Football, Migration and

Globalization:

The Perspective of History
Matthew Taylor
School of Social, Historical and Literary Studies
University of Portsmouth

Published on the Internet, www.idrottsforum.org (ISSN 1652–7224) 2007–03–14

Copyright © Matthew Taylor 2007. All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the
purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the author.

Three much discussed trends within international football during the past 10–15 years are
considered more important than others in fundamentally changing the beautiful game;
they are commercialization, professionalization and globalization. All three are continuous
processes, without evident origin or expected ending, and they are all too often discussed
with scant knowledge of or references to an historical perspective. In his second article for
idrottsforum.org, which reinvestigates contemporary football in the light of new historical
findings, Matthew Taylor problematizes the prevalent conception of one of these processes,
globalization. It is arguably the most problematic, in that it is currently used by all and sundry
as the be all and end all of all sorts of international exchange.
It is the migratory flow of footballers between different continents and countries that is the
object of Taylor’s study, and he starts his investigation with a thorough analysis of the litera-
ture. The concept of globalization is an active ingredient in most analyses of player migra-
tion, albeit, as Taylor notes, mostly employed undefined, uncritically and unhistorically. He
observes that economic historians view globalization as a process that started in the Middle
Ages and since then has developed in phases to the possibly more intense period of the past
fifteen years. Migrations historians, on the other hand, while accepting that capital, goods
and services in ever greater quantities travel around the globe at a steadily increasing pace,
assert that no part of social life is so strongly associated with nation-states and so resistant
to globalizing effects as labour markets.
And this is one of Taylor’s points of departure, the idea that footballer migration is by no
means a new phenomenon – his research shows that the first European football clubs more
often than not were founded by “foreigners”, in Italy, Spain and Switzerland, for example,
and that the players, during the early years around 1900, were a motley crew, represent-
ing many, mostly European, nationalities. His second contention is that footballer migration
cannot be isolated from the general trends and patterns of migration, and he identifies three
sets of determinants, economic, cultural, and institutional/structural, that have influenced
and stimulated the movement of football labour. Matt Taylor’s theses are substantiated by
the kind of thorough, knowledgeable, and exciting historical analysis that is his hallmark; and
afterwards you understand why Gunnar Gren, Gunnar Nordahl and Nisse Liedholm went to
Italy and Milan in the early 50’s, and why Zlatan Ibrahimovic is showing off in Serie A right
now.

1 A longer version of this paper was published as ‘Global Players?: Football Migration and Globalization,
c. 1930-2000’, Historical Social Research, 31, 1 (2006), pp. 7-30
taylor | football, migration and globalization | www.idrottsforum.org | 2007–03–14 

If football is the global sport par excellence, it arguably became so as early as 1930, when
13 national teams headed to Uruguay to compete in the first World Cup competition. Most
historians would point out that this tournament was some way short of a genuinely inter-
national, much less a global, affair. Only four European nations were represented and the
crowds were largest for matches involving the South American countries, particularly the
final between hosts and eventual winners Uruguay and their River Plate rivals Argentina.
In many respects, the early World Cups – the 1934 tournament in Italy and the 1938 edition
in France as well – should be seen as local or regional, rather than international, events. Yet
what the establishment of the World Cup did from the beginning was to expand the inter-
national market for football talent. For the first time, significant numbers of players moved
from one continent to another, many of them ‘pushed’ by the poor economic state of their
homeland and the amateur status of the game they played and ‘pulled’ by the promise of
financial rewards in a land that had been home to their parents. Such interactions arguably
had a positive effect on the quality and style of play at both ends but also fermented debate
around issues of national identity, citizenship, freedom of labour and the inclusion and ex-
clusion of ‘outsiders’. In parts of Europe and South America, certainly, the mass migration
of footballers was a product of these early international encounters.
Football labour migration again became a topic of popular, and increasingly academic,
debate in the last decade of the twentieth century. This paper will summarize and assess
some of the key writing on the subject, revealing how much of it has suffered from being
too focused on contemporary developments, with a corresponding failure to understand
how historical patterns of migration help us to understand the present. The aim of the pa-
per is thus to provide some historical depth to our understanding of the phenomenon of
football player migration. At the heart of the argument are two basic contentions: first, that
football migration is nothing new, but has a long and complicated history; and second,
that it should not be isolated from general migratory trends and patterns. The movement
of footballers from country to country and continent to continent is thus much more than a
product of the current economic and political relations of world football. It reflects a com-
plex set of linkages between specific countries, or sets of countries – linkages that have
deep social, cultural and historical roots.

Theorizing Migration and Football

It is hardly surprising that much of the existing literature on the migration of football tal-
ent, written by social scientists to make sense of contemporary trends, has paid scant at-
tention to its historical context. John Bale and Joseph Maguire’s edited volume The Global
Sports Arena was the first major study to seriously address the issue. The book contains
a number of essays on the ‘tradition’ (or history) of sporting migration, but tends to focus

 �����������
Christiane �����������
Eisenberg, ‘From
������ England
����������������������
to the World: The
���� ���������������������������������������
Spread of Modern Football, 1863-2000’, Moving
Bodies, 1, 1 (2003), p. 16.
 ������������������������������������
John Bale and Joseph Maguire (eds), The Global Sports Arena: Athletic Talent Migration in an Interde-
pendent World, London: Frank Cass, 1994.
taylor | football, migration and globalization | www.idrottsforum.org | 2007–03–14 

