When Niko Besnier returned to Tonga in 2007, a small island country in the Southwest Pacific where he had been conducting fieldwork since the late 1970s, the society he encountered had experienced considerable change since he had last been there in the early 2000s. Particularly notable was the transformation of rugby from a form of leisure, in which boys and young men almost universally took part, to wage labour – in a context in which employment opportunities are very few and far between. But rugby labour was located elsewhere: many young men hoped to sign contracts in the sport labour markets in industrial countries such as New Zealand, Australia, Japan, France, and the United Kingdom, which promised scintillating careers, extraordinary salaries, and the ability to send remittances home and thus regain a productive masculinity that successive economic downturns had severely eroded. At home in Tonga, there is barely enough money to support the national team, whose members are for the most part employed by teams overseas, let alone a sport infrastructure. Whenever rugby recruiters were rumoured to visit from overseas to scout for new talent, a noticeable frisson ran over the neighbourhoods and villages of the country.
What young men hoped was to follow the example of some of their compatriots who had had successful rugby careers in foreign lands. Toetu‘u Tāufa, for example, had won in the late 1990s a rugby scholarship at Nihon University, one of Japan’s elite private universities, in the footsteps of other Tongan men who had followed similar routes since the mid-1980s. After graduation, he played for the Kintetsu Liners, a team in Japan’s rugby Top League based at Hanazono Stadium in Osaka, until he retired from the game in 2018, and was picked for Japan’s national team in 2011. He facilitated the recruitment of his younger brother Tafia by the Kintetsu Liners (another brother, Tēvita, was recruited in 2019 to play for a club in New Zealand, but was killed in a car accident on the eve of his departure from Tonga). A naturalized Japanese citizen, he still lives in Osaka with his Japanese wife and children, working as a coach. While playing, he estimated that the remittances he sent to Tonga supported over 70 relatives in Tonga, transfiguring him into an incarnation of male adult success.
But the success of Tāufa’s trajectory is counterweighted by the fate of the many other Tongan rugby athletes who remain, literally and metaphorically, on the sidelines, waiting for their chance to shine or adjusting to realities that only vaguely match the dreams that led them far away from their island nation. In 2018, for example, the tribulations of former flanker Sione Vaiomo‘unga hit international sport headlines (New Zealand Herald 2017). After playing for Tonga in the 2011 World Cup in New Zealand and at the Hong Kong Sevens in the same year, Vaiomo‘unga secured contracts first with a British team and then with the rugby club of Baia Mare in the hinterlands of Romania, on the periphery of world rugby. Kidney failure suddenly interrupted what had already become a less-than-idyllic experience. No longer able to play, he and his family were close to losing their residence permit in Romania, but returning to Tonga was out of the question as the country lacks dialysis equipment. The player went from sending remittances back home to depending on the generosity of distant relatives, fellow players, and locals. A crowd-funding initiative gathered a large sum, and a few months later a kidney became available for transplant. Vaiomo‘unga was able to play again. He constantly tried to read his struggles in positive terms, helped by his strong Christian faith, the power of which was confirmed by the apparent happy ending.
While Toetu‘u Tāufa’s and Sione Vaiomo‘unga’s life trajectories can be thought of as representing two extremes, those of most migrant athletes from the Global South are closer to the latter than to the former. But Vaiomo‘unga’s vicissitudes have not discouraged other young Tongan men from pursuing overseas rugby careers at all costs, or from families from encouraging similar endeavours for their sons. Dreams of success in the global sports industries since the last decades of the twentieth century have transformed Tongan society, restructuring its economy, reconfiguring gender roles and relations, and transforming the meaning of the future. Similar dynamics have taken place in many countries of the Global South and impoverished regions and marginalized communities of the Global North.
At the same time, the global circulation of high-level athletes has had a considerable impact on many sports, particularly those that command greatest visibility. For example, while prior to the 1980s expatriate footballers constituted a relatively small minority, and most moved between contiguous countries (McGovern 2002; Taylor 2006), by 2018 migrant athletes accounted for more than 41% of players in top-division European football squads, 34.5% of whom hailed from outside Europe (Poli, Ravenel, and Besson 2018; these numbers are much higher in lower-division clubs). Migrations today contribute to many sports a national, ethnic, and racial diversity that did not exist before the 1980s. However, this diversity has not democratized sports in any sense of the term, as those who govern sports structurally or practically continue to be, for the most part, older white men of elite background.
