The Hidden Curriculum of Sports Professionalisation

Just let them play.

This Sunday was my seven year old daughter’s first game of the new football season, and in fact her first ever league game. Around six months ago I agreed to become a new coach for her team and soon after I was sent the form to get myself a nice initialed club tracksuit that all the coaches wear. As someone who long ago retired from being well attired, and now exclusively sticks to his all weather uniform of shorts and t shirt, invariably with a hole in one or the other, and who has a disdain for such life admin as filling in an order purchasing form, let alone for a voluntary position, especially when it is whatsapped to me and so I have to do it on the cracked screen of my hand me down old phone, I thought, I’ll do that later, and inevitably forgot.¹

However, the night of that first league game, after I had stood on the sideline looking more like a Geography teacher on a summer walking holiday in the Cairngorns than a football coach, one of the other coaches casually thought to text me to ask if I had ordered my coaching kit. I woke up the next morning, saw the message, and reluctantly went through the form and sent it off. So come next week’s training session I might be decked out in a coaching kit looking extremely “professional”. Which if I am totally honest, was part of my hesitancy in the first place.

Compared to when I played football as a child there seems to this growing attempt to professionalise the game at all levels, and one that I feel inherently opposed to. When I was seven I joined a football team. We played in a threadbare old kit and I played in some football boots that my dad had kept from a long time ago.² That year my parents had to give me my Christmas present a month early as my coach³ told my dad that I couldn’t really play in those old things as they only had moulded studs and I kept falling over in the thick Herefordshire mud. But nowadays it’s not just the coaches that need to look the part. My daughter, also at the age of seven, has two training tops, one with her initials on, a home kit, an away kit, and both a jumper and a club rain jacket with her initials on. And it is not just her team, it seems all the teams she plays against also have all the kit. Or as they would disparagingly say back home in Herefordshire: all the gear, no idea.

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What it is it about this “professionalisation” of children’s sports that gets my goat? In part it may be that it is a symptom of a creeping Overton window of the formalisation of children’s play over the past couple of generations. Informal sports teaches children valuable life lessons as they engage in free and unstructured play, learning that fun and playing well are more important than winning, just as in life, but nowadays sports seem to be more and more structured. This club followed by this club by that club. Driven to and fro, to and fro.

This study on volleyball players indicates that unstructured play, especially with older players, also aided their development. Arsene Wenger famously once claimed that South America created the best strikers in the world because talented smaller, younger players had to really work at excelling when playing with older children on the street. Succeeding in the face of adversity and all that. The greatest basketball player of all time, Michael Jordan, realised how important unstructured play was as he had a Love of the Game Clause written into his contract, which stated he could play a pick up game in the off season whenever he fancied it. Imagine having that much love for the game that playing professionally still wasn’t enough. I remember reading a similar story that Phil Foden was at an award ceremony to receive an award, but when the time came they couldn’t find him, turns out he was playing football outside with some teenagers in the car park.

Unfortunately nowadays it is rare to see the kind of large mixed age games of football in the park that I grew up with. Instead it is children playing in threes or fours with their parents chatting twenty yards away. This professionalisation of children’s football is it seems to me the obvious next step; the further formalisation of the already overly formalised way children now play sports.

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I would be happy arguing that the average child nowadays is technically much better at football than we were when I was cutting my teeth with a size 5 at the end of the cul-de-sac. There has been a lot of investment in grassroots football to achieve that aim and the professionalisation of the coaching from the youngest ages right on through is probably a large factor in that. But it seems that in professionalising the content we have also seen it worthy to professionalise the aesthetics as well. Maybe there is a good reason? But when I have asked other coaches there doesn’t seem to be a clear answer - it’s nice for them to look professional. Is it really? Is it nice for them to have their photo taken in front of the goal before every game? When I played football that happened once a year, twice if you won a cup final, and the game after was always to try and spot how many players who were crouching in the first row had managed to drop a bollock out at the exact moment the shot was taken. There is nothing wrong with aesthetics, often there is a serious purpose behind aesthetic choices, but it would be useful to be clear on what those are before we apply them to a bunch of seven year olds starting their journey in the game. Is what is nice also what is valuable?

I have played a lot of football over the years, sometimes for some very good teams, occasionally for some very bad how many pints can we have after teams. If I could pick out the best three teams I played for I would say my U18s team, the Sunday League team I played for between the ages of 19 and 21, and the Manchester University first team. All three teams won their league, and the Sunday League team won it three times in a row and numerous cups to boot. But it is not the respective quality of the teams that I want to focus on, but what it means to be a team, that all three of these teams were also successful in fact makes it actually: what does it mean to be a team that is successful? And how does “looking professional” play into that.

