Field of dreams. Sport, masculinities and the making of boyhood

This article examines the social construction of masculinity and boyhood through sport, focusing on youth football in Italy. Drawing on ethnographic research in an elite football academy and informed by the new sociology of childhood, it explores how boys aged ten to eleven negotiate their embodied identities within a context shaped by adult authority and media saturation. While sport has historically functioned as a «male preserve» and a disciplinary institution, the study reveals it as a site of both reproduction and resistance to patriarchal norms. The coaching staff at the academy tend to stigmatize bodily and aesthetic expressions inspired by media football, such as celebratory gestures, hairstyles, or personalized gear, in the name of discipline and modesty. Yet these same practices constitute active forms of subjectivity through which boys reinterpret football and perform masculinity. Findings highlight that beauty, in this context, is not a fixed ideal but an embodied, affective process – an ongoing negotiation of the self through aesthetic and athletic performance. By inhabiting this dynamic space, children transform the football field into a field of dreams: a hopeful materiality in which they explore possibilities of becoming, subtly negotiating generational and gendered norms while actively reinterpreting boyhood.