The new migratory trajectories link most visibly the Global South with the Global North, as aspiring athletes from destitute regions of the world attempt in increasing numbers to reap some of the fabulous wealth which sport in regions of the Global North was seemingly awash in. But they also take place within the Global South and within the Global North, and occasionally follow a reverse direction, from the North to the South. Athletes in some sports migrate from marginal locations to central locations within both the Global North and the Global South (Haugen, this volume; Pietikäinen and Ojala, this volume), or move from and to locations that are not easily characterizable with these vague labels (Calabrò, this volume). Guyanese men move to Trinidad to play cricket, but hope to make enough connections in Trinidad to then move to Canada or the United States, whether to play cricket or to work in other domains, while footballers from sub-Saharan Africa move to Istanbul in hope that it will only be a transit point to Europe (Hossain, this volume; McManus, this volume). While colonial relations of yesteryears continue to inform people’s trajectories, other structures of global inequality have since emerged, adding new layers to the world map. Countries like the United States have their own “internal” Global South, namely urban neighbourhoods plagued with abject poverty, which feed some of their sports, particularly American football and basketball, with heavily racialized talent (Hoberman 1987; Smith 2014). In the absence of alternatives in marginalized areas of the world and disadvantaged neighbourhoods in wealthy countries, youth are increasingly orienting their futures to sport.
Contextualizing global sport migrations
In this book, we seek to embed these dynamics in a broad social, political, economic and ideological context. Media and other public representations typically frame migrant athletes’ stories as individual endeavours, foregrounding the fact that they are a powerful expression of individual creativity and effort against all odds, a framing that only reflects the obsessive individualism that has become a signature feature of the contemporary moment, at the expense of the social (Giulianotti and Robertson 2007). Here, in contrast, we see them as unfolding in a much denser web of social relations. In addition to bearing witness to extraordinary talent and willpower, migrant athletes’ careers are the result of the efforts and struggles of many individuals around them, who are in turn affected by their changing fortunes. Migration exposes these dynamics in whole new ways, nuancing our understanding of success, failure, and everything in between, as social relations, selfhood, and life perspectives are transformed by the hope and the reality of migrating for sport. In Tonga and other Pacific Island nations, why have young men sought to transform their rugby skills into migratory commodities only recently, even though they have been playing the sport with considerable talent and gusto for over a century? How and why have sport mobilities become such a visible aspect of the contemporary moment?
We can answer these questions by investigating how contemporary athlete migrations operate at the conjuncture of a number of dynamics taking place on different scales, which at first glance seem unrelated but which on closer inspection turn out to form an extraordinary web of interrelatedness. These include the collapse of many national economies of the Global South and local economies on the margins of the industrial world, and the havoc wreaked on economies and labour markets by the imposition or adoption of structural readjustment policies; the growth of South-North and rural-urban labour migrations; the transformation of major aspects of the world of sport into a corporate industry and of recruiting strategies that now encompass the entire globe; the widespread privatization of television in the 1980s in many parts of the Global North and the emergence of sport-only channels; the advent of satellite television technology, broadcasting images of sporting glory to the remotest corners of the world; and the growing importance of millenarian beliefs in miraculous economic success, cosmologies that echo the cruel optimism that the sport industries encourage. Athletes’ mobility and attempted mobility complicate our understanding of the Global South and the Global North, as they both reinforce and challenge structures of global inequality.
At the core of these dynamics is the worldwide turn to neoliberalism, a reconfiguration of economies and lives that has gripped the world since the 1980s. In a nutshell, neoliberalism is constituted by the liberalization of economies, the deregulation of markets, and the withdrawal of the state from the responsibilities to the citizenry it had taken on in some countries in the second half of the twentieth century (Harvey 2005). Inspired by the economic theory of the early-twentieth-century Vienna School (Mirowski and Plehwe 2009), it was implemented in the Global North in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a fix to the economic crises of the early 1970s, which itself resulted from the unsustainability of maintaining both capitalist super-profit making and the welfare protection of workers (Bieler and Morton 2018, 165–166). In Western Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand, it resulted in the drastic rollback in the progressive welfare structures that the state had put in place after World War II to alleviate and prevent poverty.
While neoliberalism originated in the Global North, it has created a domino effect that now affects the entire world, and can only be understood in the context of global interconnections. In the Global South, starting in the 1980s, many economies collapsed as the result of the successive destructive power of colonialism and global neoliberalism. From roughly the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, colonial powers had restructured the economies of many colonies around the production of single commodities to serve their metropolitan interests (e.g., groundnut in Senegal, coffee in Côte d’Ivoire, copra in the Pacific Islands), diverting ordinary people’s energy away from more diversified and locally advantageous production activities. Starting in the 1970s, global commodity prices were increasingly determined by new forms of financial speculation in the financial centres of the world, such as futures and derivatives trading, a turn widely referred to as financialization, a central feature of neoliberalism, which introduced new forms of unpredictability and volatility. In the 1980s, countries in the Global North reduced or abolished preferential import tariffs on goods from their former colonies as part of the turn to neoliberalism. As a result, agricultural and other types of economies in the Global South were unable to compete on world markets and small producers were particularly affected, while large corporations were better able to weather price fluctuations.
