Football Retirement, Fathering, and Foucault: Reflections from a ‘Football Dad’

Socio-cultural football retirement studies have identified how exposure to the workings of what Foucault (1977) called ‘anatamo-political power’ during a sports career have significant implications for the retiring individual in the aftermath of, and years after, a submersion in high performance sport. Moreover, existing research has shown that both the negotiation of retirement/transition away from high performance sport and the experience of fatherhood are ‘pinch points’ where young adult males are more susceptible to mental health issues. Developing an awareness of this scenario, coupled with my own personal ongoing discernment regarding how I negotiate my own fathering, provoked a realisation that research that explores the relationship between these two key periods of de-stabilizing social transition is important. In response, in this paper, I present and analyse a collection of reflective autoethnographic vignettes (Anderson, 2006) centred around my own experiences as a ‘former footballer father’. Using these vignettes as evocative catalysts, I proceed to consider how the residue of my football experiences impact my ongoing negotiation of fathering. Precisely, the vignettes focus on a) my turmoil regarding how my son might have to experience the same painful emotional journey that I did in football b) how a problematic residue from my football exposure impacts upon my fathering practice and c) how I father in an attempt to mitigate the effects and workings of disciplinary power upon my son in a football setting.