Football and Migration

Perspectives, Places, Players

Richard Elliott, John Harris, Richard Elliott, John Harris

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415739788
• eBook ISBN: 9781317810469
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

Football is an incredibly powerful case study of globalization and an extremely useful lens through which to study and understand contemporary processes of international migration. This is the first book to focus on the increasingly complex series of migratory processes that contour the contemporary game, drawing on multi-disciplinary approaches from sociology, history, geography and anthropology to explore migration in football in established, emerging and transitional contexts.

The book examines shifting migration patterns over time and across space, and analyses the sociological dynamics that drive and influence those patterns. It presents in-depth case studies of migration in elite men's football, exploring the role of established leagues in Europe and South America as well as important emerging leagues on football's frontier in North America and Asia. The final section of the book analyses the movement of groups who have rarely been the focus of migration research before, including female professional players, elite youth players, amateur players and players' families, drawing on important new research in Ghana, England, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Few other sports have such a global reach and therefore few other sports are such an important location for cross-cultural research and insight across the social sciences. This book is engaging reading for any student or scholar with an interest in sport, sociology, human geography, migration, international labour flows, globalization, development or post-colonial studies.

Places

4 Migration and soccer in a football world

The United States of America and the global game

John Harris

This chapter provides an overview of some of the issues relating to soccer and migration in the United States of America (USA). That I refer to the sport as soccer highlights its somewhat marginal status in a football world (see Markovits & Hellerman, 2001; Wangerin, 2008). In looking at where the USA ‘fits’ in the broader landscape of international football and labour migration, the chapter focuses on the positioning of Major League Soccer (MLS), the case of David Beckham, and the role of the women’s game within the USA, as points of departure for discussing soccer and migration in a global perspective.

As outlined in numerous places within this collection, research into the migration of football players has developed markedly over the past two decades. Much of the work on the game, generally regarded as the global sport par excellence (see especially Maguire & Stead, 1998; Giulianotti, 1999; Maguire & Pearton, 2000; Lanfranchi & Taylor, 2001; McGovern, 2002; Magee & Sugden, 2002; Darby, 2007; Giulianotti & Robertson, 2009; Elliott & Weedon, 2010), has shown how players move towards the core football economies. As Lanfranchi and Taylor (2001, p.141) note in their history of migration in the sport, “North America has always stood at the periphery of the football world”.

There has been significant change in football across the world through the increased intensification of global flows (Giulianotti, 1999; Lanfranchi & Taylor, 2001; Giulianotti & Robertson, 2009). As outlined in Elliott’s chapter, the massive developments in the English Premier League from its inaugural season in 1992–3 to the present day capably highlight the magnitude of this change in relation to the number of different nationalities now represented within a particular locale. Such a case evidences the ever-increasing prominence of migration in football during what has been referred to more broadly as the age of migration (Castles & Miller, 1993). Sports scholars, and most notably those interested in football, have written extensively on globalisation as a means of exploring the increased commercialisation and commodification of elite sport. Globalisation is, of course, a contested concept and leading researchers in the sociology of sport have outlined the many layers of this within the sports world (Maguire, 1999; Bairner, 2001). As Giulianotti (2005) posits, we can be neither ‘for’ nor ‘against’ globalisation. Instead we should recognise that globalisation has become “an ontological dimension of social life, a kind of multi-faceted social fact” (Giulianotti, 2005, p.190). Taylor (2007) suggests that much of the writing on football migration has tended to employ the term globalisation uncritically and treats it as an established fact.

In most discussions of globalisation, the USA sits at the centre and assumes a hegemonic status. As Markovits and Hellerman (2001, p.5) note in their discussion of the “American century”:

Whereas it would be quite impossible to write a history of the twentieth century in virtually any field without having the United States present in some prominent (if not necessarily predominant) manner, this is simply not the case in the world of soccer. Crudely put, America did not matter.