To rescue the economies of postcolonial countries from bankruptcy, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and wealthy donor states stepped in with loans. But there were conditions: receiving governments had to implement structural adjustment policies, including wage freezes; the devaluation of currencies; the commoditization of government services such as education and healthcare; the radical reduction of bureaucracies, which had since independence served as a major source of employment; and the end of subsidies to small-scale producers of primary commodities. Unable to pay the interests on the loans, let alone their principals, many countries faced serious debt crises. This situation has led to what David Harvey (2003) has termed “accumulation by dispossession,” whereby wealthy countries and wealthy elites in poorer countries deprive the poor of resources and of the means to generate them. In countries of the Global South, the real victims of the debt crisis are not the official debtors such as the states, banks, and corporations, but ordinary citizens (Federici 2018, 48). In the Global North, blue-collar work disappeared as corporations moved production to the Global South, where wages are cheaper and the state keeps labour under control, thus dramatically increasing the gap between the rich and the poor and between wealthy and destitute regions or neighbourhoods. These dynamics persist to this day.
Everywhere, ordinary citizens have had to develop new economic strategies that depended on their inventiveness, flexibility, and adaptability, precisely the qualities that are prized in the neoliberal order. Hustling, wheeling and dealing, and seizing every opportunity to extract meagre resources have become the norm, consuming all daylight hours and energies (e.g., Jeffrey 2010; Newell 2012; Thieme 2018). Young men, the group that was particularly affected by the shrinking of labour markets, were often the ones who were most likely to develop these new approaches. But these were rarely sufficient to provide for families and communities, and young men have been turning their attention in increasing numbers to the possibility of making it in the sport industries, even though the probability of success in this field is infinitesimal. Young men’s dreams of sporting success are fuelled by their love of sport, but perhaps more urgently by their desire to fulfil what is expected of them, namely to provide for families and communities.
In the Global South, most countries are unable to support a sport infrastructure that could offer career opportunities to talented young men. This means that dreams of sporting success are always elsewhere, namely in the Global North, where one can actually make money as a professional athlete. Young men thus yearn to migrate to wealthy countries, but these yearnings are not limited to them. As countries of the Global South have experienced economic downturns, they have increasingly become labour-exporting countries, making “mobile and migrant labor the dominant form of labor” (Federici 2018, 29) in our times. People now see emigrating to seek employment in the Global North as the only way out of their predicaments and are prepared to take enormous risks to do so, such as crossing the Mediterranean in unseaworthy vessels piloted by untrustworthy people, with the tragic consequences that are chronicled almost daily in the media. In many cases, migrations across borders have been preceded by internal migrations, as rural people sought to move to cities when subsistence agriculture and fishing or employment in logging and mining were no longer able to provide for their livelihood, or as they seek sport careers for which opportunities are much more abundant in urban centres (Pietikäinen and Ojala, this volume). Young men’s desires to migrate to pursue sports careers are thus part of much larger migratory trends.
Other transformations that have taken place since the 1980s are at the roots of the dramatic increase in athlete migrations. In the most popular global sports (e.g., football, rugby union, cricket, basketball, boxing, track and field), neoliberal policies have turned clubs, teams, and governing bodies into corporations driven by competition for resources and the struggle for survival, and the sports themselves into commodities sold to consumers in the form of televised programmes, logo-bearing merchandise, and other products. Like other forms of popular culture, sport acts as a powerful mechanism that injects the ideologies of neoliberalism into ordinary people’s lives (Silk and Andrews 2012).
Pivotal to the neoliberal corporatization and commoditization of these sports was the privatization of television that started in many countries of the world in the 1980s, as states that until then had held a monopoly on television broadcasting (i.e., in most countries outside of North America) sold television broadcasting bands to private interests as part of the implementation of neoliberal policies. These private companies then had to fill airtime with the cheapest kind of unscripted programming possible, and sport fit that bill. Very soon, however, sport governing bodies and clubs in the most popular sports began charging increasingly large sums from broadcasting corporations for the right to broadcast and corporate sponsors for the right to advertise during sports events, leading to an exponential increase in revenues from sport, in top-level athletes’ incomes, and in the cost of advertisements. The very practice of sport has been reshaped by neoliberal capitalist interests, as...
