Challenge and relief: A Foucauldian disciplinary analysis of retirement from professional association football in the United Kingdom

Challenging times

Despite the uncertainty of a football career (Roderick, 2006), football as a vocation still provided our participants with a clear identity, allowing them to exist within a constant space where (through the regular absorption of discipline) their lives had an established focus and direction. However, as a result of career-ending injury or de-selection, retirement from football can be painful and abrupt. Access to the familiar and sustaining disciplinary lifestyle is revoked, and this presents a significant challenge for the retiring player. In the discussion that follows we establish how the regular absorption of discipline occurs in a football context and go on to explain why removal from this protective ‘bubble-like’ space (McGillivray et al., 2005) is such a challenge. Specifically, we examine the physical and relational arrangement of the social spaces a footballer occupies. And, we consider how the design and regulation of these spaces exposed him to a heavily orchestrated and monitored disciplinary lifestyle. We begin by considering how Foucault’s disciplinary techniques are useful for explaining the working lifestyle of a footballer and the production of a docile footballer. We then move on to consider how Foucault’s instruments of surveillance, or his ‘Means of correct training’, can be used to more clearly understand the discipline experienced during a career.

The initial moments of retirement can clearly be a painful experience. When a club director informed Andrew of his release from his club, he recalled that he,

felt terrible. I felt let down and massively disappointed. I was angry. As I was driving home from the game I was devastated, I cried all the way home…I remember driving to a local park and sitting on a bench for hours crying my eyes out, ignoring phone calls. I was just thinking, ‘What the fuck am I doing?’ and that football was shit and everything was going to pot. I just needed something else.

In another example, one of the longest serving players we interviewed, Brian, spoke about the anxiety he felt over his future when he came to the end of his eight-year career:

I have no qualifications from the game, just memories…I remember that I went to the cash point and I couldn’t even take any money out. I remember wandering around on the beach thinking, ‘How am I going to get money? I can’t even pay the mortgage’. Then the realisation hit me hard. Up until then I had been wrapped in cotton wool.

The ‘cotton wool’ that Brian spoke of is an excellent description of the disciplinary lifestyle he was accustomed to in working football. Using Foucault’s analytical tool, ‘the art of distributions’, it is possible to more clearly explain how disciplinary power focused upon a footballer’s body during his career. As a footballer, a player is required to arrive at the same designated space at the same time every day. He is expected to train within the ‘enclosure’ of his club’s training facilities (pitches, gymnasium, etc.), in accordance with his ‘rank’ (first team squad member). As Liam mentioned,

It was the same routine every day. 8.30 am. Turn up at the training ground, out for a warm up, then some ball work. At 9.30 am on the dot, a short, sharp first session. Usually keep-ball, then we would break up into groups. Sometimes the whole squad joined in but mostly the lads playing on the Saturday would head off and work with the coaches and do shape. If you weren’t involved, you either shadowed the first team or went off and did shooting, extra running, hit the gym, anything to try and get back in the fold.

Liam identified that during a training session, he was required to follow the instructions of those of superior rank, specifically the coaching staff. Furthermore, if he was not involved in the first team Liam was expected to engage in extra work away from training in a self-conscious attempt to improve his ‘function’ for his team.

Like all retired players, Liam and Brian no longer belong to football. Their positions or ‘rank’ within the socially desirable ‘club’ they worked so hard for has been revoked. As footballers, their focus and role had been made abundantly clear to them by the disciplinary tone of their relationships and activities. As Brian said,

When I played football I always knew what was expected of me. I knew what to focus upon on a daily basis. It was simple. Train hard all week. Do what the coaches said. Stay in the team. Keep your head down and stay out of trouble.

Foucault’s notion of the ‘control of activity’ can be helpful here to understand Brian’s experiences. For example, when acting as a footballer, Brian’s focus was explicitly enacted through the intentional design of the activities he was expected to complete on a daily basis, as well as the strict tone in which these activities were progressively controlled via ‘timetables’ in order to facilitate his improvement. Almost all of our participants reported that when the focus that daily discipline allowed was removed, when it no longer became available as a result of retirement, a significant struggle ensued. Michael explained that,

I had no direction. I didn’t know what to do with myself – my days had no pattern to them and that really got me down. I would lie in bed in the morning and just not want to get up because I knew that the day had no purpose to it. I didn’t want to be exposed to everyday things, and then I spiralled further and further into a dark place.

