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African football migration: Aspirations, experiences and trajectories
The global success of football icons like Samuel Eto’o, Didier Drogba and Mohamed Salah has fuelled the migratory projects of countless young men across the African continent who dream of following – literally and figuratively – in their footsteps. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic research, African football migration captures and chronicles the aspirations, experiences and trajectories of those pursuing this highly prized form of transnational migration. In doing so, the book uncovers and traces the myriad actors, networks and institutions that affect the ability of young people across the continent to realise social mobility through football’s global production network.
The book sheds critical light on the barriers to social mobility erected by neoliberal capitalism, and how these are negotiated by aspiring African footballers. It also generates original interdisciplinary perspectives on the complex interplay between structural forces and human agency, as young players navigate an industry rife with commercial speculation. While a select few reach the elite levels of the game and build a successful career overseas, the book vividly illustrates how for the vast majority, ‘trying their luck’ through football results in involuntary immobility in post-colonial Africa. These findings are complemented by rare empirical insights from transnational African migrants at the margins of the global football industry and those navigating precarious retirement from careers as players.
African football migration offers essential coverage of why and how African youth and young men have become actors in the global football industry, revealing the complex implications of transnational mobility, both imagined and enacted.
The book sheds critical light on the barriers to social mobility erected by neoliberal capitalism, and how these are negotiated by aspiring African footballers. It also generates original interdisciplinary perspectives on the complex interplay between structural forces and human agency, as young players navigate an industry rife with commercial speculation. While a select few reach the elite levels of the game and build a successful career overseas, the book vividly illustrates how for the vast majority, ‘trying their luck’ through football results in involuntary immobility in post-colonial Africa. These findings are complemented by rare empirical insights from transnational African migrants at the margins of the global football industry and those navigating precarious retirement from careers as players.
African football migration offers essential coverage of why and how African youth and young men have become actors in the global football industry, revealing the complex implications of transnational mobility, both imagined and enacted.
- GenresSociology
288 pages, Hardcover
Published January 25, 2022
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 10, 2023
**Shortlisted for the Lord Aberdare Literary Prize 2023**
Migrating football players are nothing new. The Italian federation, for instance, quite regularly recruited expatriate players of Italian descent during the fascist era in the 1920s and 30s. The situation has changed markedly in the last 30 years or so, with the growing status and significance of international professional football labour markets, signified most obviously by England’s Premier League, and by the growing status of professional football in many other settings.
One of the things that this growing international labour market has resulted in is a marked difference between demand and expectation among aspirant professionals and size of the workforce. One of the places where that expectation is extremely high, where professional teams and leagues have been especially active in recruitment, and where there has been a high level of exploitation in west Africa – the focus of this excellent exploration of the operation of an international labour market. Throughout, I found myself harking back to the excellent 1994 documentary film Hoop Dreams that looked as aspirations to play in the NBA, where many thousands of young athletes had the dream to play, and so few made it. Paul Darby, James Esson and Christian Ungruhe adopt a similar supply side focus, unpacking in a sophisticated way the global production network (GPN) of players, while as much as they can taking a labour force lifecycle approach, exploring entry and exit issues in particular, with a smaller than might otherwise be expected focus on player experience.
This multi-faceted approach is enhanced by the multi-disciplinary approach in a collective project by a sociologist, geographer and anthropologist. These multi-disciplinary aspects are woven together fairly seamlessly producing a nuanced exploration that highlights the complexity of football migration, mainly into Europe, but not exclusively – there is some insightful material on the experiences of playing in South East Asia, principally Thailand; not usually considered a prime football market.
This multi-disciplinary approach also means that they explore formal and informal systems and structures. They pay close attention to questions of family and wider social dynamics in aspiration to international play and subsequent perceptions of those who make it, including the misconceptions of what it means to play in an Eastern or North European lower league team, as many do. Each of the authors has a decade or more research experience on this topic, meaning that they have both a depth of knowledge and a well-developed set of trusted and trusting contacts, in an area where there considerable sensitivity and caution.
Their focus is West African, heavily prioritising on-the-ground experience in Ghana, while making clear that while there may be similarities with other regions that cannot be presumed. That said, West Africa is the biggest single source of migrant footballers from the continent, and Ghana one of the major sources in that region. It would have been good to see some consideration of Ghana as part of the Anglo-phone world – a residue of British colonialism – and whether or how different that might be from the Franco-phone states also in the region.
The authors do well, in the context of a decidedly academic title, to keep the stories of players – those who migrate and those who don’t – at the centre of their work. This means that they keep lived experience clear and enhance the accessibility of the analysis (although non-specialists will likely find the opening ‘theoretical’ chapter demanding). They also do well to historicise the issue with a review of patterns of football migration from Africa, narrowing down to their West African and ultimately Ghanaian focus. They are also good at keeping the outlooks of the aspirant players clear as shaping their analysis – the desire to ‘be a somebody’, the challenge of managing uncertainty and liminality (as a sense of betwixt and between-ness), and what they insightfully label ad hoc and precarity (where continual hope makes precarity manageable).
