A critical and important contribution capturing issues surrounding migration, hope, precarity and pain

Jan Andre Lee Ludvigsen
School of Humanities and Social Science, Liverpool John Moores University

For two decades now, researchers have established that football – and sports more widely – represent exemplary sites through which we may understand and theorize processes of ‘globalization’ and their social, cultural and political ramifications (see Giulianotti and Robertson, 2004). One departure point from this proposition relates to the fact that football involves the transnational movement of not only (global) live television images, news stories and money, but of individuals.

Within this frame, it is possible to situate the phenomena of ‘sports migration’ which José Hildo de Oliveira Filho’s new book, Sport Migrants, Precarity and Identity, examines in the case of Brazilian footballers in Central and Eastern Europe. Specifically, de Oliveira Filho’s book interrogates life stories related to sports migration, through the case of male futsal players employed by Central and Eastern European clubs. In doing so – across the book’s six chapters – he provides unique insights, that are nicely made sense of through classical and contemporary social theory, into the complex world of sports migration and the labour market that essentially underpins these transnational movements. Drawing from a multi-site ethnography including life-history interview data, the author successfully provides a new understanding of an under-examined aspect of (global) football – that is the experiences and untold stories of futsal players.

Despite its status as a global sport, governed by FIFA, futsal – football played indoors on a basketball court with five players on each team – cannot be said to have occupied a very centralized place in the social study of football. In this context, an important thesis offered by de Oliveira Filho relates to what he calls the ‘ethnographic continuum’ between futsal and football – both as a game and industry. As he explains, in the Brazilian context, the two forms of football hence often intersect before athletes – as they get older – have to pursue their dreams in one of the forms, instead of specializing in both, as they hope to ‘make it’ in elite sport.

Here, the positioning of Eastern and Central Europe in the sporting world is also discussed, with the author critiquing the oft-made assumption that these regions are solely for athletes’ seeking to retire or using their leagues as a ‘stepping stone’.

As such, Chapter One asks the question and is titled ‘What comes after hope?’. Here, the author outlines the motivations lying behind the study that informed the book and clarifies the more specific aims related to engaging with how Brazilian futsal players, mostly in their 30s and 40s, ‘respond to the contingencies of their careers abroad and how precarity affects these migrant players’ commodified bodies, their interactions with families, and their plans’ (p. 2). The author also acknowledges the book’s intention to critique dominant ideas of ‘success’ in elite sports, while also shedding a light on athletes’ religiosities and their position within the wider context of global inequality and migration.

Whilst it is – perhaps – easy to assume that the life of a professional athlete is synonymous with astronomical wages, world-class training facilities and extensive support networks, an important starting point for the book is, as the author reminds us, that the athletes he interviewed, indeed, ‘have lives distinct from those of footballers presented by the sports media or commonly interviewed in sports migration studies’ (p. 2). In this chapter, de Oliveira Filho also explains the study’s methodological approach, which involved 16 life-history interviews with Brazilian athletes working in Portugal, Austria, the Czech Republic, Lebanon and Israel, observations of futsal matches and training sessions, alongside other secondary sources, and informal conversations with football agents. It is also certainly interesting to hear the author’s own voice throughout this chapter, which gives us insight into a process that, perhaps resonating with the athletes of the study, is regularly on-the-move. As he recounts: ‘I wrote this book “on my journeys” around “Central” and “Eastern” Europe, taking trains and buses in Prague, Budapest, Krakow, and Cologne’ (p. 3).

In the following Chapter Two, we are provided with detailed life histories of two athletes interviewed in the study: Denis and Roberto. Packed with interesting passages and conversations capturing their life trajectories, this chapter serves to clarify further the ethnographic continuum between futsal and football which is central in order to understand how these two games (and industries) relate to each other and how a professional career in futsal, in many cases, is the ‘result’ of athletes’ attempts to – from a young age – to build a career in both. Here, the positioning of Eastern and Central Europe in the sporting world is also discussed, with the author critiquing the oft-made assumption that these regions are solely for athletes’ seeking to retire or using their leagues as a ‘stepping stone’.  While the data is rich and the chapter nicely sets the scene for the remainder of the book, it could be interesting to read a little more about the state of futsal in Europe here. Whilst it becomes clear that wages are lower, and that precarity characterizes the contracts and working conditions alike in futsal (compared to football), it could have been helpful with somewhat more contextualization into the governance of European futsal, its economies (e.g., wages, transfer fees) and some more discussion historicizing futsal clubs and their position within football clubs in the relevant countries.

Given the book’s focus on Brazilian futsal players, Chapter Three unpacks the notion of ‘Brazilianness’ and the ‘beautiful game’ further, in the context of sports migration. A guiding question here relates to the long-term historical processes that have invented ‘Brazilianness’ and its connection to a so-called Brazilian ‘style of play’ (p. 32). This, de Oliveira Filho argues, has been developed within the aforementioned continuum between futsal and football – but also brings about certain dilemmas speaking to race, racial inequality and stereotypes. Especially so when a style of play becomes seen as a ‘natural attribute’ (p. 37) rather than a product of training systems and approaches to football.

Across Chapters Four and Five, the author goes deeper into themes including religion, masculinities (Chapter Four) and pain, injury, sacrifices, dreams and ambitions (Chapter Five). Collectively, these chapters continue to present interesting insights deriving from the life-history interviews. Overall, these chapters invite the reader to better understand the social world of migrant athletes, what gives the athletes meaning, and how they deal with setbacks like injuries in the context of (often) short-term contracts, the lack of treatment systems and facilities and, sometimes, the movement of responsibilities for rehabilitation onto the athletes themselves. The final chapter, Chapter Six, neatly summarizes the book’s overall arguments and wider implications. One important departure point is, as de Oliveira Filho submits, that ‘sports migration research should compare various athletes to understand the opportunities (for networking, travel) and difficulties (precarious working conditions) migrant face in various “regions” of the world and in “Central” and “Eastern” Europe, specifically’ (p. 85).

Taken together, this book is well-written, and it undoubtedly contributes with new, original insights to an under-researched area of the football and futsal industries. With its rich and detailed accounts – capturing Brazilian futsal players’ voices – the book also weaves in both classical and more contemporary social theory in a meaningful manner, manoeuvring eloquently between the work of Bourdieu, Giddens, Said, Weber and Durkheim (to mention a few) in order to make sense of the issues that emerge in line with athletes’ hopes, migrations, and pains. At times – or, to be more specific, in the book’s front and end – it could have been fruitful to tie the book more tightly or directly to the broader ‘globalization of sport’ literature published over the last two decades (see e.g., Giulianotti and Robertson, 2004; Maguire, 2011), with both sports-related migration and global transfer markets constituting significant consequences of this. Possibly, it could also have been interesting to see the book’s conclusions stretched out a little further, so to gain even more clarification on how the conclusions drawn from a study on sports-related migration drive forward wider scholarly debates on migration in twenty-first century. Though, it must be emphasized that these are only small points and, undoubtedly, this book should be of high interest for sociologists of migration, sport, and work and the workplace. Moreover, it could well find itself on the reading list of readers possessing an interest in athletes’ lives and untold stories of hope and its accompanied dilemmas.

Copyright © Jan Andre Lee Ludvigsen

References

Giulianotti, R. and Robertson, R. (2004) The globalization of football: a study in the glocalization of the ‘serious life’. The British Journal of Sociology, 55(4), 545-568.

Maguire, J.A. (2011) ‘Real politic’ or ‘ethically based’: Sport, globalization, migration and nation-state policies. Sport in Society, 14(7-8), 1040-1055.