on national cases and specific chronological periods, rather than looking at patterns of flow
over time. Theoretically, it is suggestive of possible interpretations, without providing any
comprehensive understanding of the overall phenomenon. In their introduction, the editors
emphasize the importance of ‘the global dimension’ and ‘global system’, going on to put
forward a number of cross-disciplinary frameworks, from modernization and imperialism
to dependency theory and Immanuel Wallerstein’s world system theory. Maguire in par-
ticular has developed this work in a series of journal articles and in a book, Global Sport,
which features a chapter on migrant labour. He has written on migration in cricket, basket-
ball, ice hockey but also football, focusing specifically in two articles on football migration
throughout the European Union and a case study of players at the 1998 World Cup Finals.
Largely based on quantitative analysis of migration since the 1990s, Maguire’s understand-
ing of the patterns and structures of football migration has been underpinned by an exami-
nation of the ‘political economy of global soccer’, although subsequent attention has been
paid to the non-economic, particularly a combination of the political, historical, geographi-
cal, social and cultural ‘interdependencies’ which ‘contour…the migrant trails of world
sport’.
Other scholars have built upon the theoretical frameworks suggested by Bale and
Maguire. Drawing loosely on world system theory, Jonathan Magee and John Sugden have
posited a model that connects the historical diffusion of football to the flow of migrant
labour. From Europe at the core, they argue that the modern game of football spread out-
wards to the semi-periphery of South and Central America, the periphery of Africa and
the external area of Asia, Oceania and North America. The migration of football labour,
they suggest, has tended to move in the opposite direction, to those leagues with greater
financial resources and status at the ‘core’ of world football. Paul Darby offers a more
sophisticated theoretical approach. His study of the migration of African footballers to
Europe draws upon three perspectives: world system theory, imperialism and neo-imperial-
ism and dependency theory. He utilizes all of these approaches but ultimately settles on the
economist Andre Gunder Frank’s thesis of dependent underdevelopment, in which ‘the first
world prospers through the underdevelopment of the third world’, as the most insightful
way of explaining the processes at work when African footballers move to European clubs.
Darby sees the consequent de-skilling of African football according to the requirements
of recruiting clubs in Europe as a perfect illustration of how dependent underdevelopment
works in practice. Focusing on the political economy of European football, meanwhile,
Raffaele Poli has used concepts of transnationalism and circulation to explain the ‘migra-

 �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������
Joseph Maguire and John Bale, ‘Sports Labour Migration in the Global Arena’, in Bale and Maguire
(eds), Global Sports Arena, pp. 1-21.
 ����������������
Joseph Maguire, Global Sport: Identities, Societies, Civilizations, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999; Joseph
Maguire and David Stead, ‘Border Crossings: Soccer Labour Migration and the European Union’, In-
ternational Review of the Sociology of Sport, 33, 1 (1998), pp. 59-73; Joseph Maguire and Bob Pearton,
‘Global Sport and the Migration Patterns of France ’98 World Cup Final Players: Some Preliminary Ob-
servations’, Soccer and Society, 1, 1 (2000), pp. 175-89.
 ��������������������������������������������
Maguire and Pearton, ‘Global Sport’, p. 175.
 ������������������������
Jonathan Magee and John ��������
Sugden, ���������������
‘“The World at �����������������������������������������������������
Their Feet”: Professional Football and International
Labor Migration’, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 26, 4 (2002), pp. 421-37.
 �����
Paul Darby,
������� ‘The
����� New
���� Scramble
��������������������������������������
for Africa: African Football ��������������������
Labour Migration in ���������
Europe’, European
Sports History Review (2000), pp. 217-44.
taylor | football, migration and globalization | www.idrottsforum.org | 2007–03–14 

tory trajectories’ of African football players in Europe, specifically Cameroonians in Swit-

zerland, and the exploitation of these migrants on an economic and human level.
Underpinning each of these perspectives is the notion of globalization. One of the key
‘buzzwords’ among social scientists over the past fifteen years or so, globalization can be
a nebulous term that explains very little if not used carefully. According to one account, it
‘is in danger of becoming…the cliché of our times’; another points to its misuse as ‘a label
to cover whatever strikes our fancy’.10 It is not the intention here to consider the various
meanings of globalization, or to outline the different positions taken by those who employ
the term and those who are more sceptical of its utility. What is evident, however, is that
much of the writing on football migration has tended to employ ‘globalization’ uncritically,
as if it were an established fact rather than a contested concept. This is particularly prob-
lematic given recent emphasis on the limitations of globalization and, more specifically, the
awareness among some sociologists of sport that their colleagues may well have embraced
the concept too readily and enthusiastically.11 John Hargreaves, for example, has suggested
that while globalization may not be a myth ‘neither is it as significant as is often made
out’.12 He sees the concept as little more than modernization by another name, an extension
of processes and developments that have long been recognized by sociologists. In sport as
in other areas, Hargreaves maintains, globalization ‘is uneven and exhibits great variation’,
while nations and national identities continue to represent fundamental barriers to a fully
globalized world.13
A significant flaw in much of the literature on sport and globalization, and globaliza-
tion more generally, has been its insensitivity to historical change. There is, for example,
considerable debate over issues of periodization and a basic lack of agreement over when
globalization actually began. Theorists have dated it from the dawn of history, from the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the late nineteenth century, or, more commonly, as a re-
cent phenomenon of the last fifty years.14 What is usually assumed in all these approaches,
however, is that globalization is a process that is gathering momentum. Historians naturally
have a lot to contribute to these debates and their work is beginning to receive the atten-
tion it deserves. A. G. Hopkins and colleagues, for instance, have suggested a taxonomy of
globalization based on four overlapping stages: archaic globalization; proto-globalization;

 ���������������
Raffaele Poli, ��������������������������������
‘Football Players’ Migration in ��������������������������������������������������������
Europe: A Geo-Economic Approach to Africans’ Mobility’,
in J. Magee, A. Bairner and A. Tomlinson (eds), The Bountiful Game?: Football Identities and Finances,
Oxford: Meyer & Meyer Sport, 2005, pp. 217-32. See also Raffaele Poli, Les migrations internation-
als des footballeurs: Trajectoires de joueurs camerounais en Suisse, Neuchâtel: CIES, 2004. Other na-
tion-based studies of football migration include Amir Ben-Porat, ‘The Political Economy of Soccer: The
Importation of Foreign Soccer Players to the Israeli League’, Soccer and Society, 3, 1 (2002), pp. 54-68;
Gyozo Molnar, ‘Mapping Migrations: Hungary Related Migrations of Professional Footballers after the
Collapse of Communism’, Soccer and Society, 7, 4 (2006), pp. 463-85.
10 �������������������������������������������������������������������
David Held, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt and Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformations: Poli-
tics, Economics and Culture, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999, p. 1; Jan Aart Scholte, Globalization: A
Critical Introdution, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000, p. 15.
11 ���������������
Ronaldo Munck, ���������������������������������
‘Introduction: Globalisation and �������
Labour ��������������������������������������
Transnationalism’, in R. Munck (ed.), Labour
and Globalisation: Results and Prospects, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2004, pp. 1-4.
12 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������
John Hargreaves, ‘Globalisation Theory, Global Sport, and Nations and Nationalism’, in J. Sugden and A.
Tomlinson (eds). Power Games: A Critical Sociology of Sport, London: Routledge, 2002, p. 41. See also
Barrie Houlihan, ‘Sport and Globalization’, in B. Houlihan (ed.), Sport and Society: A Student Introduc-
tion, London: Sage, pp. 345-63.
13 ������������������������������������������
Hargreaves, ‘Globalisation Theory’, p. 33.
14 ������������������������������������������������
For a discussion of periodization, see Scholte, Globalization, pp. 19-20, 62-88.
taylor | football, migration and globalization | www.idrottsforum.org | 2007–03–14 

