Last man standing: goalkeeping – an art or a science?
Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal
ISSN: 0951-3574
Article publication date: 5 December 2022
Issue publication date: 5 March 2024
Abstract
Purpose
The current paper is a comment on goalkeepers in football. This paper aims to explore the skillset of the contemporary goalkeeper and whether these can be reliably measured. This paper advocates the recognition of the goalkeeper as the most important member of the football team.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper draws on the work of Bourdieu (1995) to examine the impact of calculative practice on the art of goalkeeping. This reveals the diffusion of calculations to goalkeeping but challenges whether these statistics are robust. This study used the Internet (Jeacle, 2021) to explore the multiple dimensions of this study.
Findings
The comment argues a case for the goalkeeper as the principal actor in the football team. From an accountability perspective, the impact of the goalkeeper can be profound, the more so because of rule changes. Whilst calculative practice has entered the world of the goalkeeper, the practice is questionable if contemporary metrics are not robust and more sophisticated performance indicators are required. Increasing transfer costs highlight the need for objective measures of goalkeeping performance.
Originality/value
This paper is novel in that the paper attempts to broaden the scope of accounting scholarship into a new domain of football in popular culture.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to Prof Irvine Lapsley for the advice on an early draft of this paper.
Citation
McKenzie, H. (2024), "Last man standing: goalkeeping – an art or a science?", Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Vol. 37 No. 2, pp. 686-689. https://doi.org/10.1108/AAAJ-05-2022-5826
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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