From Club to Country: Exploring youth footballers experiences of international football

Edwards, Dominic (2023) From Club to Country: Exploring youth footballers experiences of international football. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

The study of athletic career transitions has grown in recent years, with scholars seeking to understand how to better support athletes through various aspects of their career, including, but not limited to, areas such as, the youth-to-senior transition and retirement from sport. A transition that has been underrepresented in academia is that of the club-to-country transition in football. This thesis aimed to better understand the experiences of current youth footballers when moving between club and international football in order to provide both policy and practical implications to better support young footballers at this time. Through an interpretivist methodological position, a case study approach was chosen to provide the researcher with as “full an understanding of the case as possible” (Punch 1998: 15). The thesis used methods triangulation to collect data through interviews, observations and document analysis, in order to avoid the potential biases that can occur through using a single method of study (Williamson, 2005). The semi-structured interviews involved access to current youth international footballers and leadership staff from leading youth academies in The Premier League – becoming the first to provide insight into the club-to-country transition in England. The data was then analysed using a thematic analysis, generating initial codes and themes before being organised into the empirical chapters. Findings were organised into three empirical chapters. The first, Chapter 4, explained the process of entering the international environment, finding that clubs are likely to prioritise their own games programme over international opportunities for developing footballers and that, at times, from the clubs perspective there was ambiguity as to why certain players were selected. This shows the competing priorities of both club and NGB. Chapter 5 discussed the implications this transition can have on player development, showing the sporting performance and psychological implications, including identity and self-esteem that can occur through international representation. Chapter 6 discussed the relationship between professional football clubs and the national governing body during this process, highlighting how the clubs perceived the presence of the youth international footballer as a key performance indicator as well as an opportunity to recruit other potential academy prospects. The potential ethical issues were then discussed around the commoditisation of childhood. Chapter 6 also discussed the support that youth international footballers receive from both club and national coaching staff throughout the transition. In conclusion, the findings presented here add to the current career transition research through focusing on an element of the developing footballers’ career that has yet to be discussed in the extant literature. The findings were also used to develop a model for the club-to-country transition, outlining meta-transitions, described as transitions within a transition process (Schinke et al., 2015), that require different types and levels of support at each stage of the process.