Elite women coaches negotiating and resisting power in football

Abstract

While football remains mostly a sport associated with men and national identity, it has also become a popular sport for women and girls in Western countries. Despite this success, however, the coaching of football remains a strongly male dominated occupation. In this paper, we explored how 10 elite women coaches of national football teams negotiated and resisted the entanglement of techniques of biopower, sovereign and disciplinary power within the sport. The results revealed that sovereign power as exercised by Football Associations was intertwined with forms of discursive and biopower. This power constructed men as more knowledgeable about women's football than women who have years of playing and coaching experience at the elite level in the sport. Consequently, men are more often hired to coach women. In response, elite women coaches negotiated and resisted these forms of power by engaging in problematization, public truth telling/parrhesia, self‐transformation, and by creating alternative discourses about gender and football. They constructed their fellow women coaches as being more knowledgeable and more experienced than men coaches in women's football. The findings suggest that this use of a Foucauldian analysis into the entanglement of forms of power within such male‐dominated organizations and into the technologies of the self, utilized by women coaches, provides new insights into understanding the relative lack of change in gender ratio in (sport) leadership.

Is Sport Coaching a Social Sustainable Profession for Women? Analysing the Experiences of Women Coaches in Spain

“…On the contrary, one women football head coach coaching in a male-dominated and in a high-performance environment, experienced isolation, and lack of support from her colleagues, that when coupled with often negative feelings towards her organization or poor social relationships within her sports community, lead her feeling isolated and not motivated to remain in the coaching profession. This supports the findings of Knoppers et al, Fasting et al,and Norman [43,48,49], with elite women football coaches often feeling side-lined.…”

Reflections on decolonisation and enhancing inclusion in undergraduate teaching of sport and exercise psychology

“…This was included as an individual area of discussion due to unique issues faced when supporting female athletes. There is literature available in coaching and sociology spheres on issues such as power and coach athlete relations (Knoppers et al, 2021;Norman, 2015;Normal & French, 2013;Norman & Rankin-Wright, 2018). However, we also wished to highlight the significant lack of research in sport and exercise sciences (including psychology) that has been conducted specifically in supporting women in sport.…”

“…With the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020 and the following campaigns for improvements in social justice, many educators and practitioners engaged in a period of selfreflection and discussion. This included reflections on the issues that are faced in sport, in sport and exercise psychology teaching, and how we as a community are preparing practitioners to support athletes who have and will suffer discrimination (e.g., see Bradbury et al, 2020;Burdsey, 2020;Farrington et al, 2012;Knoppers et al, 2021). Decolonised and inclusive teaching is a significant step in promoting this change.…”

Experiences and Perceptions of Women Strength and Conditioning Coaches: A Scoping Review

“…The relatively low representation of women across coaching positions is often rooted in organizational culture, whereby male directors and board members in positions of power appoint male coaches (Knoppers et al, 2022). Women coaches are commonly relegated to positions which hold relatively little power.…”