Life stories of former professional football players in Pernambuco: Academic education versus sports training

Abstract

The study looks into the relationship between the academic education process and the sports training of former professional football players in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco, based on the monitoring of eleven former professional athletes who played for at least one of the major clubs in the state. Given its specificity and qualitative nature, Oral Life History was adopted as a methodology. We chose the qualitative analysis software NVivo® to conduct content analysis on testimonials collected through interviews. The results show that most respondents faced difficulty in reconciling the two types of training, resulting in delays, school failure, changes in shifts and even schools, in addition to school drop-out. Therefore, the study finds compatibility problems between the schooling process and football players’ training in the local scenario, which follows the Brazilian pattern as a whole.