National identity is a double-edged sword in the context of coaching. There are both positive and negative consequences regarding the impact of national identity on coaching, although as with most things it is seldom the case that a consequence is entirely negative or positive.
An appeal to national identity can enhance access to the best athletes. Paradoxically, this can often be difficult to ensure in the most popular and commercialised sports, which are also the clearest markers or carriers of an ideal of national identity. In the UK, for instance, players and clubs in both football and rugby union are caught between several sets of demands. Playing seasons in recent years have been around ten months’ duration. As the number of national and international club-based competitions has increased, so have international matches. Additionally, clubs have more financial investment in players. The honour of representative sport in some cases, therefore, has come to clash with the commercial demands of professional sport. As a result, there have been a number of intense disputes between national bodies and clubs during the later 1990s and early 2000s over the availability of, and threat of injury to, internationally representative players.
Although these sorts of commercial considerations can, and often do, weaken the positive impact of national identity on coaches, there are more general beneficial impacts. For instance, when issues related to national identity are clear, and when the sport in question is seen as a marker of national identity, athletes and coaches may find themselves in positions that are culturally central, resulting in a high profile for both the sport and individuals (e.g. the English football team at the 2006 World Cup). However, this can also result in greater pressure for success that may not be at all positive or beneficial. It is something coaches should be aware of and, accordingly, plan for.
It is often the case that less immediately obvious or direct support is developed in association with national identity markers and alongside certain sports as nationally distinctive. For example, the development in the last quarter of the twentieth century of mass formalised coach education systems is linked to the demands of high-performance sport to be internationally competitive. It is increasingly common for coaches to take the blame for team failures, and the complexity of contemporary commercialised elite sport often means that there is more than one team coach. These systems of coach education, linked to a broader sense of the need for specific credentials in a range of occupations, have intensified rapidly. Consequently, in many sports there are now strict limits on who may do what, in that an aspiring coach will require certification by the relevant governing body to coach at a specific level. Although there is a debate to be had about whether these mass, formal coach-education systems are necessarily a good thing, there is little doubt that their development is, in part, the result of concerns about elite sports performance and comparative national standings.
A less obvious effect of the link between national identities and sport is related to popularity and participation rates. Sports that carry with them the weight of national identity tend also to be popular and to have relatively high participation rates. In this respect, well supported and popular sports tend to provide more opportunity for full-time employment (for coaches and others), although this is more so for sports traditionally seen more as men’s than women’s. For example netball, by far the most widely played women’s sport in the UK, has proportionally far fewer opportunities for full-time, or even paid, coaching work than traditional men’s sports and fewer opportunities in real numbers than men’s sports with fewer participants, such as rugby union. Gender, then, disrupts a sense that sport and national identity are linked in an obvious or standard manner (Williams 2003).
Even allowing this gendered differential, when combined with a system of formal coach education and qualifications, the sport, popularity and national identity dynamic makes clearer the mechanisms for upward mobility for coaches and contributes to the growing potential for full-time, secure employment.
As coaches and athletes have discovered over the years, however, a close association between their sport and national identity is not always a good thing; in many cases this association can have definite negative consequences for coaches. As many coaches have discovered to their cost, in sports heavily invested with a sense of national identity there is a great and often over-emphasis on success at all levels. Closely related to this heightened emphasis is an exaggerated media focus not only on coaching decisions and skills but also on all aspects of a coach’s life. Consider, for example, the attention paid to Nancy Dell’Olio during Sven-Goran Eriksson’s time as the coach of the English men’s national football team. This media focus can become intrusive to the extent that coaches lose credibility, while they can be affected in many ways by the intensive and distracting focus on their abilities as measured by the team’s performance.
In the main, however, sports (and by implication, coaches) tend to benefit from a close association with a national identity in terms of enhanced support, a greater allocation of resources from the state and other sources, and more secure career structures. These benefits have disadvantages for other sports not so central to national identity. In a context where financial and other resources are limited, these other sports will be marginalised not only by the media but also by central and local government as well as other financial agencies. Sometimes this is a direct product of the normally close fit between gender and national identity, as seen in the previous rugby union–netball example. More often than not, most of us remain unaware of this marginalisation. For example, it is common for migrants to recognise the extent to which the English sports media is dominated by football (soccer). This domination by football often extends to coverage of the semi-professional, fifth-division Conference League at the expense of national and international success in other mainstream, although less popular, sports such as gymnastics, hockey, netball and women’s football (both soccer and rugby union). In these cases, and many others, the close association between other sports and English national identity means that financial resources are directed elsewhere, undermining professional, commercial and career structures and, in effect, maintaining the under-development of those sports themselves.
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A further, less obvious problem, although one that is becoming more real, is the over-formalisation of learning processes leading to an exclusion and/or alienation of both potential and lower-level coaches. Many national governing bodies now have a system of coaching awards that apply at all levels of a sport, meaning that a parent who has skills in a specific sport and who may want to coach their child’s team (and in doing so become a sport volunteer and the backbone of mass sport globally) may find themselves obliged or under pressure to study for a coaching qualification. There is, therefore, a risk that high-profile sports success and popularity leading to a formal career structure may end up placing obligations beyond those that such parents consider necessary for coaches or potential coaches at mass and entry level. It would be reasonable to assume that this alienates people willing, happy or wanting to be part of a mass sport experience. Here, then, investment in national identity-related factors can actually drive people away from the sport.
The final issue to be discussed here is that the cultural centrality of a sport can, and often does, lead to general constant over-expectations of success and rapid recrimination upon failure. In recent years a number of national team coaches have fallen on their swords in the wake of perceived failure, which is often a failure to meet expectations. John Hart resigned as the All Blacks’ coach on the day the team lost to France in the play-off for third place in the 1999 men’s rugby world cup. This was the lowest placing the team had ever achieved in the competition, and they had been expected to make the final. Late in 2006 Andy Robinson resigned as the English men’s rugby coach after a series of losses by the 2003 World Cup winners that matched their worst run ever. This could also be seen as a failure to meet expectations, although it could equally be argued that English rugby had merely returned to a level of performance seen through most of the last quarter of the twentieth century.
CONCLUSION
Coaches work in a world where they need to balance demands as diverse as the nutritional needs of their athletes and the expectations of supporters. A significant, but not the only, factor shaping supporter expectations is the role that the sport in question plays in the particular national identity and its relationship to the myths and traditions (authentic and invented) of nationhood. This is in addition to the class, gender and ethnic associations of the sport in the context of the nation, as well as the underlying linguacentric or iconocentric bases of assumed nationhood. A sport central to a sense of national identity will present as many issues to be managed and problems to be controlled as a sport marginal to that sense of national identity. These national identity-related factors do not only have an impact on the context of sporting action, but also on the day-to-day business of team selection, systems of coach education, funding, social and political support, and facilities and sporting infrastructure. In none of these cases is the relationship with national identity (central or marginal) entirely positive or entirely negative; in all cases it is extremely influential, and ignored by coaches at their peril.
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1. The traditional amateur ethos of, and the cult of athleticism in, British sport has mitigated against the development of sports coaching as a profession in the UK.
Discuss.
2. How does national identity affect individual sports? Think of the sport you most often partake in; how does its standing in society affect the available oppor-tunities to work within it? How much media coverage does it get? Why do you think this is? Compare this experience with a sport that is equally as popular but has either a much higher or much lower standing in society.
3. What is meant by the authors’ statement that ‘National identity is a double-edged sword in the context of coaching’?
4. How valuable is historical knowledge to coaches and coaching? Justify your answer.