African Football Migration: Aspirations, Experiences and Trajectories

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Africans have long graced football fields around the world. The success of icons such as Samuel Etoo, Didier Drogba and Mohamed Salah has fuelled 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.

Author Bio

Paul Darby is a Reader in the Sociology of Sport at Ulster University

James Esson is a Reader in Human Geography at Loughborough University

Christian Ungruhe is a Research Fellow in Social Anthropology at Erasmus University Rotterdam