Alexander Rothenberg is a Research Associate at the Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn (since August 2024), researching sustainable nutrition in elite youth football academies. The SOCCER project with Ina Danquah draws on more than 50 interviews conducted in 2025 and 2026 across several youth academies. The research examines how nutrition is understood, supported, and organized within the academy environment and how players' nutrition can be made more consistent and sustainable. Alexander Rothenberg completed his doctorate in Modern and Contemporary History at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS), University of Bonn, with a dissertation on slavery, dependency and the production of elite bodies in professional football. His focus was on sports academies, particularly in football, with special attention to the structural pressures placed on adolescent athletes – the vast majority of whom never reach professional status despite years of intensive training. His research bridges history, sociology, development studies and sustainability, with a particular interest in food systems, sports and social inequality. A recurring theme in his work is the search for ways to make sport more sustainable for young athletes.

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Selected publications

Rothenberg, Alexander. 2024. Elitesklavereien und Profifußball. (Dis)Kontinuitäten in der Produktion von Elitekörpern. De Gruyter.

Rothenberg, Alexander. 2025. Asymmetrical Dependencies and Factory Farming: Externalizing Violence. In Ecological Interdependencies, herausgegeben von Zeynep Y. Gökçe und Jennifer Leetsch. De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783112217764-004

Venters, Laurie, und Alexander Rothenberg. 2022. Trammelled Stars: The Non-Autonomy of Female K-Pop Idols. Celebrity Studies 14 (4): 455–71. https://doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2022.2083521