A study on professional athlete career transition: an overview of the literature

Abstract

Since the 1990’s, there have been many research studies that focus on career transitions for professional athletes in Japan. The main reason for this is that during that period, amateur sports teams, such as soccer and basketball, were spun off from divisions of companies to become separate professional teams. Consequently, this changed forced how athletes view the transition to a second career because they can no longer count on being employed by the companies that had previously run teams as part of their corporate operations. Research studies primarily covered top athletes but did not distinguish between the amateur and professional athletes. In reviewing the assumptions and results of such previous research with respect to professional status, this study will present the basic themes of such research. For example, early research investigated the actual reasons why and how athletes decide to change career; whereas later research seek to study how athletes specifically deal with career changes. Finally, in order to determine the effectiveness of actual support programs, the authors of this study proposes that more thorough investigation is needed to scrutinize how the career transitions of ex-professional football players have changed over time by using a “longitudinal” analysis.