modern globalization; and post-colonial globalization.15 C. A. Bayly has taken up these cat-
egories in his recent monumental study of world history from the 1780s to the First World
War. He focuses on the gradual erosion of an archaic form of globalization prominent be-
fore the late eighteenth century – and evident in the ‘global exchange of ideas, personnel
and commodities’ – by a nineteenth-century international system ‘driven by cooperating or
conflicting national political economies’.16 Bayly describes this as a move from globaliza-
tion to internationalism but is keen to stress the persistence of these older patterns of glo-
balization and the crucial ‘interconnectedness and interdependence of political and social
changes across the world well before the supposed onset of the contemporary phase of
“globalization” after 1945’.17
Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson have likewise identified the discontinuities
and ruptures in the history of globalization.18 They chart the development of transconti-
nental networks in the period up to the 1750s, which they argue was then followed by an
era of unprecedented global integration based around imperialism, industrialization and
free trade. From 1880, globalization became politicized and subject to increasing national
controls, with a period of economic ‘de-globalization’ following the First World War. This
interlude ended in 1945, the post-war era heralding the development of a new kind of
globalization characterized by a range of integrative political, economic and sociocultural
processes. Osterhammel and Petersson conclude with an analysis of the years since 1970,
considered by many to be the ‘age of globalization’. However, they prefer to see this latest
stage less as a radical departure than part of a longer-term historical transformation. Such
had been the influence of globalization on much of the world’s population as far back as
the eighteenth century that, by the 1980s and 1990s, it was ‘no longer…anything particu-
larly special’.19 Those economic historians who make much of the globalizing trends of
earlier periods have also vigorously challenged the assumed novelty of globalization. It
is now generally accepted, for instance, that prior to the First World War the international
economy was in many respects as integrated as it was to become in the late twentieth cen-
tury.20
For historians of migration, the concept of globalization can be particularly problem-
atic.21 International migration, after all, is not the linear phenomenon it is sometimes as-
sumed to be. As Carl Strikweda has argued, migration across the globe has in fact ‘flowed
and ebbed in two great waves over the last two hundred years’.22 The first of these waves
was the so-called ‘Great Migration’ of the nineteenth century. Between 1860 and 1914, 52

15 ���������������������
A. G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World History, London: Pimlico, 2002.
16 �������������
C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons, Oxford:
Blackwell, 2004, pp. 42, 234.
17 �������
Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, p. 1.
18 �������������������������������������������
Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Globalization: A Short History, Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2003.
19 ���������������������������
Osterhammel and Petersson, Globalization, p. 146.
20 �����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������
A. G. Hopkins, ‘The History of Globalization – and the Globalization of History?’, in Hopkins (ed.), Glo-
balization, pp. 28-29; Timothy J.Hatton and Jeffrey G. Williamson, ‘International Migration 1850-1939:
An Economic Survey’, in T. J. Hatton and J. G. Williamson (eds), Migration and the International Labor
Market, 1850-1939, London: Routledge, 1994, pp. 3-32.
21 ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������
For the contrasting approaches of historians and sociologists to the study of migration and migration the-
ory, see Caroline B. Brettell and James F. Hollifield (eds), Migration Theory: Talking Across Disciplines,
London: Routledge, 2000, especially the essays by Hasia R. Diner and Barbara Schmitter Heisler.
22 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������
Carl Strikweda, ‘Tides of Migration, Currents of History: The State, Economy and the Transatlantic
Movement of Labor in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, International Review of Social History,
taylor | football, migration and globalization | www.idrottsforum.org | 2007–03–14 

million Europeans are estimated to have moved to the Western hemisphere, Asia or Ocean-
ia. The largest population movement involved transatlantic migration from Europe to North
America but Europeans were not the only ones to move. The mass migration of Asians,
often as temporary indentured workers, helped to create what Strikweda has called ‘the
closest approximation to a global labor market that we have ever seen’.23 The First World
War and economic depression brought an end to the ‘Great Migration’. But more important
than a simple fall in numbers, what occurred in the period of the two world wars was an
end to the free migration that had characterized the nineteenth century system. Throughout
Europe and the Americas, governments imposed controls on entry, through quotas, nation-
to-nation agreements, passports, visas and work permits. Most significantly, in the United
States a series of restrictive measures starting with the 1917 literacy test and continuing to
the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, the Immigration Act of 1924 and the National Origins
Act of 1929 effectively cut pre-war immigration levels by four-fifths.24
The second great migratory wave of the post-1945 period has clearly had profound ef-
fects on the composition of societies across the globe. Migration expanded to include more
regions and intensified in volume. So significant has the movement of population been in
the shaping of the contemporary world that two leading writers on the phenomenon have
even christened this ‘the age of migration’.25 Yet the recent wave of migration is not as un-
precedented as it appears. Dirk Hoerder, a leading migration historian, has categorized late
twentieth century ‘global’ migrations as ‘unique in character but not in kind’.26 In many re-
spects, the movement of population flowed more freely in the nineteenth century than it did
in the late twentieth. The vital control that states have maintained in deciding whether to
let migrants in, and under what circumstances, is crucial here. Most writers agree that even
if the movement of goods, capital, even of culture, are being transformed by globalization,
we are some way short of a global labour market. As Malcolm Walters noted in 1995: ‘No
other area of social life remains so under the thrall of states and so resistant to globalizing
effects’.27
All of this is relevant to football. In fact, it makes more sense to see the history of the
international migration of footballers as one of ebb and flow rather than of straightforward
increase and growth; as a series of waves rather than a simple upward curve. Just like any
other type of migration, the movement of footballers has been affected by economic and
political processes and by the restrictions of states and governments, as well as the regula-
tions of national and international football federations. Even in the late 1990s, footballers
were far from free: they were rarely exempt from the systems of work permits, green cards
and other immigration controls which existed throughout the world. For these reasons, and
some others that will be developed in the course of this article, references to globalization
may not be the best way of understanding the history of football migration.

