EVALUATION COMMITTEE

The Faculty Council has appointed the following adjudication committee to evaluate the thesis and the associated lecture: 

• Dr. Martin Littelwood, Liverpool John Moores University.
• Dr. Louise Kamuk Storm, Syddansk University.
• Dr. Henrik Vardinghus-Nielsen, HST, Aalborg University (Chairman).

Moderator:
Dr. Niels Nygaard Rossing, HST, Aalborg University.

Abstract

Increasing professionalization and adulteration of children’s sport has led football clubs, academies, and federations to systematically identify talent and select among children at an early age. The purpose of this PhD thesis is to explore the importance of early talent identification and selection processes for children’s understanding and negotiation of their identity. An initial systematic scoping review of talent identification and selection processes in football identified that the dominant research interest was centered on optimizing the processes, largely overlooking children’s perspectives. Consequently, this PhD thesis is based in 1.5 years of fieldwork in a suburban football club in Denmark to explore 10-11-year-old boys’ experiences of talent identification and selection processes — including the experiences of those ‘selected’ as well as those ‘unselected’. Using Jenkins’ perspectives on the interaction between external categorization and internal identification processes, it became evident that the football system’s skill-level division (in A, B-, and C-groups) were key to the boys’ understanding and negotiation of their identities. Further, the boys selected to an extracurricular training program were found to display an emerging athletic identity with an exclusive focus on football and largely refrained from exploring other aspects of their identities. In sum, the dissertation shows that football played a salient role in the boys’ identification of themselves and others, and points towards the importance of raising awareness about the potential consequences of early selection practices for the lives of children.