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It was only at one of these teams that it was mandatory, like it is for my daughter, to turn up wearing all the right kit on matchday. Manchester University was the best footballing team I ever played in. I played next to someone just released by Bolton Wanderers⁴ in central midfield, easily the best player I have ever played with, who the year before had sat on the bench against Bayern Munich. Up front we had someone who banged in dozens of goals and then went on to play professionally for among others Leeds United, and once scored two goals to help Oldham knock Liverpool out of the FA Cup. The quality of players was high and the demands were equally high. Once you get to a certain level it can only be that way. Wearing the training kit before the game and travelling all together was mandatory because it was designed to ensure that we turned up prepared with the right attitude. As Ran Prieur says rituals are vehicles to turn action into motivation; the action of dressing right should help motivate you to get into the right frame of mind for the match. So the thinking goes. Defenders had to wear the correct length studs, too short and they might not get enough of a nick on it to stop a cross; the attention to detail was a level up. These were the best players I ever played with, and by a country mile the best coaching I ever received, but I would not say they were the best team.

My Sunday League team was a joke. In multiple meanings of the word. Our manager was the largest personality in town, but clueless. Sometimes he came in after a night of inspirational inhalations with novel ideas such as the 4-4-4-2, which he thought would mean we could swamp them in midfield. Of course, we pointed out, but which midfield as we seem to have two. But we were also a joke in how successful we were despite not really caring and drinking far too much on a Saturday night. Of course, we didn’t have to play difficult games every week, but when we did have a big game the manager would do a lap of the pubs at about seven to send anyone who was still out home to bed for an early night. Naturally he was told where to go. But it was that audaciousness of personality that was his greatest skill and it was the glue that brought us all together. We would tell him what subs to make during a match, we would change our formation on the pitch without consulting him, he was utterly useless at footballing decisions and had no bearing on the team in a footballing sense, but I can’t imagine what it would have been like to not have him there. The camaraderie that he helped facilitate was the large part of what made us such a good team. Who organises a football tour to Prague without booking either a) any teams to play against before leaving or b) even a hotel despite telling everyone they had. He does. Who pulls off the best holiday ever. He does.

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It feels different to approach something professionally as opposed to playfully. To approach a cup final checking you have the right length studs on to play fullback and looking around the dressing room to see everyone in similar training tops is completely different from having a few ciders the night before with the manager as he tells you to go home and you laugh at him, “it will be fine, I will be in bed by nine, I’ll boss the midfield tomorrow”. I’m not claiming here which of those is better, I’m simply stating that maybe that is context dependent. Or put another way, I think that playfulness should always trump seriousness if you can still achieve the result that you wanted to. I don’t think that it is either or, but more a matter of prioritising the degrees. Interestingly to back that up Rio Ferdinand and Ben Foster make the claim that playing computer games bonded the team and possibly helped them to win the Premier League. Playfulness on the team bus, professional as soon as they got off it. A healthy balance for the situation at hand.

This photo might sum it up. Here I am on the right in the red looking at the ball like I didn’t expect to see a football on a football pitch. In the background is the management team and subs in training tops that no one ever bothered wearing normally. This must be a cup final or something important, further evidenced by the fact someone bothered to take a photo. The man in black is the manager; different colour to denote his importance. A difference of importance by the way that was only going on his mind as he stroked his David Brent like ego. The one to the left has DOC printed on his, he was the team doctor. Smoking a fag, of course, as this is Sunday League, but to be honest that was probably a joint, especially if this was a cup final. He never had even a plaster to his name and would only come on to ask if you were ok and then leave you alone regardless of your answer. His main role was savage joke teller and driver of the minibus after far too much imbuement. The essence of professional and playful all rolled into one.

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It must be said that the coach who I assist for my daughter’s football team is great. There is a total understanding of where seven year olds are at and for the most part it is mostly playful and relaxed and a great place for her to learn how to play football. However, as an unschooler who has therefore questioned the building block of our society, the education system that almost all children go through, it leaves you with the habit of constantly questioning things, especially things centred around children. I can’t say for sure if the small act of asking them to always be looking professional will have an impact on them as they grow up, but it seems obvious that it would in some way. It seems like a small part in a complex system that we can’t really untangle. Maybe it is inconsequential, maybe I am wrong, maybe my gut is not right on this one. My brother in law played for Arsenal youth team and was getting close to breaking into the first team before a career ending injury. I asked him, someone who would know more than me with a journey further towards being a professional, what his thoughts on it were. He agreed that it seemed to be a bit over the top. Just let them turn up in whatever they like at that age I would have thought.

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Critical pedagogy is a critique of the school system that picks up on something it calls the hidden curriculum. That is the things that students learn at school that are note explicitly taught but are internalised anyway: ideas of authority gradients, hierarchies of people and knowledge, norms and behaviours of society, class and social status. It must be said that there is no requirement to turn up in your training top for training but an implicit seed is definitely planted when they are presented with them (the majority seem to do so) and my wondering is what that seed does when sown and how we would even know. What is the hidden curriculum of this over formalisation of sports?

