Health follows football: a reflexive thematic analysis of culture, masculinity, and men's wellbeing in recreational football.

Men carrying the greatest burden of preventable ill health are among the least likely to be reached by conventional health promotion. Football-based initiatives have demonstrated capacity to engage such men, yet the cultural mechanisms through which sustained engagement and health outcomes are achieved remain poorly understood. This paper explores how football culture and the organizational culture of the Football Cooperative (FC) initiative, an Irish social enterprise using recreational football as a gender-responsive mechanism for men's health, interact to sustain engagement and create conditions in which health benefits follow. An interpretive qualitative design was adopted, using Reflexive Thematic Analysis guided by Braun and Clarke (2022) to examine how men make sense of football, masculinity, participation, and health within particular social and cultural contexts. Data were drawn from semi-structured and pitch-side interviews with 33 participants across two FC sites. Schein's (2010) three-level organizational culture framework informed theme development. Three interdependent themes were constructed. The first established that football functions as a basic cultural assumption in masculine identity and requires no health framing to activate. The second examined how the culture of FC's games aligns with, and sustains, existing meanings, through design, through reliability, through the reproduction of inclusive norms. And the third: when these cultures align, men who would not engage through conventional health routes experience meaningful health and social outcomes through something they already value. The findings suggest that effective gender-responsive health promotion for men may be dependent on creating cultural conditions which reduce social risk and are familiar to men.