Abstract
In the course of our research, we surveyed the educational programmes of the football academies of Hungary. We wished to reveal the educational aspects of the life of the students at the football academies. The purpose of our project is to comparatively analyse the formal and conceptual dimensions of the educational programmes of the academies through an analysis of the documents of the academies concerned. We also conducted semi-structured interviews with the heads of the social- and educational sections of the academies (N=6). We used the results of the interviews to check–confirm or refute–the results we found. We believe that the findings of our research make it possible for us to better understand the elements and value-based components of the educational dimensions of the football academies. In this way, our survey is similar to the projects of researchers who worked with local educational programmes (for example, Brezsnyánszky et al., 2000). As a conclusion of our research, we may point out that both the formal and conceptual dimensions of the educational programmes of the individual football academies are strongly heterogeneous, and the quality of their pedagogical programmes is often questionable. The results yielded by the analysis of the interviews suggest that although an educational-social department is present at each of the academies, some our former conclusions in connection with the general standards of the educational work were confirmed by the answers we received from our respondents. The academies, almost without an exception, produce their own educational programmes and carry out their educational work individually, and do not cooperate with the other institutions. There is, consequently, no uniform and standard educational work, and there is no professional documentation of the work going on either. In this way, the quality of educational work is not really able to improve.
Highlights
Our research was necessitated by the fact that academy-type institutions where new generations of football players are brought up
In the course of our survey of the formal characteristics of the educational programmes, we sought answers to the following questions: what is the breakdown of the document? How different are the individual documents in terms of size? What structural differences are there between the documents of the individual academies? How much attention do the makers of the documents pay to the reccommended and required elements as suggested by the related literature? What are the specific names of the documents prepared, and what structural differences are there in them? Is the name of the document relevant to its inner content?
The following chart contains the formal parametres of the documents we examined, and a more detailed analysis is provided further on: Table 1: Formal Parametres of the Educational Programmes of the Football Academies (Source: the author’s own)
Summary
Our research was necessitated by the fact that academy-type institutions where new generations of football players are brought up. Thousands of young Hungarian children live, play and learn in these academies. Since the academies are supposed to provide school-type education in addition to the training and education in sport, and since these are boarding institutions, where children are away from their families, it is highly important to analyse and evaluate the quality of the educational programmes going on at the academies. The importance of such a research programme is further improved by the high popularity of football in the 21st century. The projects have included the start of various programmes for children, shaping and re-shaping the strategies of replacement training and the creation of football academies since 2001
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