As a result of the daily training routines and disciplinary lifestyle reported by the majority of our participants, it is clear that they experienced being disciplined into ‘docile footballing bodies’ by the practices demanded by the role of a working footballer. We would argue that Michael’s reaction to retirement occurred because without the control of his activities, the micro-management of his development, what Foucault called the ‘organisation of geneses’, or the efficient and economic use of his footballing body in relation to a football, what Foucault called ‘body object articulation’, he no longer felt protected by the structured disciplinary lifestyle he was accustomed to. One could argue that as a result of the removal of what Brian called the ‘cotton wool’ of football, Michael experienced his downward spiral.

Clearly, a player’s removal from an intentionally choreographed football space can have a significant impact upon his life. It is clear from our participants’ responses that the removal of the disciplinary techniques common to football can be disorienting for a player when he retires. As a result, retirees can face an initially challenging period because of their previous reliance upon the powerful sustaining effects of the disciplinary techniques prevalent in the football context. Without the constant prescription of activities or the regular reinforcement of expected behaviours (such as those mentioned by our participants above), retired players are often at a loss as to how to establish direction in their new roles within society – especially at the outset of their retirement.

Foucault’s instruments of discipline, his ‘Means of correct training’, can also help to highlight the disciplinary nature of a footballer’s career and provide insight into why retirement can be challenging. For example, when discussing ‘hierarchical observation’, Foucault explained that in workshops and factories, constant supervision instils discipline by taking into account ‘the activity of men, their skill, the way they set about their tasks, their promptness, their zeal, their behaviour’ (Foucault, 1991: 174).

We also suggest that the removal of the continuous supervision found in working football significantly contributes to a retiring player’s disorientation. Foucault (1991) observed that because discipline coerces by observation, certain architectural arrangements (for example the lines and boundaries of a football practice field or the position of a manager’s office within a training facility) can have powerful coercive effects upon resident bodies. This quote from Harry illustrates how he felt while performing his function as a working player under the conditions of constant supervision instilled at his football club:

The coaches always had an eye on you. What time you turned up – when you left. During training and matches they were always up on the side or in the dug-out, watching, and whispering to each other – so, every time you made a bad touch – you thought – shit. And, you were always shit scared they would spot if you didn’t track your runner. Always being watched we were. I have to say although you got used to it, the fact that you are always being watched never really went away.

As a highly skilled manual labourer (Roderick, 2006), the continuous supervision that Harry described was enforced by coaches and managers as ‘specialised personnel’ (Foucault, 1991: 174). Hierarchical observation is, therefore, enacted through a combination of the coaches’ and managers’ position of expertise and their physical positioning within the architectural spaces of the working football environment. This strategic arrangement allows ‘no zone of shade and constantly supervises’ (p. 176) and has a powerful, but importantly, constant and reliable effect of discipline upon the supervised resident bodies.

Foucault’s second instrument of discipline was what he called ‘normalising judgement’. He saw that another way discipline could be worked onto the individual body was through exposure to repeated strategies of normalisation. By ensuring that even the slightest departures from correct behaviour are subject to punishment, or by ensuring that expected behaviours and outputs are repeatedly rewarded, discipline is constantly exercised. Continuous supervision (enabled through hierarchical observation) is utilised to record deviance and reward conformity, consequently normalising the behaviour of the individual. For a footballer the constant supervision and comparison to normalised and expected behaviours had significant consequences. Those who observe a footballer establish a ‘penal accountancy’ of his football-related behaviours – an invisible ‘punitive balance sheet’ composed of all manner of actions. Everything he performed – miles ran, tackles missed/won, fouls conceded, goals scored, reactions to criticism from coaching staff/team mates – would have been observed and considered. To ensure his conformity, but also to ensure he maintained access to the rewards associated with this conformity, a footballer would have accepted being fined for arriving late, would have displayed normalised, hyper-competitive behaviour and would have obediently engaged in any prescribed training activity by his superiors. As a result of this constant surveillance and the punishment associated with it, as well as the regular gratification for displaying normalised and expected behaviours, disciplinary power was heavily integrated into a footballer’s everyday role. The consequence of this was that it normalised his body and his behaviour, and produced him as a docile footballer.

Foucault’s (1991: 184) final instrument of discipline was the combination of hierarchical observation and normalising judgement – ‘the examination’. An examination is a highly ritualised event that ‘makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish’. The examination makes it possible to extract and constitute knowledge surrounding an individual – in this case, a footballer. This quote from George highlights just how many examinations a footballer’s day-to-day life includes:

I haven’t been for many job interviews, but when I was a footballer it felt like I was like, going for one every day, you know? Right from when you were a kid on trial – then when you’re at a club, the smart clothes you had to wear for home games – to the tight time keeping all over the place – like if you had a meeting with the gaffer…Other things used to irritate me like them keeping a tab on your height and weight at the start and end of pre-season. Then them springing fitness testing on us throughout the year, bleep tests and all that. I could keep going – a medical before a new contract, all that stuff, it was constant.

