On Thursday, May 22, 2025, at 13:15, Leah Monsees will present and defend her dissertation A Multiverse of Talent – Contemporary Understandings of Talent in Swedish and German Elite Youth Football at the Department of Sport Sciences, Malmö University, in Room D138, Orkanen, Nordenskiöldsgatan 10, Malmö. The defence will be held in English, and will be broadcast live (a link will be published on this page on the day of the defence).
The faculty examiner is Associate Professor Christian Thue Bjørndal, Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, and the examining committee is made up of Associate Professor Cecilia Stenling, Umeå University; Professor Stig Arve Sæther, Norwegian University of Science and Technology; and Professor Tor Söderström, Umeå University.
Assistant professor Kutte Jönsson, Malmö University, has been Leah Monsees’ principal supervisor, and Senior lecturer Jenny Vikman, Malmö University, and Professor Astrid Schubring, German Sport University, Cologne, were co-supervisors.
This compilation thesis is available here in full text, open access.
Abstract
Drawing on four sub-studies, the thesis adopts a predominantly qualitative approach to examine how football talent is understood and communicated in both media representations and high-performance youth environments. Empirical material includes German and Swedish media coverage, as well as ethnographic data from elite youth academies in one German Bundesliga club and one Swedish Allsvenskan club. The first two studies engage with both national contexts, analyzing how talent discourses are shaped within and across Germany and Sweden. The latter two studies focus solely on the German case, offering a more in-depth investigation of the organizational and technological dimensions of talent development. Theoretically, the first two papers presented in this dissertation are informed by Laclau and Mouffe’s approach to discourse theory, offering an underutilized yet powerful lens for examining the contingent and political nature of meaning-making in sport. In addition, the third paper draws on Karl Weick’s sensemaking framework to explore how football organizations construct and negotiate definitions of talent in interaction with one another. The final article takes an inductive approach to investigate how emerging technologies are reshaping current understandings and practices of identifying and managing talent. The findings emphasize that talent is an empty signifier that is mobilized to serve different strategic aims, often in ways that obscure the contingencies behind its construction. As such, the dissertation underscores the need for a critical engagement with how talent is defined and operationalized in football. It highlights the socio-cultural, technological, and institutional forces that shape talent discourses and calls for greater reflexivity in both academic and applied discussions of talent in sport.
Prior to this dissertation project at the Department of Sport Sciences at Malmö University, Leah Monsees (born 1994 in Bremen, Germany) earned a Master of Science from the
Department of Political Science at Lund University and a Bachelor of Arts from the Department of Global Political Studies at Malmö University.
