Embodying citizenship. Children’s spatial and bodily experience in a football club academy

Historically, children’s identities have been constructed through their bodies and the different meanings attached to them. Children’s bodies are central to defining their social and spatial position in the city. They are in fact, more than any other group, subjected to a set of spatial bans and prohibitions that confine them within places specifically targeted at them during their free time (i.e. recreational, ludic and sports organizations). One of the recreational activities most commonly engaged in by Italian children is sport. However, little is known about children’s approach to sporting activities. What is proposed here is that the site of children’s involvement in sport is a valuable key for the observation of the ambiguous construction of children’s citizenship through spatial borders and body training. Based on a long-term ethnographic study of one football club academy for children, and informed by the new sociology of childhood approach, this article investigates the role of organized sport contexts in the urban generational order. The conclusions stress the contradiction detectable in a structured football club academy as a site that, on the one hand, promotes children’s rights to play and, on the other, restricts their substantive citizenship within the public space.