44 (1999), p. 371. See also Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millen-
nium, London: Duke University Press, 2002, pp. 3-7.
23 ����������������������������������������
Strikweda, ‘Tides of Migration’, p. 377.
24 �����������������������
Hatton and Williamson, �������������������������������������
‘International Migration’, pp. 27-28.
25 ������������������������������������
Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller, The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the
Modern World, London: Macmillan, 1993.
26 ���������
Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, p. 8.
27 ����������������
Malcolm Waters, Globalization, London: Routledge, 1995, p. 89.
taylor | football, migration and globalization | www.idrottsforum.org | 2007–03–14 

The migration of footballers is thus not a recent phenomenon: players have, in fact,
always been ‘on the move’.28 Even a cursory glance at the early development of club foot-
ball, particularly in continental Europe, indicates that it was largely founded on the activity
of migrants.29 The most celebrated club founders were the British. The role allocated to the
British abroad in diffusing the game throughout Europe and elsewhere can hardly be un-
derestimated but there were others involved in the process too. Rather than giving the prize
to one nationality, it is crucial to recognize that the spread of football was built on interna-
tional networks. In continental Europe, football became closely associated with Britishness
but it was also linked with notions of economic progress and modernity and more specifi-
cally with a range of technical innovations – from electrification to the development of the
railway network – all of which required massive migration of skilled and highly qualified
workers.
The defining feature of the first football clubs in continental Europe was their cosmo-
politanism. In a French novel published in 1932, the author described the atmosphere of
Lyons Football Club at the turn of the century. It was, he wrote, ‘A mixed society in which
the German-speaking Swiss was together with the Italian, the Englishman with the Egyp-
tian, and the man from Lyons with the man from Marseilles.’30 One could argue that the
real situation was not much different. Even clubs founded by the British, or with British
names, were often initially a mixture of different nationalities and cultures. Started in 1893
by a group of Englishmen and Scotsmen under the patronage of the local British Consu-
late, Genoa Cricket and Football Club was a strictly British affair until the arrival of James
Spensley in 1897. Spensley, a doctor in charge of the British shipping crews, decided to
broaden membership to Italians but also other nationalities such as Swiss and Austrians.
Conscious of football’s association with modernity, he approached members of local high
society to join the club. Many of those who joined, such as the Italian-Swiss Pasteur broth-
ers, were highly educated, anglicized and well-travelled ‘sportsmen’.
The multinational composition and cosmopolitanism of Genoa was repeated elsewhere
in Italy. When Bari Football Club was founded in 1908, Swiss, German, Austrian, French,
Spanish, British and Italian tradesmen played alongside one another in the same team.31
The two clubs founded in Naples in the early twentieth century reflected the cosmopolitan
identity of the city. Naples (pronounced with an English accent) and Internapoli included
among their first teams an Egyptian fine arts student, three Germans, two Swiss white-col-
lar workers and representatives of Belgium and Malta. Naples also fielded three British
professionals alongside the Scarfoglio brothers, who like the Pasteurs were Italians who
had been educated in Switzerland. To complete the club’s exotic image, two Norwegians
signed in 1913.32 In the north, Torino, Milan and Internazionale, like Genoa, were often
lambasted as ‘English’ teams but their memberships were invariably a mixture of nationali-
ties.

28 ��������������������������������������������������
Maguire and Bale, ‘Sports Labour Migration’, p. 1.
29 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������
Much of the following section is based on Pierre Lanfranchi and Matthew Taylor, Moving With the Ball:
The Migration of Professional Footballers, Oxford: Berg, 2001, chapter 1.
30 ����������������
Joseph Jolinon, Le joueur de balle, Paris: Ferenczi, 1931, p. 83.
31 ������������������
Gianni Antonucci, Bari 90, 1908-1998, Bari: Corcelli, 1998, pp. 14-18.
32 ���������������
Roberto Ciuni, Il pallone di Napoli, Milan: Shakespeare and Company, 1985, pp. 16-21; Giogio Nicolini,
La storia del Napoli, Rome: Editrice Italiana, 1967, pp. 14-18; Elio Tramontana and Gianni Virnicchi, Il
Napoli dale origini ad oggi, Naples: Arte tipografica, 1970, p. 11.
taylor | football, migration and globalization | www.idrottsforum.org | 2007–03–14 

The creation of FC Barcelona provides another good example of this tendency. The
club was founded in 1899 by Hans Gamper, a Swiss accountant representing the interests
of various French and Swiss companies. It was composed entirely of foreigners who had
been prevented from joining a local gymnastics clubs. Players from the first Barcelona
team came from as far afield as Britain, Switzerland, Germany and Austria and the club
colours of blue and red, chosen by Gamper because they were the same colours as those of
his home canton’s flag, represented its initial cosmopolitan identity. Only from the 1920s,
according to Gabriel Colomé, did FC Barcelona develop an important role in Catalan
political and social life, transforming itself from a team of foreigners into ‘a symbol of
Catalonia’.33 Even the foundation of German clubs, generally more nationalistic than those
in southern Europe, was often the work of migrants or highly mobile locals. The found-
ing members of Bayern Munich, for instance, were hardly locals: Heiner Gillmeister has
concluded that they ‘were Saxons, Hanseatics, Jews, Prussians, foreigners…for short, there
were no Bavarians’.34
Most of the great pioneers of European football fitted this model of mobile cosmopoli-
tanism. Before he founded FC Barcelona, Gamper had studied in Basle, Geneva and Zurich
(where he helped to set up FC Zurich in 1897) and had worked and played football in Ly-
ons.35 Both Henry Monnier, a French banker and Vittorio Pozzo, the famous Italian man-
ager of the 1934 and 1938 World Cup teams, spent time studying and playing football in
Switzerland and England, before establishing clubs in their own countries. The most prolif-
ic club founder of all was the German Jew Walter Bensemann. Educated at a private school
in Switzerland, Bensemann established his first club, FC Karlsruhe, at the age of sixteen.
He went on to found a number of other football clubs in Switzerland and Germany before
moving to Britain for some time and later becoming involved, like Pozzo, in the formative
years of European sports journalism.36 The similarity in the patterns of these lives is quite
striking. All were educated in Switzerland, all were trained in aspects of business and com-
merce, and all had spent time in Britain and/or were anglophiles. Most importantly, they
were all on the move. Although very different from their professional descendents, Eu-
rope’s first football players and club founders were migrants.

