The central focus of Michel Foucault's "Panopticism" is using order and discipline.  The main purpose of the short story is to get the audience to recognize certain ways of thinking about organizing people and groups of people. Panopticism is not only this but it is also "a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men"(Foucault 248) which means that it is simply a way to pattern the way people live to make their lives more efficient and safe.

Foucault used a few different examples of settings that the panopticon model and panopticism would be useful in his work. One of examples that is used in the text is the plague city model. This model sort of treats everyone the same, in terms of infected or uninfected. Watch is kept on each house and record of each living, infected or dead person is kept. It is important to understand that each entity is treated the same, no matter their condition, because a blanket approach is used on discipline in this model. The same thing can be applied to an aspect of my life, the soccer team here at USC.  From an academics standpoint, no matter the type of student you are, you always have to meet with your academic advisor on a weekly basis.  Players are required to make a weekly checklist of things to study for and projects that are needed to be completed for the week.  There are people hired to check that players are making it to class and on time every day and if not then there will be repercussions, just like in the plague city model if one steps outside of their house. In the plague city model, if one of the subjects in a house so much as even steps foot outside of his or her house without permission, then they are immediately put to death, no matter if they are infected or not. This is very counterintuitive in a way because the whole purpose of the plague city model is to keep everyone alive and healthy but if someone decides to break the system, then they put everyone else at risk. It is the thinking that you must kill one to save one thousand. This may not be morally right but it is somewhat logical. The same happens on the soccer team. If you are caught missing classes then you are punished, not to the extent of death but usually ran until it is pretty close. The way that subjects are closely monitored in the plague city, the members of the soccer team are closely monitored as well but this is not the only similarity between the two structures.

In addition to being closely monitored by authorities, both structures have a hierarchical system. No matter who you are on the soccer team, you almost always have someone that is immediately above you and someone who is immediately below you. It can be seen that the order is by class, or by age because this is not always consistent with year in school, or by authority given by the coaches, like captains. Each player has people that they are supposed to be accountable for and look after.  The players all must look out for one another because they are their brother's keepers. This is held true because if just one player is lost to academics or something else then this hurts the team. Likewise in the plague city, people all want the town to be as populated and healthy as possible, so measures are taken to make sure that this remains to be the reality. There is a hierarchal system that starts with the citizens in their houses and then continues to the deputy on each street that is in charge of watching after the whole street. After the deputy comes the person that he reports to higher up official who is in charge of a whole sector, and so on and so forth. This way, someone is always accountable to someone else. A championship takes the full squad so it is imperative that no players are lost to something as simple as academics or missing class.

The panoptic structure found in Michel Foucault's "Panopticism" has many attributes that can be related to qualities found within a soccer team.  The main thing that both are trying to achieve are order and discipline. These may be difficult absolutely achieve but it is very possible to become very close with the sole principles of panopticism and the panopticon. 
