Confessions of a retired footballer: a Foucauldian reading of British working footballers’ longer-term retirement experiences

Historically, the phenomenon of retirement from high-performance sport has predominantly been researched through a psychological or psychosocial lens, highlighting the key challenges experienced by athletes in their lives after sport. Despite this substantial investment and the tailored interventions that have ensued, as well as the assertion that sport prepares individuals well for their futures, problematic issues associated with this common athlete experience prevail. Denison and Winslade (2006) have suggested that the focus of psycho-social research upon the individual athlete as the ‘problem’, and the location where ‘change needs to occur’ has limited scholarly understanding of a range of athletic issues, including retirement. Over the last few decades, the socio-cultural exploration of sports retirement has grown considerably and scholars have begun to consider sport retirement using a range of theoretical tools. However, sport retirement studies have overwhelmingly considered the initial and recent aftermath of career cessation - what sport psychologists have labelled the ‘retirement phase’ (Stambulova et al., 2020). In the current study, in an attempt to change this status quo, we continue our Foucauldian informed analysis of Association Football (football) retirement to analyse the experiences of 25 retired football players between the ages of 21 and 34, a minimum of 18 months since their careers had ended. To do so we use a theoretical framework derived from Michel Foucault’s (1978) underutilised conceptualisation of ‘confessional techniques’. Our data analysis has suggested that the legacy of having worked as a ‘docile football body’ continues to impact and shape our participants’ everyday experiences–in particular, through the importation of a learned ‘confessional mindset’ from their careers as a means of navigating their new roles.