Determinants of Migration

In studying the historical patterns of migratory flows, it is possible to identify a range

of factors that have influenced and stimulated (or, conversely, slowed and restricted) the
movement of football labour. Three main sets of determinants can be identified: economic,
cultural and institutional or structural. The first of these, economic determinants, are un-
doubtedly crucial, often taking precedence in the explanatory literature. As we have noted,
one possible way of conceptualizing the whole process of football migration has been to

33 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������
Gabriel Colomé, ‘Football and National Identity in Catalonia: FC Barcelona and Español’, in S. Geh-
rmann (ed.), Football and Regional Identity in Europe, Münster: Lit Verlag, 1997, pp. 113-19.
34 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������
Heiner Gillmeister, ‘The Tale of Little Franz and Big Franz: The Foundation of Bayern Munich FC’, Soc-
cer and Society, 1, 2 (2000), p. 81.
35 ��������������������
See Nicolau Casaus, Gamper, Barcelona: Labor, 1984.
36 ������������������������������
On Pozzo, see Vittorio Pozzo, Campioni del Mondo, Quarant’anni di storio del calico italiano, Rome:
CEN, 1960; on Bensemann, Heiner Gillmeister, ‘The First European Soccer Match: Walter Bensemann’,
The Sports Historian, 17, 2 (1997), pp. 1-13.
taylor | football, migration and globalization | www.idrottsforum.org | 2007–03–14 

see it as a movement of sporting labour from the economic periphery to the economic core.
According to one such account, the European core has acted ‘as a magnet for [football] la-
bour migrants on a global scale’.37 There is certainly a great deal to be said for this type of
approach. The movement of playing talent from Africa and Latin America to Europe – and
within Europe, from east to west – has been a characteristic of world football for many
years. The reasons for this are not difficult to ascertain. Weak national economies and fi-
nancial crises have often worked to ‘push’ players out while, on the ‘pull’ side, the wealthi-
est European leagues, in particular, have been able to offer unrivalled financial rewards.
However, this type of simplistic centre-periphery model fails to do justice to the com-
plexity of football player migration. First of all, the centre and periphery in football do not
correspond completely to the conventional centre and periphery of world system theory.
North America, for example, a core economy in every respect, is on the football periphery.
In much the same way, many of the peripheral countries of the southern hemisphere (such
as Brazil and Argentina) are much closer to the core of world football. The relative devel-
opment of national football infrastructures is significant here. Within Europe, for instance,
one of the main migratory routes has historically been from the ‘poorer’ north to the ‘rich-
er’ south, an obvious contrast to general economic relationships. We must remember that
many of the rich countries of northern Europe have been exporters rather than importers of
football labour. Before 1954, for instance, Dutch football was strictly amateur and so play-
ers anxious to earn a living from the game had to go abroad. Faas Wilkes, the most famous
Dutch footballer of the period, migrated in 1949, playing first in Italy for Internazionale
and then with Valencia in Spain. But his exile meant his exclusion from international foot-
ball; he did not play again for the Netherlands until he returned home in the mid-1950s.38
Likewise, before the 1980s the Scandinavian leagues were amateur and still are largely
conducted on a semi-professional basis. The pull of lucrative contracts in the professional
leagues of the south of Europe has proved to be difficult to resist for generations of Danish,
Norwegian and Swedish players.39
A more fundamental problem, however, is that this type of economic-centred explana-
tion is insensitive to socio-cultural differences and the variables of geography, language,
religion and colonial and post-colonial ties. For many football migrants, language, culture
and heritage have been at least as important as any economic considerations. This is clear
if we consider in more detail their precise destinations. The first South Americans to cross
the Atlantic in the late 1920s and 1930s, for instance, were certainly attracted by good
contracts but also by the prospect of achieving this fortune and fame in the land of their
parents. Many of the Argentinian migrants to Europe, for example, were descendents of
Italian immigrants who had settled in Argentina in the nineteenth century. The families of
Julio Libonatti, who signed for Torino in 1925, and Raimundo Orsi, who joined Juventus
in 1928, were both from Genoa. Renato Cesarini, another Juventus signing, had actually
been born in Italy. Similarly, the majority of Brazilian migrants to Italy in the 1930s were
of Italian descent. Many of them were recruited specifically from the Palestra Italia Club

37 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������
Jonathan Magee, ‘Historical Concepts of Football and Labour Migration in England’, paper presented at
the 18th Conference of the British Society of Sports History, Eastbourne, April 1999.
38 �����������������������
Lanfranchi and Taylor, Moving With the Ball, pp. 206-07.
39 David
������ Stead
��������������������������
and Joseph Maguire, ������������������������������������������
‘“Rites de Passage” or Passage to Riches? �������������������������
The Motivation and Objec-
tives of Nordic/ Scandinavian Players in English League Soccer’, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 24,
1 (2000), pp. 36-60.
taylor | football, migration and globalization | www.idrottsforum.org | 2007–03–14 10

of São Paulo (now Palmeiras).40 Significantly, these migratory routes have by and large re-
mained consistent over time. Of the 351 foreign players who played professionally in Italy
between 1929 and 1965, over half (176) came from Argentina, Brazil or Uruguay, and the
majority had Italian origins. And while 70 per cent of foreign stars in Spanish football dur-
ing the 1970s came from South America, only seven South Americans in total played in the
German Bundesliga between 1963 and 1983.41 At the beginning of the twenty-first century,
Spain, Portugal and Italy were still the pre-eminent destinations for South American foot-
ballers, even if migrants from the continent were increasingly found plying their trade in
many European countries. In the 1999/2000 season, for example, there were 74 Brazilians
in the Portuguese league and 42 Argentinians in Spain. By 2005/06, there were 49 Argen-
tinians and 41 Brazilians playing at the top level in Spain and 24 Argentinians and 41 Bra-
zilians in Italy. 62.2 per cent of the foreign players in Spain and 50.9 per cent of those in
Italy originated from Latin American federations compared with 5.6 per cent and 18.8 per
cent in England and Germany respectively.42
A similar pattern can be discerned among African migrants to Europe. From as early as
the 1930s, French professional clubs mined their colonies for football talent. Players from
the North African territories of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia were initially the most com-
mon, some following the migratory paths of unskilled immigrant workers, others enrolling
as students at French universities. The Algerians Ali Benouma and Kouider Daho were
among the first employees in the newly professionalized French national league in 1932:
the former combined his contract at FC Sète with manual work in the docks, while the lat-
ter continued his medical studies. Most prominent of all the African soccer migrants of the
1930s was the Moroccan-born Larbi Ben Barek, who transferred to Marseille in 1938 and
went on to represent the French national side 17 times during the late 1930s and 1940s.43
North Africans were increasingly involved in the French professional league after the Sec-
ond World War. Between 1945 and 1962, 76 Algerians, 34 Moroccans and seven Tunisians
played in the top level of French football; 12 of these players were selected to represent
France. From the 1950s, footballers from Francophone West Africa became equally promi-
nent numerically and symbolically. From negligible numbers in the mid-1950s, there were
already some 43 West Africans employed by French clubs in 1960.44 What is more, from
Raoul Diagne and Ben Barek in the 1930s and 1940s, through to Zinadine Zidane and
Patrick Viera in the 1990s, African migrants or sons of African migrants have played an
important, if complex and changing, role in representing France and articulating notions of
French national identity on the football field.45
Portugal too, and Belgium to a lesser extent, built its football reputation upon sons of its
colonies and former colonies. From the 1950s, Portuguese clubs began to recruit players
from Africa, largely as a result of the defeats experienced in propaganda tours to Angola
and Mozambique. Players such as Miguel Arcanjo, Lucas Figuereido ‘Matateu’, Mario

