Sporting Success? a critical criminology of childrens grassroots football

Sport connects significant spheres of social life such as education, family, economics, and politics. This enables panoramic insights into the organisation of society.
Traditionally, positive attributes tend to be ascribed to participation in sport, with many
commentators claiming that it strengthens social bonds, fosters positive attitudes and provides stability in otherwise chaotic lives riddled with crime and deviancy (Wacquant, 2004,
Jump, 2017 ). On the other hand, critical narratives around childhood participation concentrate on overt forms of criminality (Vertommen et al, 2018; Groombridge, 2018). However,
a focus on the explicit forms of criminality negates evidence gathered from the mundane
operation of childhood sport and the pervasive but embedded forms of systemic harms which are hidden in plain sight. This paper offers a critical analysis of how organised childhood
sport has been imbued with neoliberal values of consumer culture and the normalised harms that emerge from this relationship. Adopting a deviant leisure framework (Smith and
Raymen, 2016) and using findings from ethnographic fieldwork, I challenge and interrogate the neoliberalisation of children’s football in a broader context of late modern precarity
and how this cultivates harmful competitive individualistic subjectivities.