Embodying citizenship: children's spatial and bodily experience in a football club academy

Abstract

In Western countries children's identities have been constructed through their bodies and the different meanings attached to them. Children's bodies are central to defining their social and spatial position in the city. They are in fact, more than any other group, subjected to a set of spatial bans and prohibitions that confine them within places specifically targeted at them during their free time (i.e. recreational, ludic and sports organisations). One of the recreational activities most commonly engaged in by Italian children is sport. However, little is known about children's approach to sporting activities. What is proposed here is that the site of children's involvement in sport is a valuable key for the observation of the ambiguous construction of children's citizenship through spatial borders and body training. Based on a long-term ethnographic study of the Cagliari football club academy for children, and informed by the new sociology of childhood approach, this article investigates the role of organised sport contexts in the urban generational order. The conclusions stress the contradiction detectable in a structured football club academy as a site that, on the one hand, promotes children's rights to play and, on the other, restricts their substantive citizenship within the public space.

Keywords::

• children
• sport
• education
• body
• citizenship

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. It would also be worthwhile to reflect on how this applies differently to each of the sexes: from a very early age, boys are encouraged to participate mainly in sports activities based on strength and dynamism, while girls are encouraged to participate in more disciplined and controlled activities in which the esthetic canon of beauty, with its ideal of slenderness, is predominant.

^2. For the Italian context see also Zoletto (2010), Zoletto and Wildemeersch (2012) and the Introduction to this Special Issue.

^3. The research was carried out on a continuous basis from January 2010 to July 2012, with particular attention given to certain periods of the school year, during which I observed the training and matches (both home and away matches) in which the children participated three or four times a week. After an initial three-month period of participant observation and informal interviews with parents, academy staff and children, I began to carry out formal interviews focusing more on individual experiences of all the children enrolled (18) and of almost all the parents (15 of them) who agreed to be interviewed.

^4. The ethnic composition of the group of children is homogeneous: they were all born in Sardinia. What distinguishes them is their place of origin, which is either Cagliari or the villages located in the hinterland or villages at a great distance from the city. The inhabitants of this last group are usually called disparagingly ‘paesani’ (peasants) and considered ‘not cool’. In the Academy, the group is also mixed as regards socio-economic background, but not in terms of its educational background (academic qualifications), which is more uniform and comprises essentially people without higher education.

^5. Note that the word ‘mister’ is not the translation of an Italian word, but rather the actual term used in Italian football contexts at all levels of competition (professional and amateur) to refer to the football coach.

^6. While interviewing the children, I learned of the existence of other, albeit rare, opportunities for play outside training at the football academy. These were interstitial situations. Sometimes this was the half-hour when the parents allowed them to play in the nearby car-park after lunch or once homework had been done. At other times, especially for the children from the smaller villages, the opportunity was offered by informal matches at the semi-abandoned local pitch. In the latter case, the children were accompanied by a parent or an elder peer. Notwithstanding this, what has been stated in section 2 on children's spatiality in the urban space, restricted within the borders traced by adults, remains valid at the macro level. The extracts demonstrate the agency of the children who play, and not only physically, at/with these borders.