There can still be some confusion as to exactly what is meant by globalisation, with some dominant discourse still largely framing it within a language that is presenting a thesis of Americanisation. Whilst there is no denying that the USA has a hegemonic status in many spheres of globalisation, this is not always the case in sport per se and certainly not in football. Writing more broadly about the so-called Americanisation of sport, Bairner (2001) suggests it is doubtful that much of this reflects Americanisation as opposed to “the evolution of capitalism” (p.15). Veseth’s (2005) wider analysis of globalisation draws out some of the central issues in highlighting the limitations of the Americanisation thesis and emphasises that much of what is put forward as globalisation and/or Americanisation is actually little more than ‘globaloney’ – about interests and the arguments that best advance them. In international football the USA has long occupied a peripheral role (Lanfranchi & Taylor, 2001), although this is not to ignore the more central position the country has begun to play, and will likely continue to play, in the contemporary international football business (Giulianotti & Robertson, 2009).

There has been relatively little work undertaken which has examined labour migration into US sport. This is due, in part, to the somewhat insular nature of sport in the USA and the popularity of (American) football, which is played (largely) within national borders. At both the collegiate and the professional level this particular code of football assumes a hegemonic place in the landscape and casts a significant shadow over all other sports (Markovits & Rensmann, 2010). The global sport of association football becomes the ‘other’ within this particular cultural context and has to compete with many activities in a very crowded sporting space. As noted above, this ‘othering’ extends to referring to the sport by a different name and also sees the game marginalised and placed in a peripheral position. This discourse often frames soccer in relation to what football is not (Sugden, 1994; Wangerin, 2008). As work on social identities in sport has clearly outlined, these collective identities are focused on notions of difference where boundaries are negotiated and contested (Harris & Parker, 2009).

The US version of football assumes a central and important role in the promotion and representation of dominant ideologies surrounding masculinity and muscularity (Sabo & Panepinto, 1990). This in part helps explain the popularity and success of women’s soccer in the USA, where girls and women do not face the barriers to participation evident in many other parts of the world where association football is the national sport and a key marker of masculine identity (e.g. Harris, 2005). Here then we encounter a very different scenario, and in a sport where the country has long sat at the periphery of the men’s game the very same nation sits at the core of the women’s game, and this is a subject I will return to later in the chapter.

As the various contributors to this collection capably highlight, the migration patterns of football players traverse geographical, political, cultural, ethnic and economic boundaries. These flows have developed steadily with the increasing globalisation of the game, which has witnessed exponential growth in recent years (Giulianotti & Robertson, 2009). Many studies examining migration in football have sought to make sense of the movement of workers by examining the factors influencing players to move (e.g. Maguire & Stead, 1998; Magee & Sugden, 2002; Molnar, 2006; Darby, 2007; Elliott, 2013). Whilst some athletes are obviously significantly influenced by financial gain, as is the case with many other skilled migrant workers, the process of “following the money” (Maguire & Pearton, 2000, p.761) is interconnected with a broader series of processes, which reflect political, historical, cultural and geographical patterns (see Lanfranchi & Taylor, 2001; Taylor, 2007). It is also important to note that the movement of athletic migrants is not always towards the ‘core sport economies’ but occurs on a number of levels, and for a range of reasons.

Men’s professional soccer in the USA: from ASL to NASL to MLS

Allison (2005) noted the USA’s curious role in world sport, where domestic competitions achieve a certain primacy and international competition is not considered as important in the most popular sports. Markovits and Hellerman’s (2001) work on soccer and American exceptionalism, where the notion of American exceptionalism in the global order is also reflected in the sports space of the nation, offers a cogent account of this positioning. The establishment of this sports space in the late 1800s and early part of the twentieth century was influenced by a desire to ‘Americanise’ sports introduced from Britain and mark the country as being distinct and different from the old world (Markovits & Hellerman, 2001). One of their key points is that soccer, whilst being an immensely popular activity (what people do), has failed to move into culture (what people talk about). In an overview of the sport in the nation, Collins (2006) noted that in contemporary times there has been a marked growth in the numbers playing the game, although it is also important to recognise that much of this growth is among female players. In this sense, as Markovits and Hellerman (2003) have suggested, the success of women’s soccer in the USA may be perceived as yet another form of American exceptionalism.

