Constraining Football

This is a book about learning. Learning can often be forgotten or fringe in the pursuit of other fruits. When these fruits are practice books, formal & standardised education and easy to digest, saccharine infused niceties there is a risk that we overlook one of the fundamental human needs; to develop, change, grow and learn to master crafts. The mastery of crafts such as coaching takes time, earnest commitment and many challenging, chastening experiences that leave us feeling a little less than skilful. However we overcome these challenges, they are likely to be enablers that support our learning and growth towards becoming a better coach than we were yesterday. This book is intended to support that exploration; generate and guide your thinking whilst ensuring the gestation of those seeds of thought. We will encourage and enable a deeper understanding of the people or players in our care and provide some illumination on how to guide our decisions in designing environments that are responsive to both you and your players. There will be no coaching prescriptions, simply because the general nature of a constraints-led approach is at odds with prescription focussed approaches to coaching. A constraints-led approach encourages us to take account of, better understand and integrate what we understand about the player (person), the game of football (task) and the specific conditions on any given day (environment) into every interaction, coaching session, game-day, tournament and any other activity we might engage in within player development. There will, however, be some probing into alternative ways for coaches to eschew the traditional practice book or formal curriculum and scaffold player and coach development towards a unique, bespoke, responsive eco-system that keeps rhythm with the beating heart of our own football club. Taken together, this can support the experiences we are exposed to and build to be unique, individual and reflective of what collectively we have agreed and understand to be important in our world. The characteristics of our context should be coupled to our commitments. The backdrop to the way of thinking expressed in this book has been supported by a generation spent within coaching and development; fortune has favoured the opportunity for me to support in a sustained fashion the development of players who have been top scorers at The World Cup, multiple Premier League winners and coaches who coach and manage across some of Europe's top leagues. However, these perceived successes must be allied to the players within those same development programmes whose opportunity has been curtailed by serious injury and coaches who have fallen foul of some of the vagaries that the industry can perpetuate. As such, no development system is universally successful or unsuccessful and we should be careful, thoughtful and willing to as readily 'research' the graveyard as we do the top table. That mirror may be unpleasant to stare into at times, yet it is an important reflection of our own fallibilities and an important reminder to ensure that whatever outcomes our coaching and development programmes facilitate; supporting them to be as humanly supportive yet challenging as is consciously achievable is a worthy and important goal. The aspiration for this book is that it provides a map of some of the landscape that coaches may wish to explore in developing their own constraints-led approach to development, both for the players in their care and for themselves as a coach. Illuminating this fertile land sufficiently to support discoveries that are purposeful, personal and personable.

Women’s Football in a Global, Professional Era is an important addition to discussions on sport as work for women, and an essential reference point for students, researchers and sports professionals interested in the debates around the professionalisation of women’s football internationally.

This is a brand new multi-media resource to support new and experienced primary school teachers develop skills of critical reflection in order to improve teaching and learning. An integrated DVD and textbook present a range of innovative case studies comprising video clips of real teachers in the classroom, together with context and narrative, step-by-step guidance through key issues, and commentary and debate from experts and professionals in the field.

This volume draws upon social science and historical approaches to provide insights into the world of women’s football and female fans. It gives an in-depth analysis of the development of the women’s game in different European countries and examines the experiences of female fans. An overview about women’s football in Europe shows the rise and development of the game and the increasing inclusion of girls and women in football and fan communities. To date, there has been a lack of research on female participation in football, but drawing on research studies from various European countries, the volume explores a range of issues, including how girls and women become football fans and players, how women combine football with their everyday lives, and how they may encounter stereotypes and barriers when they challenge male dominance by entering this traditionally male sport. This collection will be of interest to students and scholars in a range of fields, including sports sociology, sport sciences, gender studies, leisure studies, women’s studies as well as fandom and cultural studies.

Association Football is undoubtedly a global sport, with millions of individuals participating in more than 200 countries. The need for an educated football coaching workforce to deliver appropriate coaching practices has never been greater. Formal coach education, which is often the primary medium for developing football coaches, is socially constructed, meaning an array of social, cultural, and historical factors underpin the design and delivery of any provision. Coach Education in Football: Contemporary Issues and Global Perspectives is the first book to explicitly explore these aspects, by providing critical insight into football coach education programmes from across the globe. Each chapter, organised via a central theme, highlights a contemporary issue affecting football coach education and development within a specific country, offering insights into the contextual opportunities and challenges. The book covers essential topics including the progression of female football coaches, coaches’ perspectives towards current provision, technological and pedagogical advances, and the historical development of formal coach education. Each chapter demonstrates the complexities associated with developing football coaches within grassroots and high-performance domains, while providing recommendations for national governing bodies, policy makers, and coach developers. This book is the first of its kind to explicitly investigate football coach education globally. This accessible book is an important read for students, academics, and practitioners with an interest in sports coaching, coach education, and football.

This edited volume explores how Stephen Ball’s work has shaped the field of the sociology of education worldwide. Written by internationally based researchers who are Ball’s former PhD students, it draws on different strands of his work to show what it means to think, write, and do research inspired by Ball’s theory, methodology, and epistemology. The contributions revolve around a wide range of themes including: the ethics of doing educational research, disability studies, the bio-politics of the child’s soul, lived experiences of marginalisation in education, educating migrant and refugee women in the borderlands, and post-Brexit reflections on the Bologna process. Chapters draw on different lines of thought from the corpus of a significant and influential figure in the sociology of education to present, explicate, and discuss a wide range of research projects, themes, theoretical directions, as well as methodological approaches in the field of the sociology of education today. More than celebrating Ball’s scholarship, this volume shows new and innovative directions in the sociology of education. It will be highly relevant reading for researchers, scholars, and students in the sociology of education, educational policy, and politics and educational theory.

This book aims to provide an extensive overview of how football is organized and managed on a European level and in individual European countries, and to account for the evolution of the national, international and transnational management of football over the last decades.

The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence has two goals. The first goal is meta-theoretical and is fulfilled by Part One, which comprises the first three chapters: an interpretation of the past (Chapter 1), the present (Chapter 2), and the future of AI (Chapter 3). Part One develops the thesis that AI is an unprecedented divorce between agency and intelligence. On this basis, Part Two investigates the consequences of such a divorce, developing the thesis that AI as a new form of agency can be harnessed ethically and unethically. It begins (Chapter 4) by offering a unified perspective on the many principles that have been proposed to frame the ethics of AI. This leads to a discussion (Chapter 5) of the potential risks that may undermine the application of these principles, and then (Chapter 6) an analysis of the relation between ethical principles and legal norms, and a definition of soft ethics as post-compliance ethics. Part Two continues by analysing the ethical challenges caused by the development and use of AI (Chapter 7), evil uses of AI (Chapter 8), and good practices when applying AI (Chapter 9). The last group of chapters focuses on the design, development, and deployment of AI for Social Good or AI4SG (Chapter 10); the positive and negative impacts of AI on the environment and how it can be a force for good in the fight against climate change-but not without risks and costs, which can and must be avoided or minimised (Chapter 11); and the possibility of using AI in support of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (Chapter 12). The book concludes (Chapter 13) by arguing in favour of a new marriage between the Green of all our habitats and the Blue of all our digital technologies and how this new marriage can support and develop a better society and a healthier biosphere.