The career decision-making process of Irish underage international footballers

Researching adolescents who participate in sport, particularly at an elite level, involves investigating their environment, social support structures and how they develop and maintain continuity in their lives during the many transitions they make. A key feature of this research is its sociological and longitudinal dimension which provides a window into the lives of young Irish underage international football players. Because this social world has never been examined before, a conscious decision was made to ensure the focus of the research harnessed the voices of the participants. The key reason for doing so was to illustrate how they view the elite sporting environment they are immersed in, their attitudes to education and their longterm career planning, all of which are encapsulated by the ambition to migrate from Ireland to a professional football club in the United Kingdom. In an attempt to provide a better understanding of the career decision-making process of the participants in this study, a pragmatic methodological research approach was chosen. This was principally because of the requirement to utilise all available resources for data collection having particular sensitivity to contextual considerations. This involved administering a selfcompletion questionnaire to three Irish underage international teams, followed by three separate focus groups and eleven individual interviews over a three-year period. The participants of the study had all been members of one of the three underage international football teams under investigation. This included the Irish under fifteen, under sixteen and under seventeen football squads. This research is underpinned by a theoretical framework called careership theory, developed by Hodkinson, Sparkes and Hodkinson (1996). The application of this conceptual framework is particularly important because it examines the central relationship between structure (the objective) and agency (the subjective). In addition to this, the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Jean Côté’s Developmental Model of Sports Participation, Schlossberg’s (1981) model for analyzing human adaptation to transition and Scanlon and Doyle’s (2018) model for supported transition are utilised as they work seamlessly to build on careership theory. They are also used to plot and understand the transitions young international footballers believe they have to make to become full-time professionals