"Drive these boys…make sure that’s ingrained in our blood”: theorising coach identity as subjectivities across the coaching ‘archipelago’

Despite being positioned as a central concern for sport coaching research, coach identity has received limited critical attention. This study adopts the notion of subjectivity to move beyond the static and essentialist connotations of identity, aiming to recognise the contingent and ongoing constitution of coaches. Data were generated over 2 years in the youth academy of an English Football League club through participant observation and semi-structured interviews. Drawing on Foucault’s geographic metaphor of the carceral archipelago, we illustrate the dispersed yet interconnected processes through which coaches were constituted across the breadth of their practice. Discourses produced assumed truths that shaped subjectivities through coach meetings, CPD events, training sessions, and matches. Specifically, the notion of intensity functioned as a normalising judgement that spanned the academy’s archipelago of activity. This logic informed CPD and governed the subject positions through which coaches could become intelligible.