Hague, Nicola ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9541-4713 and Law, Graeme ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5047-6208 (2026) Football is life. You are trained to be a footballer; you are not trained to not be a footballer’: Retirement transitions of male professional footballers through Norbert Elias’ Shock Experience Theory. International Review for the Sociology of Sport. (In Press)

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Abstract

This article explores how retired professional footballers from all four leagues in the English game experience the transition out of elite football through the lens of Norbert Elias' figurational sociology and his underutilised shock-experience theory. While athlete retirement has attracted increasing scholarly attention, limited research has examined retirement as a relational and processual experience using Eliasian sociology. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 20 retired male professional footballers, the study adopts an interpretivist approach and reflexive thematic analysis to examine how players negotiate the loss of their playing careers. Findings demonstrate that retirement shock emerges through the disruption of established routines, interdependencies and occupational identities, but that players can experience this disruption differently according to the extent to which they retain connections to football and exercise control over the timing and circumstances of retirement. Elias' shock-experience theory provides a valuable framework for understanding how retirement disrupts long-established patterns of interdependence and exposes tensions between imagined futures and lived realities. The article extends figurational sociology by demonstrating that professional footballers encounter distinctive forms of retirement shock arising from alterations to their habitus such as early specialisation, intense socialisation and relational dependencies that characterise elite football careers.

Item Type:	Article
Status:	In Press
Subjects:	G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GV Recreation Leisure > GV0557 Sports G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GV Recreation Leisure > GV0733-734.5 Professionalism in sports. Professional sports (General) H Social Sciences > HM Sociology
School/Department:	School of Health Sciences
URI:	https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/16333

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