A critical pedagogical reading of youth football and associative sports practices, with an emphasis on the connection between education and performance

Abstract

Within the landscape of community-based sport practices, football represents one of the most widespread contexts of youth participation and a significant environment for bodily and relational socialisation. Despite the educational value often attributed to youth sport, several studies have highlighted how contemporary sport practices are increasingly shaped by performance-oriented and selective logics, which tend to transform sport experiences into technical training systems anticipating professional sport dynamics (Côté, Hancock, 2016). Drawing on the perspective of experiential pedagogy (Dewey, 1938) and phenomenological educational theory (Bertolini, 1988), this paper aims to explore the educational meaning of youth football within community sport organisations, analysing both its formative potential and its possible reductionist tendencies. The article develops a critical reflection on the organisational structures of youth football by comparing them with selected Northern European sport models (David, 2005; Halldorsson, 2020) which emphasise children’s rights, inclusive participation and the delayed introduction of competitive selection. The comparison highlights how the educational quality of sport practices depends less on the specific discipline than on the pedagogical frameworks that shape young athletes’ experiences. From this perspective, community sport can represent a privileged context for the education of corporeality and for meaningful learning experiences, provided that sport organisations place the development of the person, the playful dimension of movement and the educational responsibility of adults at the centre of youth sport practices.