Daniel Bloyce

Working in men's professional football can be viewed as a prestigious and lucrative occupation. In reality, this is only the case for few, with many, such as backroom staff, experiencing high workload, stress and pressure in their roles. This article aims to more adequately assess the reality of working in men's professional football clubs. 51 backroom staff at professional football clubs across the United Kingdom were interviewed, and the data was theorised using a figurational sociological perspective. Working in men's professional football involved accepting challenges, such as excessive working hours, work–life imbalances and difficulties escaping work. The sacrifices required to work in football were accepted as necessary to survive within the industry. Despite roles being characterised by job insecurity, growing role pressures and an increasingly saturated market, participants typically viewed these as a ‘dream job’, as they had turned their passion for football into a career. While some questioned the long-term sustainability of roles in football, the ‘love of the game’ and fantasy-laden beliefs drove motivations to remain. This research helps further clarify the realities of working life in the men's professional football industry.

Purpose: The article explores the process of using LinkedIn to recruit hard-to-reach groups, reflecting on our experience of the football industry. We propose LinkedIn as a viable option to mitigate recruitment challenges, particularly in employment-focussed research.Design/methodology/approach: We examine how LinkedIn was used to recruit 43 football backroom staff for a sociological research study. It outlines the process of using LinkedIn to contact participants, the ethical considerations made throughout the research process and reflects on why LinkedIn was effective for a primarily employment-focussed study.Findings: We discuss the importance of insider knowledge for identifying LinkedIn as a potentially fruitful recruitment tool and how the functionality of the platform can be beneficial for a targeted recruitment method. We also explore the ethical and practical considerations of using social media for recruitment.Originality/value: Previous research discusses social media as if they are indistinguishable and interchangeable with one another and we argue that this neglects the importance of a platform’s functionality. We discuss how the decision to use a particular social media platform to recruit should be grounded in the researcher’s familiarity with the site, the functionality the platform offers and the sample recruited. This article explicitly explores the considerations taken when using LinkedIn to help overcome recruitment challenges.

There are certain times when Journals take stock of where they are, where they have come from and how they hope to develop. Such thought pieces may fall on an anniversary, the turn of the millenniu...

Association football has been viewed as an industry with considerable lucrative career prospects; however, this has not prevented the use of unpaid staff throughout football in the UK. There has been increasing academic research regarding the professionalisation and commercialisation of football, yet there has been little acknowledgement of the role of those working in football in an unpaid capacity. Therefore, this paper examines the culture of unpaid work in football scouting, by exploring the motivations of 12 unpaid scouts at professional clubs, from a figurational perspective. Our findings suggest that scouts want to work in the industry because of their ‘love of the game’, in a ‘quest for excitement’ in their career. Unpaid work was in the pursuit of experience and contacts, the latter of which was highly valued in the industry. Football clubs are enclosed figurations and the scouts placed importance on developing interdependent social relations to gain entry to the industry, demonstrating how football may be perceived nepotistic. The likelihood of gaining a paid role directly from an unpaid position was low and therefore the decisions to continually accept unpaid work represented the notion of fantasy-laden thinking.

Association football is a lucrative sport with high financial rewards for top players. However, there has been little empirical work on the lifestyles of professional footballers. Based on interviews with 29 current and former male professional footballers, this paper examines the relationship between money, status and image management within and outside the changing room. The concept of conspicuous consumption is used to help explain players’ attitudes to money, their relationships with others within the football environment and how they advertise their earnings in an environment where open discussion of wages is seen as taboo. Our findings suggest that professional footballers are expected to display a particular image of the professional footballer and this constrains players, even those on lower incomes, to buy expensive clothes and accessories in order to be accepted by others. Players who do not conform to the expected image may be subject to sanctions by their teammates.

Eric Dunning and Norbert Elias began developing their concept ‘quest for excitement’ in the 1960s. In this paper we consider the concept in the context of their work on the civilizing process and leisure in the spare-time spectrum, applying it to an analysis of the global diffusion and transformation of yoga. In so doing, we develop a preliminary theoretical account of its global popularity as a leisure-time movement form. We specifically consider the extent to which yoga’s transformation from the late 19^th century onwards can be understood as a socially generated psychological quest for excitement rather than as a need for relaxation. We take a long-term developmental perspective, focusing on processes of globalization to explain the transformation of yoga into an increasing variety of forms. We argue that its global popularity is linked to its transformation into a diversity of styles, which provide flexible, individualized, non-competitive and health-oriented leisure opportunities that have become attractive to an increasing number of people. We conclude that the contouring of yoga in this way reflects the socially generated leisure time needs of people in complex societies. Our preliminary theoretical account, informed by the work of Dunning and colleagues, illuminates how yoga, as a polymorphous social practice, provides leisure enclaves which can lead to an upsurge of satisfying emotions and hence can be psychologically restorative.

This paper explores public health policy implementation through partnership working at the local level by examining how local actors from public health, and the wider workforce make sense of and work on social inequalities in health. An ethnographic case study was used to examine policy implementation in one local strategic partnership in north-west England during a period of significant resource constraint. Semi-structured interviews were the primary method of data generation. Sensitising concepts from figurational sociology were used to develop a theoretical account of how local policy implementation directed at narrowing social inequalities in health tended to give rise to relatively fragmented and short-term services, projects and practices, which focused on lifestyle factors and behaviour change. Theorising partnership work as figurations goes some way to explaining the apparent paradox among participants who expressed a relatively detached appreciation of wider social influences, alongside emotional involvement in their work. This process of individualisation explains how local professionals tended to conceptualise health inequality and the social determinants of health as personal troubles. Individualisation meant that the social reality of working in partnerships on difficult issues was simplified. Thus, any scope for working on the social determinants of health tended to be overlooked. The extent to which this was intentional or a matter of struggling to see opportunities, or a mixture of the two, was difficult to discern. Although the policy landscape has changed, the findings give some insight into understanding how local collaborative processes reproduce local public health work underpinned by lifestyle choices.

In an era of sustained budget cuts, England’s local authorities are increasingly forced to ‘apply’ for infrastructure funding via competitive bidding processes. However, we currently know little about how this method of funding impacts implementation. Accordingly, we consider the consequences of competitive funding by exploring the constraints associated with implementing infrastructure under the state-funded Cycling Demonstration Towns programme. This was achieved via a case study in Chester, a city that was unable to deliver the ambitions of their bid. This study was informed by figurational sociology in order to focus on relational processes. Fifteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with personnel involved in the planning and implementation of the project. The key findings were: (1) participants considered the bidding process to be akin to a ‘beauty contest’ where authorities were consciously making fantasy-laden promises in order to ‘impress’ the awards panel; (2) those involved in the bid did not consult key delivery parties, many of whom held car-centric predispositions, until funding was secured, and this led to complications in the delivery process; (3) during project implementation as the chains of interdependency of those involved widened, several unintended outcomes emerged which contributed to the two ‘flagship’ infrastructure proposals being halted; (4) this led to an intervention package that was heavily weighted towards promotional, or ‘soft’, interventions. Theoretical insight from this study suggests that competitive funding is likely to encourage authorities to present bids that are largely detached from the realities of implementing infrastructure, thus leading to difficulties once funding has been awarded.