Talent in Swedish and German Elite Youth Football: An Account of Why Talent Resists Definition Using Discourse Theory

Henrik Fürst
Department of Education, Stockholm University

The concept of talent captivates both academics and practitioners in sports. Coaches, scouts, and other stakeholders evaluate players, aiming to identify and develop talent. Academic research is particularly drawn to it due to the challenges in defining it clearly. Yet, talent remains one of the greatest mysteries in both sports and sports science. A fuller understanding of talent, which this thesis aims to advance, comes with an implicit promise to address practical issues in talent identification and development and possibly clarifying its true nature.

This compilation thesis under review addresses the central issue of definitional problems and provides an explanation for why talent is so challenging to define. Drawing on Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory, talent is understood as both an “empty signifier,” a term that never attains a full, fixed meaning, and a “floating signifier,” reflecting ongoing struggles to stabilize its definition. In essence, the meaning of talent is contested, and people struggle to define, use, and connect it to different ideas. By situating talent within discourse theory, the thesis clarifies why defining talent is so difficult and emphasizes the importance of understanding how the term is used in various settings through language. This methodological reframing is the main contribution of the thesis.

To critically review the approach proposed in the dissertation, I will connect to and contrast it with my own work on the definition of talent and its identification recently published in this journal (Fürst, 2024). Drawing on American pragmatism, I sought to address the persistent difficulty of defining talent by applying the pragmatic maxim: the meaning of a concept is found in the practical consequences of its use. My suggested empirical strategy contains looking “for a variation of talent and talent identification by tracing the concepts’ practical consequences in different cases, over time, and between situations” (p. 81).

This approach led me to a conceptual shift from talent to qualification. Like this dissertation, my work suggests that talent is not fixed. Rather, talent is the result of qualification processes, with the label talent being one of its outcomes. The approach suggests examining not only formal assessment processes but also informal contexts, such as team interactions, where judgments are made and values assigned to players. This approach has two aims: to better understand how value is conferred through qualification, and to identify the conceptual boundaries of talent. This includes investigating how the meaning of talent is shaped by the structural positions, e.g., using Pierre Bourdieu’s field analysis, and evaluative practices of those doing the qualifying.

While the approach to talent proposed in the dissertation could be applied across various domains, it is examined in elite youth football in Germany and Sweden. The empirical material is drawn from two sources. First, the dissertation includes 16 interviews with stakeholders from elite football academies affiliated with top-tier clubs in both countries, focusing on how they articulate the concept of talent. Second, it analyzes 44 newspaper articles about football and talent, aiming to understand how the concept is portrayed in the media.

In the absence of structural positioning, as in the pragmatic qualification approach, “context” might be expected to take on some of the analytical work typically done by structuralist frameworks, potentially addressing some critiques of the relativist treatment of talent.

The dissertation finds in the first article that the talent discourse in German newspapers differs from that in Swedish newspapers, although certain concepts, such as “personality” and the focus on male football talent, are shared across both contexts. Talent in Swedish media appears more uniform, while the German discourse is more diverse and fragmented. Some of these criteria also re-appear in the second article based on interview-material from the two countries, where “personality” re-appears but is articulated differently by the interviewees, and where more universal idea of early specialization appears as important. Nonetheless, in Sweden, there is a tension between egalitarian cultural values and the need for players to stand out as individuals, so the pressure to conform in the Swedish case is also visible in this second article. The third article draws on interviews from a German Bundesliga club, with a sporting director, coaches, and scouts, and demonstrates that talent is not simply the result of individual decision-making but is shaped by organizational processes and collective sensemaking. It highlights frequent misalignments among stakeholders regarding talent criteria and emphasizes the need for strategies to address these inconsistencies. The final article shows that while emerging technologies in talent identification are promoted as objective tools, their use and interpretation remain subjective. This creates tensions between data-driven approaches and more holistic, traditional understandings of talent.

These findings provide valuable insights into how talent operates as a contested concept across different national and organizational contexts. As the dissertation itself acknowledges, the empirical material is relatively limited, due in part to practical difficulties accessing newspaper archives and recruiting interviewees. Ethical constraints may also limit what can be presented. However, the lack of detail about the teams’ specific positions and more details about the interviewees’ roles within the clubs limits the depth of the analysis. This reflects a broader limitation of post-structural approaches, which may struggle to detect the structural patterns more readily identified by methods such as the one suggested through Bourdieu’s field analysis (Fürst, 2024). Furthermore, there appears to be no clear justification for restricting the analysis to top clubs. The concept of talent may be used in less prominent clubs but in different ways, as suggested in the pragmatic qualification approach. The media discourses are presumably not limited to these clubs, which opens up opportunities to “trace” the meanings of talent and to explore its fuzzy boundaries.

The dissertation makes a good point in arguing that talent detection is context-dependent, which also opens up the empirical material used to scrutiny. The newspaper articles provide naturalistic data expressing public ideas about talent. However, the use of interviews combined with discourse theory warrants further reflection. Discourses are enacted within the interview setting rather than when talent assessments occur. This situation makes it difficult to evaluate the applicability of the findings to the situations that most are interested in, namely when players are evaluated and selected. The interviewees’ responses could even reflect justificatory talk for the particular interview setting. Ideally, following actors in their natural environments, as suggested in the pragmatic qualification approach, would potentially provide richer insights, though this may be practically very challenging, to study how talents (or its equivalents) are used in settings of talent assessment.

