exploring the trade

In response to critics of the so-called football slave trade -- and to European football clubs' history of accessing (and exploiting) cheap African talent -- one could say, Look, Europe is the world’s epicenter of pro football. It's where the most competitive play occurs, where the most profitable leagues flourish, where players receive the most lucrative contracts. It should come as no surprise to anyone that young athletes around the world dream of growing up and playing for Barça, Arsenal, Manchester United, Marseille... or that many of them would go to extreme means for the opportunity to make it. This point I concede freely. But what is deeply troubling is the route by which most African boys must travel in hopes of making it in the European leagues.

Pro teams go scouring for potential talent that can be signed on the super-cheap. Pro agents prowl the streets of Accra and Abijan, hoping to “poach” the next star player. Community football coaches and managers, and even parents, hoping to get rich off children. As Dan McDougall (2008) has put it:

European, Arab and increasingly West African middlemen are effectively buying the best young players from their families in tightly binding contracts, often backed up by threats of violence against families with the hope of making a small fortune selling the boys onto the West or extorting their families for the cost of passage.

As young as 10 years old, these young boys are sold into lop-sided contractual obligations, shipped off to Europe, and set on course in football training programs. Tens of thousands of players have passed through this gauntlet. For the majority of these young men, their chances do not materialize into professional contracts and are shown the door, frequently left on the streets of European cities, as undocumented, “illegal” immigrants. In the worst-case scenarios, these kids have entered into child prostitution to survive (Donnelly & Petherick, 2004). In 2001, FIFA responded with new regulations, preventing clubs from signing players under 18 years, and creating policies whereby clubs outside of Europe that manage the football training and formation of players under 18 receive compensation from any European club that signs one of its player (FIFA, cited in Darby, 2007). Yet at the same time that regulations were being constructed, this transnational, peculiar institution was already in motion, constructing a new system to circumvent the regulations, and thus, continue the flow of cheap labor from Africa to Europe. The establishment of African football academies has boomed since that time, legal and illegal "schools" that even can capitalize on FIFA regulations.

So, in what ways do 'football academies' provide the legal cover for the maintenance of this modern-day slave trade? How does race, ethnicity, and class operate within this complex? Who benefits? Who suffers? What social theories (do/can) emerge from this complex "from or on behalf of historically oppressed groups (to) invest ways to escape from, survive in, and/or oppose prevailing social and economic injuststice?" (Hills Collins, 1998, xiii) This last question in particular will be critical to my inquiries...
more as it comes.