African Football Migration

Africans have long graced football fields around the world. The success of icons such as Samuel Eto'o, Didier Drogba and Mohamed Salah has fueled the migratory projects of countless male youth across the continent. Using over a decade of ethnographic research, African football migration traces the historical, geographical and regulatory features of this migratory process.While a fortunate few do forge a successful career overseas, the book reveals how the vast majority experience involuntary immobility. Meanwhile others who are able to 'go outside' encounter truncated careers at the margins of the industry followed by precarious post-playing career lives. In unpacking these issues, African football migration offers fresh perspectives on the transnational strategies deployed by youth and young men striving to improve their life chances in post-colonial Africa, and the role that mobility, imagined and enacted, plays in these struggles.

African Footballers in Europe traces the social and economic evolution of African football and examines the strategies and resources that players mobilise in their migrations, with a particular focus on ‘Give Back Behaviours’ (how players contribute to their countries or communities of origin). It shines new light on contemporary migrations, labour markets in sport, and processes of development in Africa. Using a multidisciplinary approach and Weberian methodology to analyse players’ 'Give Back' behaviour, the book highlights the complex rationale behind this behaviour, based on a combination of social, cultural, and economic elements. It features interviews with former and current African professional players, providing a vivid picture of the role of communities in players’ migration projects, the allure of the European football market, and investment initiatives that can contribute to local and regional development. This is a vital read for academics, researchers, and students of sport sciences, sociology of sport, sport management, sociology, geography, political sciences, management, sociology of Africa, migration studies, sociology of the labour market, and economic sociology. It is also an important resource for professional organisations, NGOs, football agents, football administrators, federations, confederations, and governments.

With Following the Ball, Todd Cleveland incorporates labor, sport, diasporic, and imperial history to examine the extraordinary experiences of African football players from Portugal’s African colonies as they relocated to the metropole from 1949 until the conclusion of the colonial era in 1975. The backdrop was Portugal’s increasingly embattled Estado Novo regime, and its attendant use of the players as propaganda to communicate the supposed unity of the metropole and the colonies. Cleveland zeroes in on the ways that players, such as the great Eusébio, creatively exploited opportunities generated by shifts in the political and occupational landscapes in the waning decades of Portugal’s empire. Drawing on interviews with the players themselves, he shows how they often assumed roles as social and cultural intermediaries and counters reductive histories that have depicted footballers as mere colonial pawns. To reconstruct these players’ transnational histories, the narrative traces their lives from the informal soccer spaces in colonial Africa to the manicured pitches of Europe, while simultaneously focusing on their off-the-field challenges and successes. By examining this multi-continental space in a single analytical field, the book unearths structural and experiential consistencies and contrasts, and illuminates the components and processes of empire.

In this dazzling collection of papers, leading international sport studies scholars chart the patterns, policies and personal experiences of labour migration within and around sport, and in doing so cast important new light both on the forces shaping modern sport and on the role that sport plays in shaping the world economy and global society. Contains a broad range of case studies focussing on such diverse areas as European and African soccer, Japanese baseball and rugby union in New Zealand.

This book employs men's football as a lens through which to investigate questions relating to immigration, racism, integration and national identity in present-day Sweden. Specifically, this study explores if professional football serves as a successful model of multiracialism/multiculturalism for the rest of Swedish society to emulate.

This book explores various aspects of intranational elite football in Africa, drawing on the expertise of notable scholars from across the world. Africa’s Elite Football focuses on an area largely ignored by current scholarship on African football, where interest has focused on international migration. In exploring the intranational, the book is written in two parts. The first is a general focus on the continent, and the second is an examination of country cases. The general focus of the book is on the nature of elite tier leagues, the relationship between politics and football, the media, youth academies, intranational migration and fans. Notably, chapters on topics such as intranational migration present groundbreaking scholarship in this area. Currently, football discourses on migration focus on international migration of footballers, yet the majority of migration in African football is intranational. Thus, by addressing the intranational, this book brings attention to an area that is underrepresented in the current academic discourse. The second part of the book, which focuses on country cases, covers Botswana, Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The topics explored in those cases include religiosity, health, women’s football, media and management. The coverage of health-related issues is particularly important given that several books on African football rarely broach such a topic. With its unique approach to African football, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of sports history, African studies, politics in sports and African sports.

Sport has been a component of African cultural life for several hundred years. In today’s globalized world, Africans and Africa have become a vital part of the international sporting landscape. This is the first book to attempt to survey the historical, contemporary and geographical breadth of that landscape, drawing on multidisciplinary scholarship from around the world. To gain an understanding of sport in Africa and its contributions to the global sports world, one must first consider the ways in which sport itself is a terrain of conflict and represents another symbolic territory to conquer. Addressing key themes such as colonialism, globalization, migration, apartheid, politics and international relations, sports media and broadcasting, ethnobranding, sports tourism and the African diaspora in Europe and the United States, this collection of original scholarship offers a significant contribution to this burgeoning field of research. Sport in the African World is fascinating reading for all students and scholars with an interest in sport studies, sport history, African history or African culture.

From Accra and Algiers to Zanzibar and Zululand, Africans have wrested control of soccer from the hands of Europeans, and through the rise of different playing styles, the rituals of spectatorship, and the presence of magicians and healers, have turned soccer into a distinctively African activity. African Soccerscapes explores how Africans adopted soccer for their own reasons and on their own terms. Soccer was a rare form of “national culture” in postcolonial Africa, where stadiums and clubhouses became arenas in which Africans challenged colonial power and expressed a commitment to racial equality and self-determination. New nations staged matches as part of their independence celexadbrations and joined the world body, FIFA. The Confédération africaine de football democratized the global game through antiapartheid sanctions and increased the number of African teams in the World Cup finals. In this compact, highly readable book Alegi shows that the result of this success has been the departure of huge numbers of players to overseas clubs and the growing influence of private commercial interests on the African game. But the growth of women’s soccer and South Africa’s hosting of the 2010 World Cup also challenge the one-dimensional notion of Africa as a backward, “tribal” continent populated by victims of war, corruption, famine, and disease.