Abstract
In a time where research on African migration has become increasingly restricted to stories about misery and misfortune at the margins of the Global North, it is worthwhile for migration scholars to look outside their well-established empirical domains, if only as a source of oxygen in an otherwise asphyxiating political climate. It is in that spirit, rather than as a specialist on the topic, that I have approached Darby, Esson, and Ungruhe's well-researched and meticulously written book African football migration.
African Football Migration draws on scholarship on sports, migration, and African youth to offer insights into both front and back stage of what the authors term football's ‘Global Production Network’ (GPN). This conceptual framework is akin to other systemic approaches such as migration regimes, Actor Network Theory, or the more recent migration infrastructures approach. It outlines the constituent parts of a system producing goods or services, and analyses its workings with attention to the social and cultural “embeddedness” of production systems at various scales. Through it, the book explores how aspirations, abilities, connections, and serendipity combine to shape a football career, or produce football migrant labor, spanning everything from the ideals and prejudice informing how Ghanaian children approach a friendly game on the streets of Kumasi to how European agents facilitate the connections between African talents and the most competitive clubs in the world.
The opening chapter offers a thorough and conscientious positioning of the empirical research and analytical delimitation that informs it, including an outline of the GPN framework as well as an uneasy acknowledgement that the contribution is mainly limited to the experiences of male players. Chapter 2 outlines a systemic analysis of West Africa's place in the global football industry, including the subregion's emergence as a key exporter of football labor since the independence era. The remaining chapters present a broad chronology of a footballing career; from the ‘nodes’ that players move through to approach an international career (Chapters 3–6) through international recruitment (Chapters 7 and 8) and, eventually, retirement and a post-retirement life (Chapter 9). Within this broad chronology, individual fates of success and failure, resilience and exploitation are portrayed through the rich and extensive empirical research conducted by the authors over the course of more than a decade.
From a migration research perspective, the book offers several key lines of insight. The first is the refined systemic approach to understanding how individual migrant trajectories play out within a worldwide industry. This approach works particularly well to describe a delimited industry such as football, where key mediating actors as well as destinations and aspirations are more visible and familiar than, say, in a transnational agricultural industry or the urban informal sector in European major cities. Second, the book incorporates an anthropological sensitivity to the socio-cultural framing of social becoming — or the transition from youth to adulthood — in Ghana in particular and as a general motivating factor for most players, epitomized in the aspiration to become a ‘social giver’; a notion that rings familiar even in relation to less extravagant migrant aspirations. Third, the study of football mobilities demands an attention to the personal and subjective experiences of what migration entails by following the sometimes-dramatic ups and downs of careers marked by determination and struggle, as well as sudden lucky breaks or misfortune.
In this way, the book and its subject matter provides some much-needed oxygen to the study of African migration. It is enlightening to think about the ways in which individual players use their body as capital while at the same time relying on a vast web of mediators who may not always have the migrant's best interest at heart. Particularly in light of the current political climate around (African) migration, it throws the fates of migrants attempting similar trajectories in other, less venerated fields of work, into painful relief. As the authors argue, footballers constitute a category of African migrants with something undeniable to offer even the wealthiest countries in the world, in a currency that — despite the challenges of adjusting to different playing styles and training regimes — seems more universally acceptable than, say, a university degree.
At the same time, the specific position of football migrants in a global multi-billion-Euro industry raises the question of how the book's insights speak to scholarship on other migrant experiences. For example, the authors repeatedly refer to the uncertainties around career progression and working conditions for non-elite players as the “precariousness” of African football migration. But it is not always clear whether such precariousness is comparable to other migrant experiences, such as those of informal urban workers or undocumented agricultural laborers. A more careful comparative reflection on different scales or degrees of “precariousness” would have clarified the stakes of an international career in football, while also enabling a more nuanced conceptual contribution to the study of other forms of (African) migration. Similarly, I wonder whether the choice of an all-encompassing “Africa” evoked in the title really suits the ethnographically informed approach of the book. A more modest delimitation towards Ghana as the main empirical case, or West Africa as a subregion, might have been more appropriate, especially in light of the authors’ pledge to “avoid totalising conceptualisation of ‘Africa’ as homogenous or undifferentiated” (p. 15). That said, the book generally contains plenty of nuance and a qualitative sensibility that should make it relevant to students and scholars not only working explicitly on football mobilities but also those of us interested in new and different perspectives on African migration.