An Exploration of Professional Coaches’ Well-being Experiences within Football Club Contexts
Authors:   , Higham Andrew 
Published: December 2024

This thesis explores how coaches experience and make sense of well-being within men’s professional football clubs. Chapter One introduces and provides a structural overview of the programme of work. Chapter Two presents a literature review which highlights the necessity for a (bio)ecological and qualitative exploration of coaches’ well-being experiences and sensemaking. Chapter Three explores how coaches experience and make sense of well-being within the context of football using an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) approach. Participant narratives are harnessed and presented to reflect their well-being experiences and sensemaking capabilities. This chapter is important as it provides the first detailed exploration as to how football coaches make sense of and experience well-being without proxy constructs, concepts, and/or measurements such as, but not limited to, stress, burnout and coping. Chapter Four advances the IPA approach by adapting and applying it to coaching video docuseries, utilising them ‘as a window’ through which professional head coaches’ well-being experiences could be captured. This novel approach accesses a seldom heard group in professional head coaches and explores their well-being experiences throughout a season illuminating temporal fluctuations and contextual demands. Chapter Five builds upon four and three by exploring how football coaches experience and make sense of wellbeing throughout a season using a combined longitudinal IPA and auto-driven photoelicitation approach. This chapter is pertinent as it is the first to explore and enrich coaches sensemaking throughout a season using a photo-elicitation approach. Considering men’s professional football contexts are replete with masculine cultural norms, such as suppressing vulnerability and emotive expressive behaviours, chapter five uses visual stimuli to counteract such norms and harness richer and more open narratives. Chapter Six extends and complements chapter five by adopting a similar methodological approach but with a sole woman coaching in a men’s professional football club. Chapter six is the first to offer significant insight into a woman’s lived experiences of well-being while coaching in a men’s professional football club. Chapter Seven offers the participants’ and author’s reflections on the implementation of an auto-driven photo-elicitation approach throughout a football season. The reflections illustrate how the photo-elicitation approach inadvertently acted as a well-being management tool. Specifically, reflections are made on how participation in the study and the use of visual stimuli contributed to improved self-awareness and well-being management. Chapter Eight more broadly provides reflections about the general programme of research and how undertaking a PhD which focuses on well-being has directly shaped the author’s understanding of the construct. Chapter Nine then concludes the programme of work in the form of an epilogue which addresses contributions to well-being theory and research, advances in methodological approaches exploring well-being, applied research and practice implications, strengths of the thesis, and areas for future research development.