Adopting a Rights Lens to Children’s Training in Football Academies
Abstract
Sporting issues are increasingly the subject of legal intervention in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, but the effect of commercial pressures on young football players remains largely unaddressed. Underpinned by an empirical assessment of the English Premier League’s self-regulation on youth development matters, this article argues in favour of the need to adopt a rights-based approach to children’s involvement with professional football academies. Based on data gathered through almost 80 semi-structured interviews across England, the analysis concentrates on stakeholders’ awareness of children’s rights and how they influence football academies. The article concludes with policy recommendations to ameliorate the issues identified.
Keywords: children; football; children’s rights; sports; Premier League.
Downloads
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Those who contribute items to Amicus Curiae retain author copyright in their work but are asked to grant two licences. One is a licence to the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, enabling us to reproduce the item in digital form, so that it can be made available for access online in the open journal system, repository, and website. The terms of the licence which you are asked to grant to the University for this purpose are as follows:
'I grant to the University of London the irrevocable, non-exclusive royalty-free right to reproduce, distribute, display, and perform this work in any format including electronic formats throughout the world for educational, research, and scientific non-profit uses during the full term of copyright including renewals and extensions'.
The other licence is for the benefit of those who wish to make use of items published online in Amicus Curiae and stored in the e-repository. For this purpose we use a Creative Commons licence (http://www.creativecommons.org.uk/); which allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they mention you and link back to your entry in Amicus Curiae and/or SAS-SPACE; but they can't change them in any way or use them commercially.