Limitations of space do not permit a detailed discussion of the history of migration and US soccer here, but, as with many of the other cases discussed in this collection, the migration of players to and from various nations has occurred for a number of years and is not just a recent development. Commenting more broadly on the subject of migration, Lanfranchi and Taylor (2001) note that what has marked out the United States (and Canada) from other countries of immigration is not so much the scale of immigration as its diversity. English players were part of the first professional football league in the USA in the 1890s (Waldstein & Wagg, 1995; Lanfranchi & Taylor, 2001) but many of these men were from established immigrant communities in the nation. The creation of the American Soccer League (ASL) in 1921 was an important moment in the history of the game in the USA and also included a number of players who had moved to the country for work outside of football. Many wealthy companies soon began to target professional players in the United Kingdom though, and numerous Scottish footballers were recruited on salaries far better than those they were receiving from their Scottish clubs (Lanfranchi & Taylor, 2001; Wangerin, 2008). The ASL collapsed in 1931, and the next significant attempt at developing a professional league in the region occurred with the formation of the North American Soccer League (NASL) in 1968.

Part of NASL’s strategy to develop the sport involved the signing of some of the best-known players in the world. At the height of NASL’s popularity, Franz Beckenbauer (West Germany) George Best (Northern Ireland), Bobby Moore (England) and Pele (Brazil) all played in the league. Yet these players were at the end of their athletic careers, and NASL gained a reputation as a kind of ‘football graveyard’ for ageing mercenaries from across the world. Pele stated on his arrival that he hoped to make soccer as big as baseball and (American) football (Satterlee, 2001). This was too big a task even for the man widely regarded as the greatest player of all time. On one level it is felt that Pele failed, as NASL folded in 1984 and of course soccer never ascended to the status of the major sports in the USA. Yet, looking at the number of players now registered in youth leagues and the many other developments in the game, it could be argued that this was Pele’s real legacy and that he played a significant role in increasing the popularity and profile of the sport (Satterlee, 2001).

In addition to the financial incentives that tempted a number of the well-known players referred to above to move to the USA, the motivation to move can also be linked to a lack of opportunities for career development. The lack of professional opportunities can push an athlete from their home nation, whilst the lure of a specific location may pull them in a particular direction whether on cultural or economic grounds. For some American (male) soccer players during the 1980s and 1990s this was certainly the case, as few opportunities existed to develop a professional career given that no professional league existed in the United States between 1984 and 1996. Players such as Brad Friedel, a goalkeeper for the US national team and someone who has enjoyed a long and successful career in the English Premier League, followed the path of winning a soccer scholarship and gaining a university degree before embarking upon a career in the professional game. The creation of Major League Soccer (MLS) in 1996 offered a new generation of American players the chance to develop a professional career in the game within their home nation.

MLS is quite different from the sports leagues that dominate the American sporting space, as the National Basketball Association (NBA), National Football League (NFL), National Hockey League (NHL) and Major League Baseball (MLB) define themselves as the best leagues in the world in their respective sports. Here the increased inward migration of non-American athletes over recent years has been viewed as having a negative impact upon the popularity of activities such as basketball and baseball to domestic sports fans (Brown, 2005). These leagues though, just like many other sporting competitions all over the world, needed to promote their products and develop their brands in new markets and so embarked upon targeted internationalisation strategies. Such change is not always welcomed. The decision to award the 1994 FIFA World Cup Finals to the USA was a contentious one, and the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) insisted that a professional league would have to be developed in the country as part of this agreement. MLS was created as a single-entity structure, meaning that the league is owned and controlled by investors. Part of the rationale for adopting this approach was to control the expenses associated with operating such a league and was a conscious attempt to avoid some of the worst excesses of NASL.

From the beginning MLS promised to learn from the lessons of NASL and implemented a strategy focused on slow ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Content
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword – Figuring out sport migration: Old maps, new trails
• Perspectives, places and players: an introduction to football and migration
• Perspectives
• Places
• Players
• Conclusion: playing the long-ball game – future directions in the study of football and migration
• Index