40 �����������������������
Lanfranchi and Taylor, Moving With the Ball, pp. 74-77, 81-82.
41 �������
Pierre ������������
Lanfranchi, �������������������������������
‘The Migration of Footballers: The
����������������������������������������������������
Case of France, 1932-1982’, in Bale and Maguire
(eds), Global Sports Arena, p. 68.
42 ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������
Paolo Piani, ‘Studio sull’incidenza degli stranieri nele rose dei club europei’, News letter del settore teni-
co FIGC, 1, 2 (2000); Raffaele Poli and Loïc Ravenel, Annual Review of the European Football Players’
Labour Market, Neuchâtel: CIES, 2006, pp. 31-34, 39.
43 �����������������������
Lanfranchi and Taylor, Moving With the Ball, pp. 172-73; Darby, ‘New Scramble for Africa’.
44 �����������������������
Lanfranchi and Taylor, Moving With the Ball, pp. 173-75.
45 ����������������
See Geoff Hare, Football in France: A Cultural History, Oxford: Berg, 2003, pp. 131-38.
taylor | football, migration and globalization | www.idrottsforum.org | 2007–03–14 11

Coluna and Eusebio went on to star for their respective club sides and represent Portugal.
By the 1960s Africans were increasingly recognized as the most cost-effective acquisitions
for European club sides, yet they remained concentrated in three countries with a colonial
past – Belgium, France and Portugal. Only Britain, at this time a no-go area for ‘foreign’
footballers in general, failed to utilize its colonial resource to any significant degree.46 Long
after decolonization these post-colonial connections were still strong. In 2000, 69 per cent
of the Africans in Portuguese football were from the former Portuguese colonies of Angola,
Mozambique, Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. Even in Belgium, which had developed
more generally over the previous two decades as a ‘first stop’ or ‘holding bay’ for African
footballers and agents looking to develop a career in Europe, the equivalent figure was 31
per cent. In France, 59 per cent of the 162 African players were from former French territo-
ries and by 2005/06 players from Senegal, the Ivory Coast and Cameroon represented the
second, third and fourth largest foreign contingents respectively in Ligue 1.47
Alongside economic factors and cultural and historical traditions, institutional or struc-
tural factors have been instrumental in helping to shape patterns of migration. We could
mention a number of factors here – many involving governmental and regional agencies
outside the football world – but will limit ourselves to the role of national football federa-
tions in controlling immigration. A quick snapshot of the 1930s reveals the range of differ-
ent approaches to the frequently articulated ‘problem’ of foreign players. At the protection-
ist end were England and Germany. In 1931, the English FA introduced a two-year resi-
dency qualification for non-British professionals in major competitions, which effectively
meant that foreigners could only play as amateurs. A planned professional league in Ger-
many was shelved when Hitler came to power in 1933 and the German federation banned
the involvement of foreign players and managers at every level. The French professional
league, formed in 1932, allowed its clubs to field up to five foreign players in every match.
The Italian league, meanwhile, banned non-nationals but permitted the importation of play-
ers with dual citizenship (the so-called rimpatriati) from South America. At the opposite
end of the spectrum to England and Germany was the American Soccer League (ASL) in
the United States, which made no restrictions on the grounds of nationality.
48

After 1945, national immigration policies continued to be important in determining

where migrants actually went. Italian football, for instance, opened its doors to foreigners
but placed limits on numbers. More interestingly, in 1949 it introduced the concept of the
oriundi alongside the categories of nationals and foreigners. The oriundi – originally from
in Spanish – were South American players of Italian or Spanish descent who could have
their ‘original’ citizenship reinstated. In Franco’s Spain, meanwhile, reforms in the 1950s
led to the development of dual nationality agreements with South American nations, and
subsequent increases in the number of imports. But this relative openness to migrant talent

46 �����������������������
Lanfranchi and Taylor, Moving With the Ball, pp. 177-80; Paul Dietschy, ‘Football Players’ Migrations: A
Political Stake’, Historical Social Research, 31, 1 (2006), pp. 38-40.
47 ���������������������������������������������������������
Darby, ‘New Scramble for Africa’; Lanfranchi and Taylor, Moving With the Ball, pp. 182-83; Poli, ‘Foot-
ball Players’ Migration’, p. 226; Poli and Ravenel, Annual Review, p. 39.
48 ��������������������
See Matthew Taylor, The Leaguers: The Making of Professional Football in England, 1900-1939, Liv-
erpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005, p. 237; Pierre Lanfranchi and Alfred Wahl, ‘La profession-
nalisation du football en France (1920-1939)’, Modern & Contemporary France, 6, 3 (1998), pp. 313-25;
Simon Martin, Football and Fascism: The National Game under Mussolini, Oxford: Berg, 2004, pp.
189-97; Colin Jose, American Soccer League, 1921-31: The Golden Years of American Soccer, Lanham:
Scarecrow, 1998.
taylor | football, migration and globalization | www.idrottsforum.org | 2007–03–14 12

was not constant. In France and Spain, the borders were closed to footballers in 1962; they
reopened again in the early 1970s. Italy’s famous defeat to North Korea in 1966 convinced
the federation to shut its gates on foreign entry for over 15 years. English football, which
had effectively barred foreign professionals since 1931, finally removed its prohibitive
residency qualification in 1978. The loosening and tightening of these restrictions have
naturally had a significant effect on patterns of migration over time.

