Cooling out as objectifying subjectivation. On dealing with disappointment and failure in high-performance sports

Abstract

Based on an ethnographic study of football training, the paper asks how members of high-performing sports teams handle disappointment and subjective experiences of failure in match analyses. It seizes impulses from the sociology of practice, from theories of subjectivation and from Goffman’s cooling out concept to conceive these match analyses as social practices. By urging each other to deal with disappointment and failure in a professional manner, coaches and players subjectivize themselves as capable participants in the social field. Video recordings can be considered a particularly important element of these match analyses, for they mediate the retrospection on the game and permit an objectivized view on past performances. The paper shows that the team members do not simply refer to existing, unanimous registers of success and failure or of performance and non-performance in their practices of video-based match analysis, but rather practically modulate and define the evaluation criteria for a given performance in the first place. The categories of success and performance can thus be conceived as outcomes of powerful and controversial processes of attribution and evaluation, in the course of which the positions of „cooler“ and „mark“ in Goffman’s understanding are also being negotiated. The paper concludes with a plea for further sociological research on the oft-neglected problem of disappointment, failure and conflict management in the context of competitive team collaboration in the field of high-performance sports.