Sustainable careers of athletes: Themes and concepts regarding transition theories involving athletes

Abstract

Athletes’ transition has been one of the crucial social issues for athletes, their families, and significant others. This study aimed to provide a thematic analysis of research on athletes’ transition, considering the widely adopted transition theories. That is, this study is designed to evaluate the models that describe athletes’ transition, published in peer-reviewed journals from 2000 to 2020 within the domain of sports and relevant areas. Ten articles were included in this qualitative method-based research, and the selected articles were analyzed using the text data-mining technique using Leximancer version 5.0. The results can provide a methodologically significant contribution to the study of athletes’ transition. In addition, this study provides some insights regarding sustainable careers to help athletes and advance future studies.