Learning to be a professional football manager: a Bourdieusian perspective

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on the theoretical concepts of Pierre Bourdieu to provide an insight into aspirant football managers’ perceptions of what is required and valued at different stages of their desired managerial career journey. Drawing on interviews with candidates from one cohort of the Scottish Football Association Professional Licence (n = 19), our evidence suggests that aspirant managers have responded to changes in field logic by adopting strategies which place increased emphasis on cultural capital in the form of engagement with educational discourse. While we find evidence of instrumentality in attitudes to education, we also find evidence which emphasises the importance of habitus as an unconscious process. Educational culture is absorbed and embodied by some aspirant managers, which enlightens their actions and encourages them to adopt empowering strategies through which they seek to transform their place in the field. The paper concludes by considering potential implications for governing bodies and clubs.

KEYWORDS:

• Professional football
• football managers
• Pierre Bourdieu
• education

Disclosure statement

The authors provide management education workshops on the SFA's Pro-Licence courses.

Notes

1 European clubs have long employed a Head Coach (with responsibility for the training, development and performance of the first team only) and a Director of Football (a senior management figure with responsibility for all other football-related activities and for liaison with other club executives and directors). British clubs, in contrast, have traditionally employed a (football) Manager, whose role and responsibility often extended beyond the responsibilities ordinarily associated with a Head Coach, encompassing the training and development of a club’s first team squad of players (which may or may not include carrying out the role of coach), talent identification, youth development, buying and selling of players, and media and public relations activities. In recent years, however, there has been movement within British football towards the so-called European model.

2 Club managers in England dismissed in 2015–2016 were in post for an average of only 1.29 years (LMA, 2016).

3 See also, Fry, Bloyce, and Pritchard (2015) who use the concept of habitus to examine how professional golfers make sense of their workplace experiences as they seek to reconcile sporting and financial objectives and pressures.

4 For example, Tomlinson (2004) offers the example of the Marylebone Cricket Club at Lords Cricket Ground in London where several forms of capital are drawn upon to construct and create a particular dominant class and patriarchal habitus. These “smart clubs” constitute an exclusive and privileged class habitus, in which particular combinations of capital (in this case educational, cultural, and economic) will determine one’s suitability to enter the habitus.

5 A recent example from Scottish football demonstrates the willingness of some clubs to challenge this traditional view of what constitutes symbolic capital in terms of football management, while at the same time emphasising how deep-rooted traditional perceptions remain among others in the field. Specifically, the decision by Scottish Premiership club, Heart of Midlothian, to appoint former Newcastle United, Valencia and Rio Ave coach, Ian Cathro as its new Head Coach was greeted with outrage by some players/ex-players, their concern centring on his lack of experience around seasoned professionals – Cathro has no elite level playing experience – and on his putative “academic” approach to coaching. See, for example, Liew (2016) and Murray (2016). Cathro was sacked by the club after only seven months after a poor run of results.