Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Appetite
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/appet
Research report
Department of Life Sciences, Roehampton University, Whitelands College, Holybourne Avenue, London SW15 4JD, UK
School of Sport and Education, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 3PH, UK
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 2 July 2011
Received in revised form 10 October 2011
Accepted 12 October 2011
Available online 17 October 2011
Keywords:
Football
Soccer
Nutrition
Culture
Habitus
Traditions
Food choice
a b s t r a c t
An adequate diet is essential for the optimal performance of professional football (soccer) players. Existing studies have shown that players fail to consume such a diet, without interrogating the reasons for
this. The aim of this study was to explore the difculties professional football players experience in consuming a diet for optimal performance. It utilized a mixed method approach, combining nutritional
intake assessment with qualitative interviews, to ascertain both what was consumed and the wider cultural factors that affect consumption. The study found a high variability in individual intake which ranged
widely from 2648 to 4606 kcal/day. In addition, the intake of carbohydrate was signicantly lower than
that recommended. The study revealed that the main food choices for carbohydrate and protein intake
were pasta and chicken respectively. Interview results showed the importance of tradition within the
world of professional football in structuring the players approach to nutrition. In addition, the players
personal eating habits that derived from their class and national habitus restricted their food choice by
conicting with the dietary choices promoted within the professional football clubs.
2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction
Association football or soccer is the most popular sport in the
world (Giulianotti & Robertson, 2004; Metzl & Michrli, 1998). Merit payments to clubs in the lucrative English Premier League totalled 160m in 2009 (Ley, 2009), with 1.4bn currently available
in global TV rights across 211 countries (Harris, 2010). The performance of top level players is, therefore, of vital importance for both
the clubs and their fans. Yet only relatively recently, has the world
of professional football begun to recognise the importance of
nutrition as an area that may enhance footballers performance
(MacLaren, 2003; Maughan, 1997; Shephard, 1999). What, when
and how much a football player consumes has a direct impact on
his football performance. Existing studies of football players diets
from a nutritional science perspective have tended to focus on one
or two specic elements. For example, a number of previous
studies have looked at carbohydrate intake in relation to physical
performance (Balsom, Wood, Olsson, & Ekblom, 1999; Hargreaves,
1994; Ostojic & Mazic, 2002; Williams & Serratosa, 2006) and protein in relation to post-exercise recovery (Nieman & Bishop, 2006).
However, it is necessary to consider food consumption and eating
habits as a whole because in practice professional football players
need to be able to choose the right food at the right time in order to
utilize it efciently.
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: eileen.kennedy01@gmail.com (E. Kennedy).
0195-6663/$ - see front matter 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.appet.2011.10.007
Football can be described physiologically as intermittent, highintensity exercise (Coyle, 1993; Reilly, 1997). According to these
previous studies, the energy expenditure of elite football players
is estimated at around 3550 kcal/day on average, and with a range
from 3100 to 4050 kcal/day for the lightest and heaviest football
players, respectively (Reilly & Thomas, 1979; Rico-Sanz, 1998). It
is also reported that the hardest training day and match day were
estimated to require 4050 kcal/day (range 28505250 kcal/day)
and 3800 kcal/day (range 33504750 kcal/day), respectively (Reilly
& Thomas, 1979, and Rico-Sanz, 1998). It is also crucial for football
players to consider the composition of their diet for its contribution to optimal performance. Of the total calories consumed, the
recommended balance for most athletes is 5565% of CHO (Clark,
1994), no more than 30% fat (Clark, 1994). As for protein, Lemon
(1994) suggests that 1.41.7 g per kg of body mass is required for
football players.
