Exploring youth experiences of development through organised club sport and transfer beyond sport

This study examines how young people experience development through sport and the transfer of capabilities beyond the sporting context. Drawing on the Capability Approach, it asks how participation in organised club sport is converted into capabilities, and under what conditions those capabilities become valued functionings in other domains such as school, work and social life. Qualitative interviews were conducted with 38 participants aged 15–18 from diverse sporting and social backgrounds. The findings show that capability development depends on conversion ability, shaped by the interaction of internal assets (e.g. motivation and mindset), coaching behaviours (e.g. feedback and explication), supportive team dynamics and family support. Together, these factors foster engagement, reflection and meaning-making. Transfer beyond sport is further conditioned by context similarity (the correspondence between sport and the domains where capabilities are applied) and, notably, by application freedom (whether institutions beyond sport recognise and permit acquired capabilities to be enacted). Development through sport is therefore contingent and uneven, particularly for youth from lower socioeconomic or marginalised backgrounds, whose capabilities are constrained and not consistently enacted beyond sport. By specifying these conversion and transfer dynamics, this study extends the Capability Approach to youth sport and locates sport’s developmental potential within an unequal and context dependent distribution of opportunities for young people to pursue lives they value.