What's in a Dreamed Profession? Training to Become a Football Professional Player

The last few years have witnessed a widespread (with greater impact in side-line countries like Portugal) dissolution of the virtuous relationship between the type and level of education, profession, remuneration and social status. This standstill has favoured young people to look for alternative life pathways. In Portugal, schools of football are playing a relevant part in this shift. Mainly concentrated in the big cities (Lisbon, Oporto), they respond to the training solicitation of an increasing number of young males. At the base of this solicitation is the fact that football has recently been subjected to social reconfiguration and symbolic (re)valorisation, concerning diverse dimensions besides professionalization: criativization, idealization and mediatisation are also drawn in.

In this paper, we shall be looking into the subjectivities of male youngsters training to be professional football players. By which meanings do they qualify football? What role those meanings play in the construction of their identities? How is the process of transition to work they face? How is transition to adulthood affected by their “football stake”? Answering these questions lead us to examine three analytical dimensions: 1) dream production pathways: how is the idealization order of the profession socially produced and experienced; 2) dream accomplishment pathways, namely the social circumstances that involve the transformation of the dream into a project; finally 3) dream professionalization pathways: specially focusing on possible (mis)matching between the dream, the project and the realities of professional performance.

The main hypothesis we’ll be discussing is that the choice of football is, at the same time, a strategy to extend and to accomplish a fulltime identity that often is not allowed to be expressed within the more conventional professional spheres; and a decision that shows new ways for young people to cope with uncertainty in transition to the labour market and to adulthood.