Thomas, Gareth M.  ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4959-2337
2026.
Alive and kicking: physicality, pleasure, and pain in walking football.
International Review for the Sociology of Sport
10.1177/10126902261455541
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Abstract
Older people’s participation in sport, and particularly in ‘adapted’ sporting activities, is rarely subject to sociological attention. In this article, I draw upon 65 interviews with older people playing walking football, an adapted version of running football (or soccer) widely endorsed as a safe, sociable, and inclusive physical activity in later-life. Informed by a nascent research base demonstrating how older people can use sport to reclaim the corporeal body outside a conventional ageist lens of deficit and decline, I explore three main ways in which older people engage with, and understand, their bodies through walking football. First, players describe the physical benefits of participation in walking football and how it makes intense demands of their bodies. Second, they articulate the visceral pleasures of playing football and how their bodies move in unanticipated, but lively and pleasurable, ways. Third, walking footballers claim that, whilst pain and injuries can limit participation and adaptations are made to include all players, bodily discomfort is a normalised and valorised dimension of walking football. I conclude by identifying a need to continue researching sport in later-life as well as how embodiment and corporeality figure in such experiences.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Date Type: | Published Online |
| Status: | In Press |
| Schools: | Schools > Social Sciences (Includes Criminology and Education) |
| Subjects: | H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) H Social Sciences > HM Sociology |
| Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
| ISSN: | 1012-6902 |
| Date of First Compliant Deposit: | 18 May 2026 |
| Last Modified: | 18 Jun 2026 12:19 |
| URI: | https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/187095 |
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