The ‘body pedagogics’ of an elite footballer’s career path – analysing Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s biography

Author(s):

Joacim Andersson(presenting / submitting)Ninitha Maivorsdotter(presenting)

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

18. Research in Sports Pedagogy

Format:

Paper

Session Information

18 SES 06, Body Pedagogy

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-23

15:30-17:00

Room:

K3.23

Chair:

Marie Öhman

Contribution

Pedagogical research on career is encouraged to not limit sport learning to athletic skills, coaching effectiveness and coach–athlete relationships, but to also focus on learning in a multidimensional sense in the context of an athlete’s individual and social biography. This article examines an elite athlete’s career path as a body pedagogic phenomenon involving processes of self-transformation in relation to practical, social and embodied environments (Archer 2010; Shilling and Bunsell 2014).

The purpose is to analyse the career path of the elite footballer Zlatan Ibrahimovic by focusing on how different learning environments relate to different embodiments of techniques and skills and how values and norms shape professionalism.

The experiences of coaches and athletes are perceived as taking place in an interactive workplace that is packed with competing egos, hierarchies, constraints and opportunities (Jones, Armour, and Potrac 2003; Cushion, Armour, and Jones 2006). In view of this, it is important to understand how an athlete experience and deal with such challenges in relation to identity (Wacquant 2005; Shilling 2008) and what kind of pedagogic initiatives have been taken to develop a shared understanding of embodied habits (Loquet 2011; Andersson and Garrison 2016 ).

This study contributes to the field by connecting to research that follows elite athletes throughout the whole of their careers in order to narratively identify the changes in and forging of identities (e.g. Rossi, Rynne, and Rabjohns 2016). Despite the more institutionalised educational practices of high-performance sport (Peterson 2007) and commodity orientation (Barker-Ruchti et al. 2016), it is possible to analyse how an athlete navigates and struggles to forge his or her own educational pathway. Our study follows Shilling and Bunsell (2014 ), who have shown that elite athletes’ self-transformation and learning is beneficially understood in relation to Archer’ s analytical distinction between social, practical and embodied environments (Archer 2010; Shilling and Bunsell, 2014 ).

A combined framework of body pedagogics and John Dewey’s theory of aesthetic experience is used to understand an elite career path as a learning trajectory involving different selftransformation means. Hence, the elite athlete is viewed as a career climber who creates his own educational pathway and engages in processes of participating, acquiring and becoming.

According to Dewey, if processes that lead to ‘spontaneity’ and ‘ intuition’ are purely bodily, purely social or purely practical, they would never be expressions of art. Artistry, therefore, is the human expression of the creation of coherent identity (Dewey [1934 ] 2005). The practical consequence of this view – to paraphrase Pierce’ s famous principle of ‘ never block the road of inquiry’ – is that elite athletes may have to overcome identities that block the road in order to inquire further into their own artistry.

Method

Practical epistemology analysis (PEA), with its focus on aesthetic judgements (Maivorsdotter and Wickman 2011), is used to analyse the narrative of Zlatan’s career path as it is portrayed in the biography I Am Zlatan: My Story on and Off the Field. Drawing on the work of John Dewey, the later works of Ludwig Wittgenstein and sociocultural approaches, PEA has been developed for the purpose of analysing meaning-making and learning (for in-depth Maivorsdotter and Wickman 2011). In the context of this article, PEA together with a body pedagogics perspective offers a framework for the analysis of the lived experiences associated with acquiring or failing to acquire certain body techniques. It is in the endured outcomes of such embodied processes that we are able to analyse selftransformation in relation to practical, social and embodied environments (e.g. Shilling and Bunsell, 2014 ). The analysis began with the two researchers individually reading the biography several times and searching for data in terms of quotations addressing the aim of the study. The analysis then continued with a session in which the researchers compared their selection of quotations and problematised the data in order to identify one common selection of quotes. The data collection was then subjected to a categorical analysis of content (Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach, and Zilber 1998 ). By reading the quotations as openly as possible, onemajor theme was identified – Zlatan developing frombeing a dribbler to becoming a striker – which could be categorised into three minor themes, namely the suburb, the arena and the team. The quotations were then analysed in-depth using PEA with a focus on aesthetic judgements. In this step PEA facilitates an analysis that recognise Shilling and Bunsels notion that although athletes struggles with specific practical, social and embodied constraints, the situation as a whole, the aesthetic experience, can never be reduced to one environment alone.

