“They could be good players if they trained”: exploring the football discourse of five-year-old boys and girls

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article is part of an ethnographic study that aims to explore the power relations that are created around football in a school located in Portugal. The data collected show that the social and cultural conceptions that exist around football serve to exclude both girls from this sport and also children with lesser sporting skill. However, we found that boys who were excluded from this sport did not always aspire to reach the dominant masculinity represented by the game of football. At the same time, boys who play football sometimes combined hegemonic behaviours of masculinity with other less oppressive behaviours. This article tries to confirm the existence of a model of ‘flexible masculinity’ which serves as an analytical tool for future research on the construction of masculinities in young children.