Sociological analysis of professionalization and lifestyle changes of athletes (Case study: professional footballers)

The purpose of this study is a sociological analysis of professionalization and lifestyle changes of athletes (Case study: professional footballers). The method of the present research is qualitative and exploratory. The method of this research is qualitative which has been done with data foundation theory and Glaser approach, in such a way that the factors extracted from the interviews have been extracted. The purpose of using the qualitative research approach in the present study was a sociological analysis of the effects of professionalism on the lifestyle of professional footballers, which used a semi-structured interview method. In this regard, for the interview, a protocol according to the basics The theory and proposal of the research was prepared, which was approved by the professors and experts of the field at the beginning, and finally the interviews with the football players who played football professionally, such as Mr. Ali Daei, Ali Karimi, Sardar Azmoun, etc. The titles of the people to be interviewed were used. The sample size in this study was equal to 20 people based on the theoretical saturation index. Also in this research, data collection was done in the form of library and field. The results obtained from the analysis of qualitative interviews showed that the effects of becoming a professional on the lifestyle of professional footballers consist of 132 open codes and also 12 key categories. Finally, according to the results, it can be said that becoming a professional affects the lifestyle of footballers according to the environment they are in and changes their lifestyle.