Sports Coaching in Europe: Cultural Histories

This book explores the historical development of coaching traditions across Europe, placing national approaches to coaching within their cultural and political context.

Sports coaching is a social practice that has been shaped by its cultural context, resulting in different countries being characterized by different coaching traditions. By helping us to understand the history of coaching across Europe, this book allows us to better understand both the history of sport and the cultural and social history of Western European nations. Drawing on cutting-edge historical research by international scholars, the book presents studies of coaching cultures in France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and the United Kingdom. It explores how sporting histories, cultural attitudes, and social contexts resulted in distinctive coaching heritages, which were further shaped through coach migration and the adoption of elements of other countries’ coaching structures. This book explores these phenomena to provide critical evidence of the historical impact of culture on the development of sports coaching.

The book offers insight into the characteristics of European coaching traditions. It will be fascinating reading for academics in sports history, sports and coaching studies, gender studies, and transnational studies, as well as those with an interest in British or European history and social and cultural history.

Dave Day is Professor of Sports History at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, where his research focuses on the history of coaching and training, the development of swimming and swimming communities, and the gendered nature of nineteenth- and twentieth-century sport and leisure.