In Sweden, youth soccer is expected to be fun –but in a specific way. Rooted in the 19th-century idealization of amateurism over professionalism, fun in Swedish youth soccer has come to emphasize spontaneity, inclusion, and teamwork (Bachner, 2023). Over time, these amateur ideals have been woven into a broader political agenda in which youth sport is understood as a vehicle for public health, social integration and the cultivation of social capital (Doherty et al., 2013; Ekholm, 2018).
I hadn’t really perceived the problematic nature of these notions of fun and its broader political framework until I started working as a translator for the digital coaching app Supercoach, in 2018. Developed from the talent development methodology of IF Brommapojkarna –Sweden’s most prolific soccer academy– Supercoach aimed to improve grassroots clubs through structured content and a clear pedagogical progression, with the goal of bringing elite-level knowledge into the hands of the parent-coaches who normally run those teams. While the overwhelming majority of the material I translated dealt with concrete actions on the field –such as heading, dribbling, passing and running– the section that caught my attention most was one precisely on the notion of fun. It appeared within a series of lessons of a more theoretical character, covering topics that ranged from structuring trainings for different age groups to advice on leadership. Here, the ideas on what constituted fun stood out: they were even presented as the most important task of the coaches. Although the app recognized that there are different notions of fun, which furthermore can change over time, what was underscored was something that constituted a subtle critique of the prevailing notions of fun in Swedish youth soccer. Rather than celebrating the amateur ideals mentioned above, fun was defined as the experience of succeeding in specific actions, of being challenged, and of improving with each training session. What emerged, then, was a clear interest in the technicalities of soccer itself, and in creating conditions for players to get better at them.
Screenshot of some of the material available in the Supercoach App. Image by author.
A Claim for the Technical
How should we understand this claim, that the joy of playing soccer should be the main focus of coaches, and where the emphasis is on the success in specific actions, rather than the amateur ideals of spontaneity, inclusion and teamwork, or the political goals of health and integration?
One common anthropological way into this kind of question has been through the literature on technology and politics. A prominent strand of this work is the literature on technopolitics, which emphasizes how political assumptions are embedded in different technologies (Barry 2001; Hecht 1998; von Schnitzler 2016). Related arguments also appear in studies of infrastructures, bureaucracies, and digital platforms, where the neutrality of such systems is questioned, while their capacity to organize experience, standardize behavior and reproduce inequality is foregrounded (Ferguson 1994; Gupta 2012; Benjamin 2019; Buolamwini and Gebru 2018; Crawford 2021; Srnicek 2017).
Supercoach certainly participates in this kind of dynamic, since it codifies specific views of what counts as good training, what kinds of skills matter, and how improvement should be measured –choices that inevitably privilege some values over others. Furthermore, these priorities align closely with one of the goals of Brommapojkarna, which not only rely on a vast grassroots base but also seek to develop future professionals, whether to strengthen their own squad or to sell them to other teams. Indeed, Supercoach’s focus on the more technical aspects of having fun could easily be interpreted as a classic attempt to conceal a political agenda –in this case, one tied to the market-driven soccer economy– beneath the guise of technical neutrality. Yet, I am not convinced that its purpose was to secretly advance a particular, political agenda. Rather, what I saw was a space where the technical aspects of the game were taken seriously, but also how they could serve multiple ends at once: supporting amateurist projects of health and integration while also opening pathways toward professionalism and elite performance. In this way, I would suggest, it challenged the sole focus of perspectives that highlight the political aspects of technology, by showing that the technical dimension has its own appeal and can generate possibilities that may be taken up in different projects.
From Technopolitics to Play
So, how might we think about a space that allows for both politics and technicality at once? I want to suggest that a productive way forward is to shift our attention from technopolitics to play. The emphasis on fun in Supercoach already gestures in this direction, framing drills, challenges, and improvement not just as technical routines but as part of the very experience of play that the app seeks to cultivate. But play is also interesting because of its ambiguous nature. This is particularly evident in the work of anthropologist Roberte Hamayon (2016 [2012]), who highlights how paradoxes can exist within a single phenomenon. For Hamayon, play is not the opposite of seriousness, work, or rules, but a paradoxical and generative mode of action. She suggests that it unfolds through conventions and constraints, yet remains separate from the direct consequences of everyday life. What happens in play may feel real, but it is framed by an “as if” logic: participants act as if the stakes are high, as if they are professionals, as if the outcome matters deeply –all while knowing that it is not quite real.
This paradox is what gives play its imaginative and transformative potential. It becomes a space of symbolic rehearsal, where roles, futures, and identities can be explored without being fully fixed. Play, in this sense, is not a suspension of form or discipline, but a serious form of not being serious –a mode of engagement where constraint and creativity, repetition and improvisation, discipline and detachment are entangled rather than opposed.
When it comes to Supercoach and the notions of fun in Swedish youth soccer, this means that the apparent dichotomy I encountered –between joy and political concerns with health and integration, on the one hand, and technical skills that enable athletic improvement, on the other –doesn’t really hold up. As already mentioned, the app could indeed be used for different purposes, which underscores Hamayon’s suggestion that play operates through paradox rather than opposition. In this light, Supercoach, and its notion of fun, did not resolve the tensions in youth soccer: rather, it highlighted their existence, and stressed the importance of not leaving out technical aspects.
The Supercoach app could indeed be used for different purposes, which underscores Hamayon’s suggestion that play operates through paradox rather than opposition. Image by author.
Reframing Technology through the Dynamics of Play
Building on these ideas, I argue that reframing technology as a potential space of play can shift how we understand people’s engagement with digital systems. Rather than treating technology as a suspect space where hidden politics abound, this perspective highlights how its technical aspects can be attractive in their own right, while also being mobilized within different political projects. This framing also challenges the assumption that technique is somehow external to meaning. Structured environments –whether analog or digital– do not simply impose order from above; they provide the scaffolding within which people explore, adapt, and develop capacities that matter to them, and which can then be taken up in different political and moral projects.
Just to be clear: what I propose here is not a call to abandon critique. Critical scholarship has been essential in highlighting how technologies reproduce inequality and embed dominant norms, and in the case of Supercoach, it helps us understand how it relates to broader political and economic questions. But critique alone risks overlooking the generative ways people work with, around, and through digital systems, and how an app like Supercoach can be taken up in different political and moral projects. At the same time, critique risks becoming disconnected from those who might actually enact change (cf. Green 2010; Latour 2004). In professional soccer, for example, where market orientation is a reality that all actors must navigate, critiquing the economy in the abstract offers little practical help to those who operate inside it.
A play-based approach thus complements critique by foregrounding paradox: in this case, the way amateur ideals of health, inclusion, and teamwork intersect with professional ambitions of elite performance and market survival, all mediated through the technical practices of soccer. It invites us to see tension not as a flaw in the system, but as a constitutive feature of technology. In short, to grasp what is at stake in digital coaching –and in technology more broadly– we need not only to critique its politics, but also to recognize how its technical form can generate skills, routines, and aspirations that matter to people, independently of the overarching political and moral project in which they may eventually be situated.
This post was curated by Contributing Editor Iván Flores and reviewed by Karina Aranda.
References
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