Volume 13, Issue 2 - Schwerpunktheft: Krisen des Sports / Special Issue: Crises of Sports

In 2003, Jürgen Baur and Ulrike Burrmann published a paper examining the extent of individualization in adolescent sports involvement, and found that the results disproved most of their hypotheses. Against the backdrop of recent societal developments, this paper will once more seek to explore individualization in adolescent sports involvement, this time using time series data. It will also examine whether the influence of vertical socio-structural features on participation in (club) sports has diminished since the 1970s or whether this correlation has increased again in recent years. The findings will be discussed, also addressing methodological problems with the database and the lack of conceptual clarity in the theory of individualization.

This paper examines the relationship between the educational requirements of a sports-oriented school and students’ subjective constructs of the school’s curriculum and orientation. We focus on the “adjustment work” these students engage in, which can be conceptualized as a demand that they need to process: By adjusting their own developmental objectives to the demands placed on them by the educational institution, they arrive at a subjectively acceptable form of compromise. Our empirical case study of these processes is based on reconstructive biographical interviews with student athletes. The study shows that ‘being talented’ cannot be described accurately as a standardized sequence of career stages, but rather as a developmental task with the potential for reproduction but also for transformation of existing ideas about oneself and the world.

The qualitative case study at hand deals with young people’s entry into Ultras groups and the determining factors that promote their admission to these circles. We conducted problem-centered interviews with one aspiring male and one aspiring female member of an Ultras group. We explored the questions of how aspiring members go through the process of joining and what role the category of gender plays in the process, analyzing subjective expectations, processes, meanings, and conflicts. We found that despite some parallels, the process of entering these groups unfolds in very different ways for men and women. The category of gender, the aspiring member’s relationship status, and age proved to be significant factors. The article expands the research on football fan groups by investigating the important process of entry into these relatively closed circles.