The aim of this study was to contribute to the existing research
on the nutritional intake of football players (Craven, Butler, Dickinson, Kinch, & Ramsbottom, 2002; Hassapidou, 2001; Maughan,
1997; Murphy & Jeanes, 2006; Rico-Sanz et al., 1998). Despite
research indicating that the consumption of an adequate diet can
play a signicant role in enhancing football performance, previous
studies have consistently indicated that football players fail to
consume an adequate diet for optimal performance (Hassapidou,
2001; Maughan, 1997; Rico-Sanz et al., 1998). These studies report
that football players regularly fail to meet their energy and
carbohydrate requirements (Hassapidou, 2001; Jacobs, Westlin,
Karlsson, Rasmusson, & Houghton, 1982; Maughan, 1997;
99
Methods
Participants
A nutritional intake assessment was conducted using data from
24 professional football players playing in English football leagues
to ascertain whether they consumed a diet that was adequate for
their performance. Those players were recruited from four Premier
League and a League One clubs during the seasons 20067 and
20078. Using a 4-day food record diary with household measures,
energy and macronutrient intakes were assessed with the Dietplan
6 dietary analysis computer software (Foresteld Software), and
then compared with the levels of intake recommended for professional football players (Economos, Bortz, & Nelson, 1993; Lemon,
1994; MacLaren, 2003; Shephard, 1999). The purpose of the nutritional intake assessment in this study was to conrm whether professional football players consumed an adequate diet for their
100
were carried out through the 20078 and the beginning of the
20089 seasons. Two interview sessions were carried out in Japan
and France where the players were based at the time of the interview. Each interview session took place in either a sports science
ofce or treatment room, which could provide a relaxed atmosphere for the interviewees and make them feel comfortable.
Once an interview session was completed, the interviews were
transcribed. As two out of 42 interview sessions were carried out in
Japanese, these interviews were rst transcribed into in Japanese
and then translated into English.
Ethics and condentiality
Ethical approval was obtained by Roehampton University Research Ethics Committee prior to carrying out this study. All participants were assured of condentiality and anonymity and no
nancial or other incentives were offered to take part. As many
researchers (Kelly & Waddington, 2006; Magee & Sugden, 2002;
Parker, 1996; Roderick, 2006) have described, the professional football world is tremendously secretive. The issue of condentiality
was of critical concern, therefore, as professional football players
needed to trust that there would be no negative impact from the research on their career progression. In total 118 professional football
clubs were approached to participate in the study, but turned down
the invitation to due to concerns over condentiality. This is because managers consider nutritional intake assessment to be valuable information that they were reluctant to share with outsiders.
In addition, some managers were unwilling to have visitors at the
training ground. For example, a physiotherapist from a Premier League club sent his regrets with a clear explanation why their manager did not want to participate in this research project as follows:
I would also mention that the Manager prefers to keep our
training ground facility as private as possible and does not allow
visitors to have access to coaching or medical areas in order to
speak to them.
(personal communication, 7 August 2006)
Data analysis
During analysis we sought to avoid pre-determining the themes
of the data and enabling them to emerge from the data itself. As a
result, the data was organized into what might be termed common
clusters (Roderick, Waddington, & Parker, 2000) based on the key
themes emerging from the interviews. These clusters included
the football players experiences of food in childhood as well as
dietary changes after becoming professional football players, nutritional support from the clubs and British food culture. In addition,
the impact of football traditions and power relations within a professional football club emerged as consistent clusters. Analysis of
the clusters enabled us to group the factors affecting the footballers dietary choices into two themes. These overarching themes
were habitus and traditions. Factors such as the football players experiences of food in childhood, dietary changes after becoming professional football players and British food culture were
classied as habitus, and the themes such as nutritional support
from the clubs, football traditions and the power relations within
a professional football club were classied as traditions.
Results
Procedure
Nutritional intake
All the interviews, which lasted between 30 and 60 min, were
tape-recorded with the permission of the interviewees and the
tapes were transcribed for analysis later. The interview sessions
101
It is very very dependent on the club [whether they hire a nutritionist]. Here is an example. . . they [the club] came up to the
Premiership in the past few years from the Championship. Massive, massive amount of money was spent on sport science,
such as nutrition, sports medicine and rehabilitation. . . Now
they are not doing so well. Again, because the managers changed. So it is not purely about money. . . If you have money, you
dont necessarily spend money in the right place. The manager
comes in and uses that money but he may not use it in the right
place.
As a consequence, nutrition is excluded from their strategies
and professional football players subsequently acquire the knowledge that nutrition is not useful.
Habitus and the dietary choices of British footballers
This study found that the football players habitus (Bourdieu,
2001) had an impact on their nutritional intake. Football can be
considered a working-class sport in Britain, and British professional football players are often from a working-class background
(Walvin, 1975). Consequently, their tastes are likely to be derived
from working-class eating habits of their childhood. Interviews
with players bore this out and indicated some of the difculties
players had in changing their diet to a sport specic diet. Players
were often critical of childhood diets. For example:
I lived on sh and chips, sausage and pies when I was younger.
I dont remember if I had something else to be honest.
