Player care and welfare within elite academy male football and the EPPP performance pathway

This project seeks to understand athlete welfare and care from the perspective of various stakeholder groups within elite youth academy male football. To date, only a single study has explored care within elite adult football, with no research exploring care in youth English football. Thus, this project provides a significant and original theoretical contribution to the field of care within elite sport and has the potential to impact coaching practice by utilising the voice of the elite sports persons. Specifically, it looks to address how sports practitioners, working within Elite Player Performance Plan's (EPPP) multi-disciplinary environment, look to holistically care and impact children and young people's physical and mental wellbeing. Utilising Tronto's ethics of care (1993) as its theoretical underpinning, in addition to undertaking unstructured interviews with coaches and players, the project provides a more complete understanding of care in a context in which many young people participate both in the United Kingdom (UK) and internationally. Preliminary findings show practitioners who actively work with other stakeholders within their multi-disciplinary team state they provide better care for players' physical and mental wellbeing.