Who is a coach? Understanding coach subjectivities in professional youth football

Despite being positioned as a central concern for sport coaching research, the exploration of coach identity and the question of who the coach is, has received limited attention. Existing work has highlighted the importance of coaches’ individual ‘performances’ in a dramaturgical sense and resulting social interaction for coaches to establish and maintain their identities. However, it has relied on methods that can only partially capture such aspects. The prevalence of autoethnographic and interview-based studies has limited understanding of identity as a process and emphasised an overly agential and personal perspective. By taking up the notion of ‘subjectivity’ to replace the static and essential connotations of ‘identity’ and conducting a longitudinal ethnography with participant observation, I aimed to recognise the contingent and ongoing constitution of coaches. Two seasons of fieldwork were conducted in the youth academy of an English Football League club using participant observation and semi-structured interviews within an ethnographic framework. This extended period of in-situ data generation followed the regular patterns, spaces, and sites of Academy coaches’ everyday practice. Adopting a Foucauldian lens, the findings highlighted the productive action of power and knowledge, and furthermore, by considering the Academy in terms of Foucault’s ‘carceral archipelago’, the analysis demonstrated the dispersed yet interconnected processes through which coaches were constituted. Academy coach meetings, CPD sessions, training sessions, and matches were all sites of constitutive possibilities, with each space shaping opportunities to produce subjectivities. Problematising assumed ‘truths’ uncovered normative ideals about who was intelligible as an Academy coach and who was excluded as ‘other’. Discourses positioned ex-professional players as ‘experts’ and their playing experiences as the source of legitimate knowledge, shaping subject positions and governing possibilities for coaches. Through disciplinary techniques that sustained a panoptic mechanism, certain coaches internalised coaching methods that made them recognisable as Academy coaches. However, others were resistant and used technologies of the self to produce themselves differently. This demonstrated the possibilities for practices of freedom within a Foucauldian notion of subjectivation. By providing a contextualised exploration of coach subjectivities, this research has developed understanding of ‘identity’ in coaching, illustrating processes of subjectivation through discursive (coaching) practice.