Raffaele Poli

Understanding globalization through football: The new international division of labour, migratory channels and transnational trade circuits

Among all sports, football is the one that saw the largest diffusion during the 20th century. Professional leagues exist on all continents and professional footballers are constantly on the move, trying to reach the wealthiest European clubs. Using the football players’ market as an example, this article highlights some key features of economic globalization: the new international division of labour, the ever increasing role played by intermediaries to bind the demand and supply of work on a transnational scale, and the setting up of spatially fragmented trade circuits. These processes form the basis for the creation of a global market of footballers in which clubs and championships play complementary roles and are more than ever functionally integrated beyond national borders.

Africans’ Status in the European Football Players’ Labour Market

This essay makes a dual attempt to understand the manner in which the European football players’ labour market is structured as well as the status held by players recruited from Africa. Firstly, it outlines the major changes since the implementation of the Bosman law in 1995, which led to an explosion in salaries paid to the footballers playing in well‐off clubs of major leagues. This huge growth in stars’ revenues reflects the emergence of an ever‐increasing economic gulf separating clubs of the G‐14 organization, a lobby which groups together 18 clubs among the richest in Europe, from the rest of the European clubs. The essay then goes on to examine the viability of Jean‐François Bourg’s theory of the existence of a ‘segmented’ labour market in European professional football. The latter part of the essay concentrates on African players’ status through a statistical analysis of their presence in 78 professional and semi‐professional leagues of UEFA member countries, which reveals that, in comparison with migrants of other origins, Africans are more concentrated in the lower levels of competition. Indeed, in the context of an economic polarization and of a ‘segmented’ labour market which needs a constant renewal and circulation of players, African footballers are particularly sought after, not only because of their value as footballers, but also because they allow the clubs’ recruiters to make substantial financial savings through a form of wage dumping.

The Denationalization of Sport: De-ethnicization of the Nation and Identity Deterritorialization

This essay presents the effects on sport of recent developments such as the acceleration of migratory flows and the increasing influence of mass media on a global scale. It examines two different sets of processes occurring in sport today that can be conceptualized as examples of denationalization. The first one, defined as the progressive disconnection between the geographical origin of sportsmen [1] and the nation-states that they are supposed to represent, leads to a de-ethnicization of the nation. The second one, defined as the decrease in importance of the ‘origin label’ in the identification process between fans, sportsmen and teams, leads to an identity deterritorialization. Both of these processes show that the state-national reading grid, defined as the preservation and reproduction of the correspondence between a state, a territory and an identity through the organization and interpretation of sports events according to the sportsmens nationality, is essentially an historical construction. From this perspective, it is emphasized that contemporary changes regarding the concept of the nation-state and national identities in sport are inscribed in a nonlinear historical process, which previously had the tendency to ethnicize nations and to territorialize identities, and nowadays tends to de-ethnicize the first and deterritorialize the second.

The African footballer as visual object and figure of success: Didier Drogba and social meaning.

Through a study of the iconographic representation of Didier Drogba and other expatriate players in the Ivorian public space and sports press, this article examines the social meaning of footballers in Africa. It analyses expatriate footballers as ‘figures of success’ and examines connections with other important social fields beneficial to acquiring fame in Africa, such as music and politics. Finally, the article extends its focus on the construction and circulation of sports celebrities beyond national and continental borders.

International migration of professional footballers

In this comprehensive Handbook, John Goddard and Peter Sloane present a collection of analytical contributions by internationally regarded scholars in the field, which extensively examine the many economic challenges facing the worlds most popular team sport.