Another player described the traditional British food of his
childhood as being unhealthily low on vegetables:
When I was kid, my mum cooked traditional food, meat and
potatoes. . .beef stews, minced meats, roast beef and a lot of
potatoes. . . I remember I hardly ate vegetables. I ate just basic
ones like carrots and peas. So I dont name many vegetables
actually. . .
The dietary choices of the players childhoods are not found
within the football specic diet served at professional football
clubs. Pasta, in particular, is a very common item on the menu of
football clubs inside and outside of Britain, since a number of pasta
dishes have become part of the national diet in many countries.
Nevertheless, many British players grew up with a traditional British diet that did not include pasta. For example, one of the interviewees said,
I was very much from a working class family. Every single meal
I had until I was nearly 16 years old was sausage and chips.
Thus, pasta is a relatively new food item and some British players classied it as not my thing. As a result, they rejected the football specic diet presented to them by the clubs. Moreover, British
players food record diaries used for the nutritional intake assessment revealed that many British players in this study consumed
traditional British food at home. Several British players referred
to traditional British food as a proper and healthy meal during
the interviews. When asked about his eating habits in childhood,
one player said,
I liked everything, not fussy. . . My mom gave us proper meals,
traditional [British] food such as roast meats, stew, casseroles,
chips, peas.
Nevertheless, the overrepresentation of pasta in the diets of
players indicated that they had internalised a message from the
clubs that carbohydrate equated with pasta, and this conicted
with their preference for what they saw as traditional British food.
This over-identication of pasta with carbohydrate worked to
102
56) terms, since tastes are no doubt rst and foremost distastes,
we can understand some of the reluctance of migrant footballers to
embrace British food culture in terms of its social meaning. Many
of the migrant professional footballers had access to nancial resources that could enable them to consume high quality food
items, yet food as a cultural practice takes its social meaning,
and its ability to signify social difference and distance, not from
some intrinsic property it has but from its location in a system of
like objects and practices (Wacquant, 2000, p. 115).
In addition, migrant players considered their national food
found in Britain to be different from the food that they were familiar with in their home countries. For example, Norwegian players
involved in the study disliked British version of bread:
I dont like to eat bread here [in Britain] because I found a lot of,
very white bread, very light. . . not dark bread, wholegrains,
something like that I used to eat.
Migrant players tended to reject Anglicized versions of familiar
foods. For example, while migrant players may be familiar with
Italian food, they are likely to classify Anglicized Italian food as
unfamiliar food and exclude it from their dietary intake. Although
the Italian diet has been well adopted into British food culture, it
has largely been reduced to pasta and pizza in the professional
football world. Since players in our study ate on average 2.2
(SD 1.5) pasta dishes a day, all players could become bored of eating pasta dishes. Furthermore, migrant players may reject these
dishes as anglicized and inauthentic, thus constraining their food
choices further still.
It should be noted that the distaste of the national diet is not
limited to players migrating to Britain. A Japanese player at an Italian Serie A club expressed similar difculties with his new local
diet:
When I joined [an Italian club], I found it hard to nd the food I
like. Because [the Italian city where he lived] is by the coast I
thought I would be able to eat a lot of sh dish but people there
dont eat [much sh]. They eat more meat actually. You know,
we eat a lot of Italian food in Japan so having just Italian food
was no problem with me, but it was difcult for me to get used
to the Italian food that is based on meat.
Since people are taught the values of culture in which they grew
up, they tend to view their own patterns of behaviour as being
right, normal and best. As a corollary to this, foreign cultures are
viewed as being wrong or irrational or misguided. So engrained
are such attitudes that some degree of ethnocentrism is virtually
inescapable, though exposure to other cultures can broaden tolerance and aid in an understanding of how other people live (Fieldhouse, 1996).
Discussion
Dietary intake is inuenced by many factors including genetics,
the environment, socio-economics and culture (Flatt, 1995). Professional football players are regularly transferred between countries,
and consequently they experience additional problems in adapting
their eating habits to the new national food or dietary pattern. Previous studies have shown that professional football players often
fail to consume the ideal sport specic diet (Craven et al., 2002;
Hassapidou, 2001; Jacobs et al., 1982; Maughan, 1997; Rico-Sanz,
1998; Rico-Sanz et al., 1998). However, little research has been
conducted to investigate reasons why professional football players
cannot consume an adequate diet for their optimum performance.
Therefore the aim of this study was to investigate how professional
footballers change their normal eating habits to those that are sport
specic with reference to cultural factors.
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