Expected Outcomes

Zlatan develops three different ways to create distinct and heterogeneous forms of knowledge in support of professional artistry. In the ‘suburb’ , Zlatan’ s auto-didactical means to develop as a ‘dribbler’ gives him recognition as an artist, which includes participation as well as artistic liberties. In the ‘arena’, this body pedagogic is less able to help him to achieve recognised artistry. By adopting a more educational approach to his profession, he is able to balance his artistic liberties. Artistry, which at first is regarded as ‘crazy stuff’, is now transformed into something purposeful in relation to a team. The ‘wow!’ aspect is also about connecting to people and building relations. Finally, in the theme of the ‘team’, he risks this coherent identity in his attempts to gather team members around specific values and norms. Here, the workable compromises are between developing professional artistry with existing means (auto-didactical, education) or creating new means that address the social (cliques), practical (who eats lunch together?) and embodied (you cannot train soft and play aggressive) constraints he encounters. In this final theme, a new self-transformation takes place as he experiences a growing responsibility as an educator. Our analysis offers an elaborated empirical description of how the means and ends of self-transformation are developed in reciprocal relationship throughout the pedagogic traits of an elite career, and how they relate to practical, social and embodied environments. Examples of the body pedagogic outcomes are: (1) different commitment to training, team culture and the coach– athlete relationship (social), (2) that Zlatan can use his dribbling skills more purposefully for scoring goals and to satisfy Capello (embodied) and (3) that he is able to win different leagues and titles with different teams (practical).

References

Andersson, J., and J. Garrison. 2016. “Embodying Meaning – Qualities, Feelings, Selective Attention, and Habits.” Quest 68 (2): 207–222. Archer, M. S. 2010. “Routine, Reflexivity, and Realism.” Sociological Theory 28 (3): 272–303. Barker-Ruchti, N., D. Barker, S. B. Rynne, and J. Lee. 2016. “Learning Cultures and Cultural Learning in High-performance Sport: Opportunities for Sport Pedagogues.” Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy 21 (1): 1–9. Cushion, C. J., K. M. Armour, and R. L. Jones. 2006. “Locating the Coaching Process in Practice: Models ‘for’ and ‘of’ Coaching.” Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy 11 (01): 83–99.. Dewey, J. [1934] 2005. Art as Experience. New York: Penguin Group. Ibrahimovic, Z., and D. Lagercrantz. 2013. I Am Zlatan: My Story on and Off the Field. Penguin Random House. Jones, R. L., K. M. Armour, and P. Potrac. 2003. “Constructing Expert Knowledge: A Case Study of a Top-Level Professional Soccer Coach.” Sport, Education and Society 8 (2): 213–229. Lieblich, A., R. Tuval-Mashiach, and T. Zilber. 1998. Narrative Research: Reading, Analysis, and Interpretation. Thousand Oak: Sage. Loquet, Monique. 2011. “Knowledge-in-action between Rules and Experiences: Lessons from High Performance Sport for Physical Education.” Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy 16 (2): 145–162. Maivorsdotter, N., and P.-O. Wickman. 2011. “Skating in a Life Context: Examining the Significance of Aesthetic Experience in Sport Using Practical Epistemology Analysis.” Sport, Education and Society 16 (5): 613–628.. Peach, S. J., and S. M. Thomas. 1998. “Ego Threat and the Development of Competitive Trait Anxiety in Elite JuniorBritish Tennis Players.” European Journal of Physical Education 3 (1): 51–64. Rossi, T., S. B. Rynne, and M. Rabjohns. 2016. “Moving Forwards with the Aim of Going Backwards Fast: High-performance Rowing as a Learning Environment.” Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy 21 (1): 55–68. Shilling, C. 2008. Changing Bodies: Habits Crises and Creativity. London: Sage. Shilling, C., and T. Bunsell. 2014. “From Iron Maiden to Superwoman: The Stochastic art of Self-transformation and the Deviant Female Sporting Body.” Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health 6 (4): 478–498. Wacquant, L. 2005. “Carnal Connections: On Embodiment, Apprenticeship, and Membership.” Qualitative Sociology 28: 445–474.

Author Information

Joacim Andersson (presenting / submitting)

Uppsala University Sweden,

Ninitha Maivorsdotter (presenting)