As I have said this professional-playfulness is not a dichotomy but a scale, giving us a choice of the matter of degrees that we wish to pursue either relative to each other. As my experience of football and Rio Ferdinand’s explanation demonstrate you need both to succeed. One without the other will never lead to creating the conditions for a team to thrive - you need to cultivate both team bonding and individual focus. But at the age of seven should we not be tipping the scales towards playfulness? I will state again, I think going on coaching courses and improving your skills as a coach is the right sort of professionalisation of children’s sports, making them look like mini Man Utds is not. And if you went on a course you might come across this research. Fifteen minutes of free play without a coaches direction at the start of training improved the teams involved in almost all metrics, including performance in formal games afterwards. In fact one team took it to the extreme and enjoyed free play so much without the coach’s involvement that they went, with his blessing, and coached themselves and won championship after championship. Seems ridiculous doesn’t it. Let’s talk about my U18s team then.

We won the league that year, only drawing one game, our first one when I scored a last minute equaliser with my penis.⁵ And from then on the only direction was up⁶ and we went on to win every other game. That team was very good but of the three I have been talking about maybe the weakest in a footballing sense, but what we had was a togetherness that was unmatched. Two stories stick out for me from that season. As we progressed through the season winning every game we got into a habit of either scoring tons of goals in the first half and blowing the team away or conceding two or three and having to come from behind to win in the second half. It was down to the last game of the season and we were playing the team that was second, a point behind us. At half time we were 3-0 down. Our manager walked in and looked at us and said, "you keep doing this to yourselves and you keep getting yourselves out of it. You don't need me to say anything to you, you can do it yourselves", and he walked out. We sat around for fifteen minutes and coached ourselves. We went out and won 5-3 and won the league.

A month prior we had had to travel to Kington, which was about an hour away and invariably we were late. Turning up we realised we only had ten minutes to warm up and that was not enough for a proper warm up so instead we decided to play a game of sore arse. Sore arse is essentially a penalty shootout where all the people who missed their penalty have to line up on the goal line bent over, arse to the air and all those who scored their penalty take it in turns to try and smash the ball as hard as they can at those unfortunate souls from the penalty spot. If you go on a coaching course you will not come across this drill. No stretches, no warm up, just fifteen lads laughing as they smash the ball at each other’s arses. And obviously we went out and scored six or seven. Yet after the game the manager came into congratulate us and said something that will stick with me forever:

I knew we were going to lose when I saw you lot warming up like that. I thought what team spirit these lads have, that is a real team right there.

What does make a team a team? Why was that Manchester team not quite a team? I think that the revolving nature of Universities and people only being there for a few years before moving on definitely has an impact. That U18 team was made up of people who all went to school together and then all went to the pub together. But that element of playfulness over professionalism that we exhibited at Kington that day obviously did something for the other coach; it was noticed, it meant something that day. And in that lies a further development of my pondering. Will the hidden curriculum of the ever encroaching professionalisation and formalisation of children’s sports hinder that possibility or not? How do you go from a matchday preparation of getting into a tracksuit and having a photo taken at age seven to playing sore arse at age seventeen?

For me, I don’t know. And furthermore I have no real power anyway to halt the progression of every age group at my daughter’s football club having enough football kit for every day of the week. I can’t say for sure if the small act of dressing professionally is, in the grand scheme of things, going to make a difference, it is a relatively small facet of what it means to play football for them after all. What I can say for sure is that throughout my career whenever I have made a step up in the level I played at it felt momentous. One of those steps was moving to a level where it was deemed important that we all dressed professionally before we turned up to play as it said something about the level we aspired to. I worry that that step, that the desensitisation of that ritual, it’s now ubiquity, will take away from my daughter that step in her progression; the moment of going I have made it into a real team here, I’ve succeeded somewhat.

So I keep pondering how to balance these scales of professional and playful whilst coaching seven year olds. And if you are involved in children’s sports in anyway invite you to do so too. Part of the reason I think it was me who was asked to help coach is that whilst still a parent watching from the sidelines, before every training session or match, until all the girls were there, I invented a game where every girl had a ball and if I stole theirs off them and megged them they did five press ups but if they megged me I did ten press ups with one of them sat on my back. And I wonder if maybe someone should take photo of me doing press ups with a couple of seven year olds on my back with the rest stood around laughing to go on the mantlepiece beside all those team photos and furthermore, which of those photos, those moments, in twenty or thirty years, these girls would look back on the most fondly. And as I wonder this I look up at my mantlepiece and count the bollocks I can see peeking back at me.

1. My partner’s dad would say to them as children you didn’t forget you chose not to remember and in this case that is exactly what I did.

2. I don’t remember if they were his old boots, seems a long time to keep a child’s pair(?), or as a primary school teacher he had acquired them through school some time previously.

3. My coach, Mark Herbert, father of Dan Herbert, would wear whatever he wanted, often jeans if I remember rightly. One of my greatest regrets is not seeing the greatest football player to ever play in Ledbury play as I was too young. Mark Herbert was apparently a great football player, but when I was in my twenties he managed me at Ledbury Town. He would constantly go on about how he wished he could sub on his nan for some of us at half time as she could play better than us. She must have been a hell of a footballer in her day.

4. This being a long time ago was when they were a Premier League club playing in the Europa League. His name was Robert Sissons and what a player.

5. Sadly I wasn’t talented enough to flick my member at a cross in the six yard box but charged down a back pass to the keeper who smashed it at my penis and it looped twenty yards into the open net.

6. After some gentle massaging…