Football Fitness: More of the same, or a path-breaking concept?

This chapter focuses on football as a health-enhancing activity. Or more specifically, Football Fitness, which was launched in 2011 as a response to various developments in Danish sports. The sporting habits of Danes are changing, and there is a growing political desire to involve voluntary organised sport, including football, in public social and health-related tasks. The Danish Football Association (DBU) describes Football Fitness as football in a “completely new way in sporting and organisational terms”. Besides outlining how recreational football is an activity with wide-ranging impact on health, this chapter pursues the perception of Football Fitness as a football activity that breaks with traditional organisation, based on the idea of path-breaking concepts (Sydow et al., 2005). We show that Football Fitness breaks with the sporting form of recreational football, but not with the organisational form. This conclusion is challenged in the chapter's discussion, which stress that the degree of path breaking is dependent on each club's approach to managing Football Fitness.