A social negotiation of hope: male West African youth, ‘waithood’ and the pursuit of social becoming through football

This paper examines the present-day perception among boys and young men in West Africa that migration through football offers a way to achieve social standing and improve one’s life chances. More specifically, we use the case of aspirant young Ghanaian footballers as a lens to qualify recent conceptualizations of African youth, such as ‘waithood’, which have a tendency to overlook the multifarious attempts and visions of young people on the continent to overcome social immobility. Drawing on various and long-term 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. It is this collective practice among a large cohort of young males – realistic or not – which qualifies conceptualizations of youth transitions such as ‘waithood’. By this, we highlight how examining the contemporary fusion of sport with a desire to migrate furthers our understandings of social mobility for West African youth, and extends literature on the strategies used by young people in the region as they try to bypass the structural barriers blocking their path to ‘becoming a somebody’

African football migration: aspirations, experiences and trajectories

Africans have long graced football fields around the world. The success of icons such as Samuel Eto'o, Didier Drogba and Mohamed Salah has fueled the migratory projects of countless male youth across the continent. Using over a decade of ethnographic research, African football migration traces the historical, geographical and regulatory features of this migratory process.While a fortunate few do forge a successful career overseas, the book reveals how the vast majority experience involuntary immobility. Meanwhile others who are able to 'go outside' encounter truncated careers at the margins of the industry followed by precarious post-playing career lives. In unpacking these issues, African football migration offers fresh perspectives on the transnational strategies deployed by youth and young men striving to improve their life chances in post-colonial Africa, and the role that mobility, imagined and enacted, plays in these struggles

Conclusion: African football migration: aspirations, experiences and trajectories

Book abstract: Africans have long graced football fields around the world. The success of icons such as Samuel Eto'o, Didier Drogba and Mohamed Salah has fueled the migratory projects of countless male youth across the continent. Using over a decade of ethnographic research, African football migration traces the historical, geographical and regulatory features of this migratory process.While a fortunate few do forge a successful career overseas, the book reveals how the vast majority experience involuntary immobility. Meanwhile others who are able to 'go outside' encounter truncated careers at the margins of the industry followed by precarious post-playing career lives. In unpacking these issues, African football migration offers fresh perspectives on the transnational strategies deployed by youth and young men striving to improve their life chances in post-colonial Africa, and the role that mobility, imagined and enacted, plays in these struggles

Africa: SDP and sports academies

Drawing on the scholarship around the migration-development nexus, recent scholarship on the relationship between development and football migration from West Africa has shown how aspirations to migrate and the academies that seek to facilitate this articulate with varying forms of social and economic development in complex ways, and produce heterogeneous outcomes. This chapter explores these articulations in relation to men’s/boys’ football in Africa, predominantly Ghana, where academies have become increasingly visible. Through examining football academies as sites where discourses of spatial mobility and praxis of development intersect, this discussion explicates a crucial issue at the heart of debates over the migration-development nexus in the context of sport, namely the tension between sport development, the commodification of sporting talent, and aspirations to develop an individual (and their family members) through sport and thereby enact wider social development.<br