One of the strongest cultural ideals in many Western countries is that education is the great equalizer, a panacea that can resolve socioeconomic and personal ills caused by structural inequality. At the same time, considerable evidence underpins the durability of inequality (Tilly, 1998). These include reports about the persistence of disparities between rich and poor, the increase in the Gini Index in many democratic countries, low socioeconomic (SES) mobility rates (Rivera & Tilcsik, 2016), and differences in the academic achievements of groups from different ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic backgrounds (Lareau, 2015). In the context of this decline in the plausibility of the neoliberal assumptions about equal educational opportunity, educational anthropologists and sociologists have addressed at length the question of how to reconcile the promise of formal equity in schools with the stubbornness of class inequality.

In this context, many education studies have shown how formal education in schools has a central role in the transmission of social inequality and privilege through practices such as specific discourses, structural practices (such as tracking), pedagogies, and student-teacher relations (Calarco, 2018; Tyson, 2011). Only few studies have examined how these stratificational dynamics are manifest in informal spaces (Friedman, 2013). For example, some studies have described how enrichment programs, competitive after-school activities, and organized sports are closely associated with children's and parents' SES backgrounds (Andersen & Bakken, 2019). The current study proposes examining the linkage between SES and informal education through in-depth interviews with professional soccer coaches who coach high school students living in underprivileged urban neighborhoods in Israel.

Two main questions are explored in this paper: How do coaches who work in professional soccer clubs with low-SES youth perceive their role, their values, relations with the youths' parents, and the imagined future of the youth? Do the coaches' perceptions of their roles operate to perpetuate social inequality, and if so, how?

The findings revealed five primary themes reflecting the coaches' descriptions and explanatory accounts: a description of the youth athletes' life spaces, the coaches' perceptions of their own roles, the core values to which the coaches subscribe, the relationships between the coaches and the youth athletes' parents, and a description of the youth athletes' future orientation. These findings contribute to a discussion of the linkage between education, sport and SES or the implications of SES in informal education spaces.

A total of 15 male soccer coaches from low SES localities were interviewed. All the coaches attended official training institutions for trainers and coaches in Israel and, at minimum, held a certificate of soccer counselor (the first level of coaching certification in Israel), which enables the certificate holder to coach children and youth. Half of the coaches held a coaching certificate (the second level in Israel), which authorizes them to coach youth and adult teams up to the amateur leagues level. Most of the coaches were not employed as full-time soccer coaches, working in at least one additional job during the workday for their primary source of income. They coached soccer as a part-time job in the afternoon and evening. The participants were chosen through purposeful sampling (Patton, 2002). The primary criterion was their being coaches in competitive clubs and coaching teams of players aged 12–16. Appropriate interviewees were located through acquaintances at various clubs (team managers, coaches, directors). The first author had been a soccer player and now works as a field activity manager for a sports-related educational organization. These connections helped greatly in cultivating conversations with the coaches by utilizing concepts from their world, thereby gaining their trust. The research method adopted for this qualitative study was semi-structured interviews. The interviews, lasting about an hour, consisted of several parts: coaches' background details; main values; parents’ expectations; working in various life spaces; and future orientation. All the interviews were analyzed through grounded theory methodologies (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). First, transcripts were read openly to identify various themes freely mentioned by the coaches, independent of the research questions. For the next stage, focused reading was conducted per the research questions: the perception of the coach’s role; the primary values the coaches transmit to the players through coaching and play; parents’ expectations; and the youths’ future orientation. For the final stage, the transcripts were read to examine whether the coaches addressed various themes and issues other than those identified in the previous readings.

The findings reveal a linkage between position and disposition, highlighting that sports activities (or extracurricular education) are part and parcel of the endurance of inequality and intergenerational class replication (Bourdieu, 1978). The findings describe how the coaches expressed their role based on family-oriented metaphors, such as “father figure,” “father substitute,” and viewed themselves as providing their charges with a proper education not imparted to the youth by their parents. The coaches also emphasized the "parental" aspects of their work, (“to raise them”). Moreover, the coaches frequently applied the perspective of deficit (Atkins, 2010), which is based on the numerous deficits and hardships affecting their youth (“economic poverty,” “cultural poverty”). They view their charges as “at-risk youth” who should be thwarted from “getting into trouble” and “engagement in criminal activity” by guiding them to take “the straight path”. The future the coach-educators imagined for their students expressed a pedagogy of low expectations (“only few of them will succeed”). The coaches described the “regular” future path awaiting their students, including military service (compulsory in Israel for Jewish citizens), work, and family. Consistent with studies of the linkage between education and class (Calarco, 2018; Lareau, 2015; Tyson, 2011), these findings have consequences for the maintenance of educational stratification, and how class operates in informal educational spaces. The coaches’ engagement with instilling discipline and obedience to the ideal norms, a product of specific social construction, comprises a hidden curriculum (Perry-Hazan & Birnhack, 2018). we assert that the soccer coaches, who work with high school students at professional soccer clubs in low-SES towns in Israel, view their professional identity as characterized by good intentions, benevolence, and caring. However, this identity is prone to perpetuate social inequality.

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