury is ‘just bad luck’.

(Gowling 1973:140)

Gowling’s references to ‘luck’ in the life history of a professional footballer would, in sociological realms, be understood in relation to the social organization of contingencies. In this connection it might be suggested that (employing a phrase from Goffman’s (1968) work on mental patients) if those who desire to become professional footballers numerically surpass those who actually make it, as might be expected, one could say that aspiring footballers distinctively suffer, not from a lack of skill or endeavour, but from contingencies.

Sociologically it would be inappropriate to suggest that, over the life history of an individual, one ‘suffers’ from contingencies. A more adequate explanation is one that understands the enabling and constraining features of the network of relationships in which one is bound up over time. So, a schoolboy becomes a professional footballer on the basis of contingently, but not at all randomly, ordered sequences of interaction with other people. From the perspective of players, their route to professional football may seem as though they were on many occasions in the right place at the right time, a series of chance happenings. For the sociologist, it is possible to identify connections between all players who become professionals, for example, in relation to the types of people with whom they mix, the formation of their self-identities and the ways in which they learn to become committed to the role of footballer. The individual biography of every footballer can be read and examined separately, but can only be understood sociologically in accordance with the changing configuration of relationships formed by players and other people embedded in the industry. Prior to an analysis of the work of professional footballers, definitions of the concept ‘career’ are considered.

Career: definitions and usages

Sociological interest in careers and career patterns is longstanding, although there are a range of meanings of the concept ‘career’. One way that the term has been used traditionally is to refer to an organized sequence of movements made by a person in an upward direction or from one position to another in an occupational system. A number of early papers traced careers in particular occupations (Hall 1948; Becker 1952), while others considered patterns of careers traversing occupational sectors (Form and Miller 1949). The 1950s and 1960s brought continued attention to individual occupations, often emphasizing the relatively orderly, hierarchical career progressions among professionals (Abbott and Hrycak 1990). Thus, looking at individuals’ working life in an ‘objective’ fashion, we see them moving through various structural ‘statuses’ which may be viewed as making up occupational and organizational careers. The ‘objective’ career patterns and career lines identified however are generally dissociated in any direct way from the personal views of individual people. Yet for Hughes (1958) and subsequently Goffman (1961), the concept ‘career’ can refer to more than objective pathways or movements, for it can involve self-identity and reflect an individual’s sense of who they are, who they wish to be, their hopes, dreams, fears and frustrations (Young and Collin 2000). Thus, sociologists who attempt to understand the perspectives of the people involved, that is, their personal experiences and feelings, often refer to the concept career as having both ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ components. On this point, one of the central figures in developing this approach, Everett C. Hughes (1958:295), makes the following remark:

The career includes not only the processes and sequences of learning the techniques of the occupation but also the progressive perception of the whole system and of possible places in it and the accompanying changes in conceptions of work and of one’s self in relation to it.

Most of the work of interactionists has focused on the idea that a person’s self – or self-image – is ‘actually embedded in a set of social relationships that give it stability and continuity’ (Faunce 1968:93). Transformations of identity can then result from changes in a person’s position in society, from their social location, their progress – or lack of it – from one status to another. The moves which individuals make in and out of various social positions during the course of a career can be said to detail the process of a ‘status passage’ (Strauss 1962). The idea of career, which ties together social structure and an individual identity or self, can be applied usefully outside the occupational field t...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Football League descriptors
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Professional football in context
• Chapter 2 Attitudes to work in professional football
• Chapter 3 Uncertainty and football injuries
• Chapter 4 Injuries, stigma and social identity1
• Chapter 5 Transferring and the transformation of self
• Chapter 6 Transfer markets and informal grapevines1
• Chapter 7 Control and the process of transferring
• Chapter 8 The fate of idealism in professional football
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index