Globalization, Internationalization and Migration Systems

From at least the late 1980s, it could be argued that a number of factors combined to trans-
form the international migration of footballers. The ‘new’ migration in Europe initiated by
the end of the Cold War, the collapse of Communist regimes and the subsequent opening of
national borders certainly had an impact on the volume of football players exported from
Eastern Europe to the West.49 More significantly, perhaps, the Bosman ruling of 1995 has
been deemed responsible for the ‘internationalization of European league football’ and a
new ‘more globalized pattern of player mobility’.50 The ruling was undoubtedly signifi-
cant in guaranteeing football players the same freedom enjoyed by other European Union
workers to move, once their contracts had ended, to whichever employee they wished
without the burden of a transfer fee, although some writers have certainly overplayed its
‘revolutionary’ and ‘global’ impact. In fact, we need to locate the Bosman ruling alongside
a range of technological, structural and economic developments that combined to facilitate
the increasing volume and speed of football player migration during the 1990s.51 Of these,
the expansion of television coverage was probably most important. It not only allowed
many viewers across Europe (and beyond) access for the first time to the matches of the
major championships of other nations but, with the reorganization and enlargement of the
European Champions League, also increased the amount of non-domestic football shown
regularly on national television. All these factors certainly facilitated the development of a
vibrant international market and has meant that club owners and managers, as well as spec-
tators, are more likely to have seen their new signings on the screen before they witness
them in the flesh.
Yet for all this, it would be mistaken to think that these developments necessarily led
to the creation of a global market for football talent. The distinction between globaliza-
tion and internationalization is significant here. In a recent article on foreign footballers in
England after the Second World War, Patrick McGovern has argued that the labour market
in English football has been characterized above all by a process of internationalization

49 �����������������������������������
Khalis Koser and Helma Kutz (eds), The New Migration in Europe: Social Constructions and Social
Realities, London: Macmillan, 1998; Council of Europe, People on the Move: New Migration Flows in
Europe, Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 1992; Vic Duke, ‘The Flood from the East?: Perestroika and the
Migration of Sports Talent from Eastern Europe’, in Bale and Maguire (eds), Global Sports Arena, pp.
153-67.
50 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������
Takahashi Yoshio and John Horne, ‘Japanese Football Players and the Sport Talent Migration Business’,
in W. Manzenreiter and J. Horne (eds), Football Goes East: Business, Culture and the People’s Game
in China, Japan and South Korea, London: Routledge, 2004, p. 83; John Williams, Is It All Over?: Can
Football Survive the Premier League?, Reading: South Street Press, 1999, p. 41.
51 �����������������������������������
On this see Lanfranchi and Taylor, Moving With the Ball, pp. 222-29.
taylor | football, migration and globalization | www.idrottsforum.org | 2007–03–14 13

which is ‘marked by a regional rather than a global orientation’.52 There had, he argues,
been remarkable continuity in the underlying trends of player recruitment from 1945 until
1995. Despite a relative decline from the late 1970s, English football continued to draw
on talent from what McGovern calls the ‘Celtic periphery’ (Scotland, Northern Ireland
and the Irish Republic) as well as (to a lesser extent) players from the English-speaking
Commonwealth. Moreover, he suggests that those ‘overseas’ players who arrived gener-
ally came from a small number of regions, principally Scandinavia and Northern Europe,
especially the Netherlands. Thus, for McGovern, the notion of a globalized labour market
is fundamentally flawed because it ignores the degree to which ‘labour market behaviour is
socially embedded’. Employers prefer to ‘engage in repeated transactions with reliable or
known sources’ and these transactions are heavily influenced by social and cultural ties and
by established historical and economic relationships.53
We could build upon McGovern’s argument that patterns of international migration
within football are ‘socially embedded’ by suggesting that, for the historian, it makes more
sense to study the migration of footballers as a series of interlocking migration systems or
networks rather than a single global labour market. Indeed it could be argued that a broader
geographical and chronological understanding of the phenomenon comes from adopting
what has been called a ‘systems approach’. Applied initially by social geographers to the
study of rural-urban migration, the systems approach has become a popular tool in the
analysis of contemporary international migrations. According to this perspective, migration
is a part of wider flows of goods, services, ideas and information and takes place within a
set of circuits that form distinct geographical systems. The systems approach has been ap-
plied by historians such as Jan Lucassen in his study of migration in the North Sea region
of Europe from 1600 to 1900 and, more recently, by Marcelo Borges in his examination of
the regional and transatlantic migration circuits of workers from the Algarve between the
eighteenth and twentieth centuries.54 What it offers is a means of considering ‘the migra-
tion experience of particular geographical areas within global patterns of migration’.55
How can we define a migration system? Lucassen has called it a ‘composite of “push”
and “pull” areas’, while Hoerder has described it as ‘a cluster of moves between a region
of origin and a receiving region that continues over a period of time’.56 At a basic level,
a migration system is constituted by a group of countries that exchange relatively large
numbers of migrants with each other. Such a system may only include two countries, but
normally involves all those linked by unusually large migration flows. The existence of a
system would also need to include other linkages between countries, such as historical, cul-
tural and colonial ties, along of course with economic connections. Its emergence and per-
petuation would rest on a series of networks – be they individuals or institutions, national
or international – which link the migrants to the system. And finally, population exchanges
within the system involve both permanent and temporary movements (including those of

52 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������
Patrick McGovern, ‘Globalization or Internationalization?: Foreign Footballers in the English League,
1946-95’, Sociology, 36, 1 (2002), p. 30.
53 ���������������������������������������������������������������������
McGovern, ‘Globalization or Internationalization?’, pp. 23, 24, 29-30
54 ��������������
Jan Lucassen, Migrant Labour in Europe: The Drift to the North Sea, London: Croom Helm, 1987;
Marcelo J. Borges, ‘Migrant Systems in Southern Portugal: Regional and Transatlantic Circuits of Labor
Migration in the Algarve (Eighteenth-Twentieth Centuries)’, International Review of Social History, 45
(2000), pp. 171-208.
55 ������������������������������������
Borges, ‘Migration Systems’, p. 175.
56 ����������
Lucassen, Migrant Labour, p. 4; Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, p. 16.
taylor | football, migration and globalization | www.idrottsforum.org | 2007–03–14 14

students, military personnel and business men), and thus would have to account for return-
migration and re-emigration as well as permanent migration.57
Time is perhaps the crucial dimension of migration systems. Systems evolve over time:
the product not of short-term flows, but recurrent patterns of migration. But their relative
stability and structure does not mean that these systems are not open to change and adapta-
tion over time, responsive to changing social, demographic, economic and political circum-
stances. Systems can evolve, adapt or disappear entirely and, similarly, while one system
might dominate in a specific region, they are not necessarily exclusive and can overlap.

