The football club: spaces for capital accumulation

Abstract

This paper focuses on the various forms of capital that are used and accumulated through the interactions and development of an amateur football team specifically in relation to issues around social class. Formed by the author in 2009, the team plays in an amateur Sunday football league and is based in a public house in the North East of England, UK. The overall purpose of this study is to assess the transformative potential of the team through various interactions that members have through different spaces and times. A key influence for the research developed from an initial year’s experience within the club where many interesting issues and situations arose for me as a football manager and what Jarvie calls a ‘public intellectual’. For the purpose of this paper, Bourdieu’s explanation of cultural fields, cultural capital, social capital and symbolic capital will be adopted in a critique of how players acquire status via forms of ‘legitimised capital’ considered important to football players in the research setting. Attention is also drawn to the various uses of capital by the researcher in his role as manager/coach. Empirical data are incorporated in a discussion of sites and expressions of capital and how these inform processes of transformation through sport. These empirical data are in the form of extensive diary entries collected over two years. Drawing upon Murray’s work, the structured format of this journal covers the four areas of observational notes, theoretical notes, methodological notes and personal notes.

Notes

1. Williamson, Life at the ICI.

2. Rogers, ‘Poverty in England’.

3. Republica Internationale is a socialist football club that plays in amateur leagues in Leeds but is part of a broader network of ‘like-minded’ clubs mainly across Europe. For more information on this club see Caudwell, ‘Women Playing Football at Clubs in England with Socio-Political Associations’ and Tucker, ‘Forza Forza Republica’.

4. Jarvie’s term the public intellectual is used here to denote my position as an academic looking to impact upon social change through practice.

5. See also Maguire, ‘Challenging the Sports-industrial Complex’ and Jarvie, ‘Sport, Social Change and the Public Intellectual’.

6. Caudwell, ‘Women’s Football in the United Kingdom’.

7. Kuhn, Soccer vs. The State.

8. Totten, ‘Freedom Through Football’.

9. Tucker, ‘Forza Forza Republica’.

10. Schwarzmantel, Ideology and Politics.

11. Watson and Scraton, ‘Leisure Studies and Intersectionality’.

12. Rojek, ‘Is Marx Still Relevant to Leisure?’.

13. Sayer, The Moral Significance of Class, 73.

14. This may include transfers from one team to another, retirement, injury, maturation, geographical relocation, etc.

15. Bourdieu, Sociology in Question, 87.

16. Webb, Schirato and Danaher, Understanding Bourdieu, 44.

17. See Cushion and Jones, ‘Power, Discourse, and Symbolic Violence in Professional Youth Soccer’; Agergaard and Sorensen, ‘The Dream of Social Mobility’.

18. See Light, ‘Re-examining Hegemonic Masculinity in High School Rugby’; and Mennesson, ‘Gender Regimes and Habitus’.

19. Stewart, Smith and Moroney, ‘Capital Building Through Gym Work’.

20. Bourdieu, ‘The Forms of Capital’.

21. Skeggs, ‘Imagining Personhood Differently’.

22. Brown, ‘Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion’.

23. Jane Caudwell’s ‘Women Playing Football at Clubs in England with Socio-Political Associations’ and Tim Curry’s ‘Fraternal Bonding in the Locker Room: a profeminist analysis of talk about competition and women’ are two papers that represent this diversity in culture.

24. Bourdieu, Distinction, 77.

25. Bourdieu, Sociology in Question.

26. See Bourdieu, ‘The Forms of Capital’; Putnam, Bowling Alone; Lin, Cook and Burt, Social Capital: theory and research; and Nicholson and Hoye, ‘Sport and Social Capital’.

27. Bourdieu ‘The Forms of Capital’, 51.

28. Nicholson and Hoye, ‘Sport and Social Capital’.

29. Blackshaw and Long, ‘What’s the Big Idea?’.

30. Pellerman, Barbaric Sport.

31. Bourdieu, ‘Sport and Social Class’.

32. Putnam, Bowling Alone, 22.

33. Wenner, ‘In Search of the Sports Bar’.

34. Skeggs, ‘Formations of Class and Gender’.

35. Bourdieu, Distinction, 291.

36. Siisiainen, ‘Two Concepts of Social Capital: Bourdieu vs. Putnam’.

37. Sweet, ‘Symbolic Capital, Consumption and Health Inequality’.

38. Bourdieu, Practical Reason.

39. Jorgensen, Participation Observation.

40. Murray, ‘A Spy, a Shill, a Go-Between, or a Sociologist’.

41. Back, ‘The ‘White Negro’ Revisited’.

42. See Caudwell, ‘Women Playing Football at Clubs in England with Socio-Political Associations’ and Tucker, ‘Forza Forza Republica’ for more in-depth discussion of this particular football club.

43. Schumacher, This I Believe: And Other Essays.

44. Archer, ‘Realism and Morphogenesis’.

45. Putnam, Bowling Alone.

46. Baron and Armstrong, Human Capital Management.

47. Starrat, The Drama of Leadership.

48. Putnam, Bowling Alone.

49. Blackshaw and Long, ‘What’s the Big Idea?’.

50. Cushion and Jones, ‘Power, Discourse, and Symbolic Violence in Professional Youth Soccer’.

51. Bourdieu, Practical Reason.

52. Bairner, ‘Back to Basics: class, social theory, and sport’.