Clearly a working footballer is examined on a regular basis. Foucault (1991: 189) observed that ‘the examination that places the individual in a field of surveillance also situates them in a network of writing; it engages them in a whole mass of documents that capture and fix them’. The footballer who is regularly examined has established for him a ‘knowledge’ of his capabilities as a player. This knowledge, produced via multiple examinations, becomes intimately connected to the player’s identity, and can, therefore, be used by the coach to further discipline, punish and sustain a working player.

Another quote, from Lawrence, shows that retirement was a significant challenge as it left him without a clear understanding of the future:

It left me stuck in a rut. I thought…what do I do with the rest of my days? Literally what am I going to do? There was quite a big phase where I had no focus. Not through want, but because I had nothing to focus on. I had no-one telling me what I needed to do next.

For us, Lawrence’s quote is revealing as it highlights that in his post-football life, a retired player conducts his day-to-day existence in a space no longer occupied or constantly observed by the once familiar arrangement of managers, coaches, team-mates or club staff. He no longer has his activities or behaviour regularly examined, and as a result, he is no longer repeatedly exposed to football’s disciplinary practices or its ‘Means of correct training’. We suggest that the removal of disciplinary techniques and instruments associated with retirement is central to the emotional challenge a retiring player endures. The removal of hierarchical observation and normalising judgement (both punishment and gratification) and their combination in the examination (experienced on a regular basis as a footballer), significantly contributes to a player’s disorientation upon his retirement. The ‘innumerable mechanisms’ of surveillance found within his fixed football club that had formed around him ‘an apparatus of observation, recording, and training’ (Foucault, 1991: 173) have, in his retirement, been removed. We argue that for Lawrence, much like Michael, retirement (initially at least) caused significant confusion, because, without the imposed daily surveillance associated with the football space, and the training he experienced within it, he began to feel his life changing and becoming increasingly unstable, or ‘without focus’. We suggest that the reduction in surveillance for footballers, coupled with the aforementioned withdrawal of disciplinary techniques experienced by Brian and Liam, can lead to increased uncertainty in the retired footballer’s life. Accordingly, we believe that the effects of disciplinary practices and the instruments of surveillance should be prioritised when attempting to understand athletes’ retirement experiences.

We feel that it is important we are clear that the players interviewed insisted that these feelings of challenge had not occurred in isolation. And, that despite these numerous recollections of ‘challenge’, the participants were often simultaneously filled with a sense of distinct ‘relief’ upon their retirement. In the next section we explore these feelings of relief.

Relief

So far, we have explained that challenging times were brought on by the sudden loss of structure, organisation and control that our participants had become so reliant upon during their exposure to football’s overarching disciplinary apparatus. In this section we suggest that at the same time there were strong sensations of relief experienced by our participants, which was born out of the relinquishment of pressure, expectation and the level of sacrifice that the overtly disciplinary arrangement of working football attempts to preserve in its professionals. More specifically, we suggest that a sensation of relief occurs as a result of the overt and punitive discipline associated with the role of the footballer being removed. Therefore, in what follows, similar to how we showed that the challenges related to retiring from football can be associated with players’ removal from football’s disciplinary apparatus, we show how players’ sensations of relief related to retiring from football can also be associated with their removal from football’s disciplinary apparatus. The two quotes below from Eli and Dean reveal the relief experienced at no longer having to perform as a professional footballer:

Similarly, Dean’s account of his first job away from football also highlights a sense of relief:

I started working in a warehouse and the difference…I felt brilliant for six months. It was the best feeling I’ve ever had in a job, ever. Because, I’d gone from football, being under pressure every day…Going from training, knowing I had to perform, to working where I thought ‘I do not give a fuck…I haven’t got to do anything…I’m just going to chuck a few boxes on’. No-one was there telling me I was chucking the boxes on in the wrong way, and it was just great to have that.