They are also blunt about limitations – that Covid restricted their programme so there is less about East Asia and about women players than they had hoped. Even so, this is a well-crafted and important contribution to the academic literature on football migration in particular, sports migration in general and the internationalisation of sporting labour markets. It prompted me to think about labour markets in other cultural sectors (although the structure of team sport industries is distinctive), and the wider experience of migrant labour. More significantly, it led me to wonder about the potential for a comparative study of these footballers and the baseball players from places such as the Dominican Republic Alan Klein and others have studied.
Even more, it reminded me of the grim image I came away from Hoop Dreams with, as well as the fantasies of elite sport opportunities stimulated by the image of a tiny number of globally known athletes. The opportunity is much more limited, the professional athlete’s life much grimmer, and the potential for exploitation, trafficking, and fraud much higher. All in all then, this is a sharp, insightful, sophisticated and sobering scholarly analysis.
Migrating football players are nothing new. The Italian federation, for instance, quite regularly recruited expatriate players of Italian descent during the fascist era in the 1920s and 30s. The situation has changed markedly in the last 30 years or so, with the growing status and significance of international professional football labour markets, signified most obviously by England’s Premier League, and by the growing status of professional football in many other settings.
One of the things that this growing international labour market has resulted in is a marked difference between demand and expectation among aspirant professionals and size of the workforce. One of the places where that expectation is extremely high, where professional teams and leagues have been especially active in recruitment, and where there has been a high level of exploitation in west Africa – the focus of this excellent exploration of the operation of an international labour market. Throughout, I found myself harking back to the excellent 1994 documentary film Hoop Dreams that looked as aspirations to play in the NBA, where many thousands of young athletes had the dream to play, and so few made it. Paul Darby, James Esson and Christian Ungruhe adopt a similar supply side focus, unpacking in a sophisticated way the global production network (GPN) of players, while as much as they can taking a labour force lifecycle approach, exploring entry and exit issues in particular, with a smaller than might otherwise be expected focus on player experience.
This multi-faceted approach is enhanced by the multi-disciplinary approach in a collective project by a sociologist, geographer and anthropologist. These multi-disciplinary aspects are woven together fairly seamlessly producing a nuanced exploration that highlights the complexity of football migration, mainly into Europe, but not exclusively – there is some insightful material on the experiences of playing in South East Asia, principally Thailand; not usually considered a prime football market.
This multi-disciplinary approach also means that they explore formal and informal systems and structures. They pay close attention to questions of family and wider social dynamics in aspiration to international play and subsequent perceptions of those who make it, including the misconceptions of what it means to play in an Eastern or North European lower league team, as many do. Each of the authors has a decade or more research experience on this topic, meaning that they have both a depth of knowledge and a well-developed set of trusted and trusting contacts, in an area where there considerable sensitivity and caution.
Their focus is West African, heavily prioritising on-the-ground experience in Ghana, while making clear that while there may be similarities with other regions that cannot be presumed. That said, West Africa is the biggest single source of migrant footballers from the continent, and Ghana one of the major sources in that region. It would have been good to see some consideration of Ghana as part of the Anglo-phone world – a residue of British colonialism – and whether or how different that might be from the Franco-phone states also in the region.
The authors do well, in the context of a decidedly academic title, to keep the stories of players – those who migrate and those who don’t – at the centre of their work. This means that they keep lived experience clear and enhance the accessibility of the analysis (although non-specialists will likely find the opening ‘theoretical’ chapter demanding). They also do well to historicise the issue with a review of patterns of football migration from Africa, narrowing down to their West African and ultimately Ghanaian focus. They are also good at keeping the outlooks of the aspirant players clear as shaping their analysis – the desire to ‘be a somebody’, the challenge of managing uncertainty and liminality (as a sense of betwixt and between-ness), and what they insightfully label ad hoc and precarity (where continual hope makes precarity manageable).
They are also blunt about limitations – that Covid restricted their programme so there is less about East Asia and about women players than they had hoped. Even so, this is a well-crafted and important contribution to the academic literature on football migration in particular, sports migration in general and the internationalisation of sporting labour markets. It prompted me to think about labour markets in other cultural sectors (although the structure of team sport industries is distinctive), and the wider experience of migrant labour. More significantly, it led me to wonder about the potential for a comparative study of these footballers and the baseball players from places such as the Dominican Republic Alan Klein and others have studied.
Even more, it reminded me of the grim image I came away from Hoop Dreams with, as well as the fantasies of elite sport opportunities stimulated by the image of a tiny number of globally known athletes. The opportunity is much more limited, the professional athlete’s life much grimmer, and the potential for exploitation, trafficking, and fraud much higher. All in all then, this is a sharp, insightful, sophisticated and sobering scholarly analysis.
Displaying 1 of 1 review