This article examines the present-day perception among boys and young men in West Africa that migration through football offers a way of achieving social standing and improving their life chances. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among footballers in urban southern Ghana between 2010 and 2016, we argue that young people's efforts to make it abroad and "become a somebody" through football is not merely an individual fantasy; it is rather a social negotiation of hope to overcome widespread social immobility in the region. It is this collective practice among a large cohort of young males-realistic or not-which qualifies conceptualizations of youth transitions such as waithood that dominate academic understanding of African youth today.
Transnational migrants are often considered to be the core of the new global precariat. On the one hand, migrants are particularly likely to become precariats, due to the outsourcing of precarious work to migrant workers and the attribution of precarious citizenship status to migrants. On the other hand, labor migrants’ accounts show that this precarity is not exclusively based on oppression, misery, and exploitation, but that labor migration is also driven by hope and the imagination of a better future; hardships may even open up new opportunities. This article aims to scrutinize the ambivalence of precarity and the ways in which precarization processes also appear in highly skilled labor migration (in this case sought‐after jobs as transnational athletes). The article draws on material from multisited field studies among aspiring and current soccer migrants. The experiences and conditions are described for female and male soccer players who originate from various West African settings and move to Northern European locations. The analysis finds ambivalent precarization processes at various points of the career. The temporality of precarization processes becomes apparent when comparing the large number of young men and women who strive to migrate to the few individuals who become professional players abroad but often struggle with occupational challenges after their careers. The article ends by suggesting an engagement with the ambivalences of precarious work in future studies, both in sport and other vocational sectors.
Independent youth migration is socially embedded in many African societies. While it is often exclusively perceived of as a process of intergenerational negotiation which leads to higher social positions after returning home, this article points out that peer influences play a major role in the process of decision-making of leaving and returning among young northern Ghanaian males. Juvenile migrants make little effort to generate means to enter into adulthood but struggle to return with modern goods. Rather than being a means of achieving adulthood, enjoying youth and gaining recognition among friends are the prevailing motives for going and returning.
At first sight, the perception of African footballers in Germany seems to be two-fold. Whereas amateur players may face racist assaults during matches time and again, open racism in professional German football has declined. Indeed, African players in the Bundesliga are frequently celebrated by fans and are icons of their clubs. However, this paper argues that the cheering of star players and forms of open racism during amateur matches are often only two extremes of a continuum since professional African footballers continue to be socially constructed as being different. Ascriptions of playing styles as elegant, powerful, and playful reflect alleged natural differences and manifest the otherness of African players. The article analyzes the historical construction of this manifestation and also discusses to what extent ascribed otherness is adopted by African footballers as a kind of "self-charismatization."
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