Alongside “talent,” the central concept in the dissertation is arguably “context,” which is used to situate the different empirical research settings. Given that “context” is a broad and often vague concept, the dissertation would have benefited from a more explicit and systematic treatment of it, particularly concerning where, when, by whom, and under what circumstances “talent” is talked about. In the absence of structural positioning, as in the pragmatic qualification approach, “context” might be expected to take on some of the analytical work typically done by structuralist frameworks, potentially addressing some critiques of the relativist treatment of talent.

However, many of the utterances analyzed in the dissertation appear unnecessarily highly localized and fragmented, which makes it difficult to relate them to a broader discursive field. This limits the empirical contribution of the thesis. While this may be a consequence of the post-structuralist orientation of the dissertation, there remains room for further clarification on how “talent” is invoked across these settings. Without the clarification of context, it becomes hard to understand how the concept is mobilized across settings by different people and for different purposes.

A clearer explication of context could have strengthened the dissertation, enhancing both the empirical analysis and its broader contribution. Further integration could have been achieved through introducing a single overarching research question to guide the investigation into how talent is used across different settings. This would have fostered closer dialogue between the articles, generating a cumulative value that exceeds the sum of their individual contributions.

The dissertation could also have been strengthened by a clearer definition and use of its comparative method. The use of the term “case study” to describe the analyses of newspaper articles and the two clubs does not align with conventional understandings of the method. Case studies typically involve detailed examination of a specific event or phenomenon. A proper case study (or comparative case study) would require more in-depth information about the clubs, and readers would expect the analysis to focus on a particular event; an example from football would be a case study of the Bosman ruling.

In terms of the conceptual handle in the analysis, more could have been done in the use of the concept of “equivalence chains.” Specifically, for understanding how talent is used. The dissertation connects talent as a master signifier to nodal points such as “age” and “personality” in media representations. However, equivalence chains can also be understood as the different representations for talent. For example, terms like “an uncut gem” or “Messi-like qualities,” could be part of an equivalence chain symbolically representing talent. Again, this might be a matter of context, where the context provides a specific type of more abstracted equivalence chains, in comparison to talent detection in daily practice. Furthermore, the idea that equivalence chains can be transposed across different situations, where a word or phrase come to signify talent in various situations, could have been explored further. Hence, I assume here that talent can have different meanings and practical consequences in an interview (or media report) than what it might have in daily practice, as assumed in the pragmatic qualification approach.

While the dissertation may leave the reader wanting a more fully developed and integrated theoretical and empirical framework, it nonetheless offers valuable insight into why consensus on the concept of talent remains so difficult to achieve.

The dissertation makes a sound general point by providing an answer to why defining talent is so challenging, thereby offering an important contribution. However, looking forward, there are numerous areas that could be developed further.

The main title, “A Multiverse of Talent,” invites further elaboration going forward. At face value, this implies the existence of parallel universes and suggests a connection to quantum physics, and perhaps to quantum social science where phenomena, like talent, might be understood as existing in multiple states simultaneously or as “entanglements” within different discursive universes. However, what seems to be assumed is the idea of talent being a floating and empty signifier, where universes of discourse exist in parallel. To detail these universes of discourse and explore their breadth and limits could be a way forward in identifying the different kinds of conceptual boundaries that exist by using large-scale data. These would then take additional steps in exploring variations in cases, over time, and between situations that has been initiated in this dissertation.

While the dissertation’s use of media sources is notably limited, given the accessibility of digitized archives, especially within the Swedish press, the potential for a large-scale, data-driven analysis of how the concept of talent is articulated remains underexplored. A more expansive use of big data methods would not only allow for the mapping of contemporary understandings of talent but also enable a historical analysis, again influenced by the pragmatic qualification approach. Such an approach could trace continuities and shifts in the use of the concept over time, potentially uncovering underlying discursive structures or transformations in meaning. Importantly, this would with a very ambitious approach allow for an analysis that extends beyond football and into broader societal understandings of talent, thus offering a richer and more generalizable contribution to both sports studies and social theory.

In terms of technological advancement, the final article addresses the use of technology in talent identification and the hesitation surrounding its adoption, while also pointing toward potential developments that merit close attention. Although AI-based training and predictive models were not fully integrated into practice, the article highlights both the hopes and anxieties linked to their future implementation. These include aspirations that AI might enhance predictive accuracy, but also concerns about the implications for expertise and judgment. It is crucial for researchers to investigate how such technologies could alter the “rules of the game” in sports, whether by reinforcing existing hierarchies or disrupting them. As teams differ in their capacity to develop and apply advanced technologies, disparities in resources may translate into competitive advantages. This makes the socio-technical dynamics of technological adoption a pressing issue for the social sciences. The article points toward this broader field of inquiry.

While the dissertation may leave the reader wanting a more fully developed and integrated theoretical and empirical framework, it nonetheless offers valuable insight into why consensus on the concept of talent remains so difficult to achieve. In that respect, it contributes meaningfully to a larger intellectual puzzle. The hope is to go even further with this dissertation in mind, using the core insight that opens up talent to empirical scrutiny. Starting with the idea of talent as an empty and floating signifier can provide help if one would deal with talent using the approach of pragmatic qualification, which would move beyond interpreting the meaning of talent to its practical use and suggest processes for talent identification. The dissertation also gestures toward other promising future directions, particularly in examining how technological developments may reshape both research practices and the processes of talent identification. The pursuit of the elusive mystery of talent continues, and this dissertation marks a noteworthy step along that path.

Copyright © Henrik Fürst 2025

References

Fürst, H. (2024). From Talent to Qualification: A Sociological and Methodological Discussion of Player Talent Identification. Scandinavian Sport Studies Forum, 15, 73–86.