ABSTRACT
Professional football is an established and celebrated part of English popular culture, yet insightful and substantive revelations regarding its inner-workings are few and far between. This report presents the main findings of a critical and detailed ethnographic study of youth training within English professional football. It presents the sub-cultural experiences and verbalised accounts of a group of first and second year football youth trainees at one English Premier League club. Key questions and issues emerged, but in particular notions of group cohesion, collectivity and team solidarity feature as the central element of this narrative.
