Sports monoculture and vehicular jargon in the educational value of school football in Spain ( Monocultura deportiva y jerga vehicular en el valor educativo del fútbol escolar en España )

Abstract

The importance and social availability of sport in Spain is presented as a cultural space in which pleasures and dreams are placed. Football occupies a privileged place in the media in a meaningful way, which converges with the consolidation of extracurricular activities and involves elementary schools in a specific way of understanding competition, the management of free time and endemic language at schools. This study uses an ethnographic design, where 21 interviews with teachers and 207 participant observation sessions were held with 101 schoolchildren (96 boys and five girls) who play on 10 school football teams, along with their relatives, friends and coaches as educational referents. The most salient results reveal a monopolization of school free-time spaces through the practice of football, which entails exclusionary microsocial processes if a child does not share the hobby or skills, a one-way media referentiality and children’s use of a sports jargon steeped in technicalities and vulgarisms acquired by linguistic immersion. The study concludes with an appeal to the need to adapt adult mediation to the particularities of children’s understanding of sports, since the media management of the sport reflects mercantile interests with no educational value or overlap with the curriculum.