Both Eli and Dean have explained that no longer having to experience the surveillance typical to a football setting came as a great relief. No longer being placed under the constant and normalising ‘scrutiny’ and ‘judgment’ from the fixed hierarchy of fans, media and superiors that surrounded his club has allowed Eli to abandon football completely. Foucault (1991: 176) identified that ‘although surveillance rests upon the individual, its functioning is that of a network of relations from the top to the bottom’. We believe that this is an accurate description of the network that surrounded Eli, and by leaving this coercive network of surveillance, he was released from a constraining disciplinary arrangement. Dean also explained how he constantly felt pressure in his previous football environment. This is unsurprising as Foucault (1991) noted that even in an intensely disciplinary context the slightest departures from the correct or normalised behaviours are subject to punishment. For example, during his career, any mistakes Dean made would have led to him being subjected to abuse from the coaching staff, or even facing a loss of his position (risking becoming a ‘reject’ – Cushion and Jones, 2006). The ‘normalising judgment’ common to a football space operates as a corrective instrument of discipline. As mentioned, the constant presence of this corrective mechanism meant that any offence committed was a failure to conform, which in turn, led to punishment. Eli and Dean’s sense of relief in retirement must, therefore, come as no surprise. We believe that these men are revelling in their release from what Foucault (1991: 183) identified as the ‘perpetual penality that traverses all points and is supervised at every instant’. In his new role, Dean is no longer subjected to any punitive consequences as a result of a deviation from ‘chucking boxes on’ correctly. This is in direct comparison to his systematic experience of the punitive consequences associated with ‘the examinations’ that are regularly experienced during a football career (e.g., the fitness testing, medical testing, training and matches that George mentioned in the previous section). While it is true that working in a warehouse is a classic example of a disciplinary space, for Dean, following his immediate removal from football, it was a space where the impact of disciplinary power, due to the comparatively weak instruments of surveillance, was not so keenly felt.

Many of the retirees also mentioned how difficult they found it during their careers to escape the constant, competitive nature of their football lives. Michael highlighted the constraining relational nature that typifies the ‘constant’ feeling of the culture footballers occupy:

It doesn’t stop. In the car, on the way to training, there’s banter. In the changing room you’re always giving it out or taking it. During training you’re looking over your shoulder making sure you do things right – then there’s banter about what happened during training in the showers…knock off early for a round of golf with the lads – guess what – more competition and banter about football. Get home for tea – text messages from the players taking the piss about whoever. A night out? More of the same. Lying in bed thinking about niggling injuries and contracts. It’s endless – and sometimes you just wanted something else.

The constant imposition of self-regulatory discipline and the ‘omni-disciplinary’ presence of team mates and coaching staff means that the ‘twenty-four-seven football culture’, defined by unceasing competition (Giulianotti, 1999) and the need to further one’s ‘rank’, ensured that players ‘couldn’t relax’. This round-the-clock one-upmanship, coupled with the constant day-to-day supervision from specialised personnel (discussed by Harry above) generated the feeling of being unable to escape the ‘football bubble’. As a result, and to no real surprise, retirees expressed relief at being able to develop new relationships and to interact with a broader spectrum of people after leaving football. For example, Andrew explained that,

I made a conscious decision to get myself out of the football bubble…meeting new people who weren’t in football was amazing for me. It got me away from the twenty-four-seven football culture, where you live with the lads and see them all the time. I used to go to all the footballers’ houses and it was twenty-four-seven banter and you just couldn’t relax, you couldn’t have a serious conversation. For the most part it was all about one-upmanship…There was no way you could have a conversation like the one we are having now…so by living with other people, you can interact like real people do and meet new people who are more like minded.

The constant presence of discipline meant that for Andrew, the life he experienced as a working footballer was defined by unceasing competition (Giulianotti, 1999) and the need to further one’s ‘rank’. The ‘football bubble’ that Andrew mentioned is a typical example of Foucault’s (1991) panoptic guard tower. As a footballer, Andrew was routinely exposed to an unceasing and inescapable gaze. As a result, he endlessly self-regulated his own behaviour and independently worked to develop his usefulness and compliant behaviour. This came at a cost, as Andrew felt excluded from alternative ways of knowing himself or using his body. The player that leaves football is removed from the intense and specific ‘panoptic gaze’ of a hypercompetitive lifestyle that previously managed to pervade the multiple contexts of his life. As a result of the removal associated with retirement, the techniques and instruments of discipline that previously rendered the player docile begin to wane, and their immediate effect upon the player significantly lessens. Andrew’s quote also demonstrates how existing within this panoptic context retarded the development of the alternative skills required to integrate with the expectations of new social spaces. Consequently, when permitted to ‘meet like-minded people’ in retirement, he experienced a sense of pleasure and release.

In retirement, the footballer leaves an arrangement of disciplinary power and the punitive effects of this discipline begin to fade over time. As the docility of each player erodes, he is then allowed the time and space to develop alternative skills. He is eventually permitted to recreate his retiring self (Crockett, 2014), in order to perform appropriately in the new places and spaces he finds himself within. However, a retired player is also forced to seek alternative means to sustain his newly fragmented identity as he can no longer rely upon the sustaining characteristics of his previously disciplinary lifestyle. We believe that this conundrum is reflective of the complexity of the sports retirement experience. As such, in this article, that is why we have attempted to make sense of sport retirement not as a fixed and known process but as a dynamic and multifaceted experience.