The British Migration System

The application of a systems approach to the migration of footballers can provide interest-
ing perspectives. Above all, what it allows us to do is examine the relationship between re-
gional patterns on the one hand and global patterns on the other. We have already touched
upon a number of these systems and can outline the fundamental relationships involved
in some of them here in a little more detail. A good example is the system based around
England and the countries of the United Kingdom and Ireland, which has been the focus
of McGovern’s work and indeed much of the published research on football migration.
As originators of both the modern game of football and its professional variant, we might
expect the nations of the United Kingdom to be at the centre of any international migration
systems. Yet their role has been characterized by marginality, having little more than inter-
mittent contact with all but a select group of nations.
The dominant migration relationship here has been that within the UK, between Eng-
land, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, with England occupying the central position. From the
late nineteenth century, English clubs heavily recruited Scottish players. By 1910, Scots
accounted for 168 (19.3 per cent) of the 870 players in the Football League and even 45
(11.7 per cent) of the 385 in the rival Southern League. By 1925 the figure had risen to 302
Scottish players in the Football League’s four divisions, although this represented a slightly
diminished 15.5 per cent of the total professional workforce.58 If the Football League vice-
president Charles Sutcliffe could call Scotland the ‘great football emporium’ for English
recruiters, south Wales had likewise become a ‘convenient and free football nursery’,
with Arsenal, for example, reported to have 14 Welsh players in its 1938/39 squad. The
movement was not one-way, however, with the best Welsh clubs attracting talent from all
parts of the British Isles. Martin Johnes has shown that, of the 94 first-team professionals
contracted to Cardiff City, Merthyr Town, Newport County and Swansea Town during the

57 ��������������������������������
Mary M. Kritz and Hani Zlotnik, ��������������������������������
‘Global Interactions: Migration ��������������������������������������
Systems, Processes, and Policies’, in
M. M. Kritz, L. L. Lim and H. Zlotnik (eds), International Migration Systems: A Global Approach, Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, pp. 1-16; John Salt, ‘A Comparative Overview of International trends and Types,
1950-80’, International Migration Review, 23, 3 (1989), pp. 438-41; Douglas S. Massey, Joaquin Arango,
Graeme Hugo, Ali Kouaouchi, Adela Pellegrino and J. Edward Taylor, ‘Theories of International Migra-
tion: A Review and Appraisal’, Population and Development Review, 19, 3 (1993), pp. 431-66; Yoko
Sellek, Migrant Labour in Japan, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001, pp. 44-50.
58 ���������������������������������������������
These figures are adapted from Wray Vamplew, Pay Up and Play the Game: Professional Sport in Brit-
ain, 1875-1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 205 (Table 13.5); Athletic News, 3, 10,
17, 24 August 1925.
taylor | football, migration and globalization | www.idrottsforum.org | 2007–03–14 15

1925/26 season, 42 were English and 18 Scottish, while Cardiff managed to win the 1927
FA Cup Final with only three Welsh players.59
This basic system organized around England as the buyer (or receiver) of football mi-
grants and the other British nations as sellers (or senders) remained largely in tact until the
Second World War. However, the boundaries of the labour market for all British players
gradually expanded over the course of the twentieth century as migratory routes multi-
plied and diversified. The catalyst for the first major migrations of British players were the
economic difficulties caused by the depression, which throughout the inter-war years left
large numbers of professional footballers unemployed or in a precarious position through
reduced wages and even less job security than previously existed. The ‘pull’ factors were
the creation of professional leagues in the United States in the 1920s and France during the
1930s. The American Soccer League, ASL, successfully recruited a stream of prominent
British players. By 1926/27, at the height of what became called the ‘American Menace’
by the Scottish and English press, there were as many as 108 Scottish, English and Irish
imports in the ASL.60 The creation of the French league similarly benefited from the avail-
ability of large numbers of disengaged British professionals. The new league began its first
season with 43 imported Britons – representing over 40 per cent of the foreign workforce
– among its ranks.61
One of the other key migrant trails of the twentieth century – the movement of South
African players to British football – was also the product of the inter-war years. Liverpool,
in particular, recruited a small colony of South Africans in the 1920s and 1930s, including
goalkeeper Arthur Riley and inside-forward Gordon Hodgson. Their success stimulated a
consistent flow of South African talent to British clubs throughout the 1930s: at Hudders-
field Town, for instance, which recruited the goalkeeper Dennis Leary and right-winger
George Wienand, and at Clyde, where the Johannesburg-born centre-forward Dudley Mil-
ligan plied his trade. After the Second World War, Charlton Athletic’s manager Jimmy Seed
re-trod the Liverpool path by exploiting the South African resource, bringing in players
like Eddie Firmani (later an Italian international) and John Hewie (later a Scottish interna-
tional). By 1964, the FA could report that the ‘great majority’ of the small colony of foreign
employees in the top two English divisions came from South Africa.62
The movement of footballers after 1945 built upon these established migrant trails. The
Scottish contingent remained easily the largest, representing just over two-thirds (68.4
per cent) of all ‘foreign’ players engaged in the Football League (and Premiership) from
1946 to 1995.63 One study found that some 1,653 Scots had played in the English league
from 1946 to 1981, the majority arriving in the 1950s and 1960s. Sixty-one players moved
from the Scottish to the English league between 1968/69 and 1972/73, but the trend was
nonetheless downwards. Whereas the number of Scots in the Football League totalled 258

59 Topical Times, 18 March 1933; Martin Johnes, Soccer and Society: South Wales, 1900-1939, Cardiff:
University of Wales Press, 2002, pp. 77, 178 (Table 6.1). Compared to the Welsh, the Irish were less well
represented in English football at this stage, although they were tempted in greater numbers to Scottish
clubs, particularly those associated with immigrant communities in Glasgow, Edinburgh and elsewhere.
60 ����������
See Jose, American Soccer League.
61 Lanfranchi
���������������������
and Wahl, ��������������������������������������������������
‘La professionnalisation du football’, pp. 316-21.
62 ������������
Jimmy Seed, The Jimmy Seed Story, London: Phoenix, 1957, pp. 53-61; FA Yearbook, 1964/65.
63 ����������������������������������������������������������
McGovern, ‘Globalization or Internationalization?’, p. 29.
taylor | football, migration and globalization | www.idrottsforum.org | 2007–03–14 16

in 1965, this figure had dropped to 198 by 1975.64 What characterized the period from the
1970s onwards was not so much the replacement of the British-based migration system as
its extension. The key change in terms of the importation of migrant labour was, as we saw
earlier, the lifting of the effective ban on overseas players, leading to the arrival of Ossie
Ardiles and Ricky Villa at Tottenham Hotspur and, shortly afterwards, Arnold Muhren and
Frans Thijssen at Ipswich Town. Scandinavian players had already filtered into the system
through Scotland (which had no ban on foreign players) and were joined by Dutch, Yugo-
slavs and the already established flows of players from the British Commonwealth (espe-
cially South Africa) as the main ‘foreign’ imports up until 1985 (see Tables 1 and 2).

Table 1: Regional Origins of Non-English and Welsh Players in the English

Football League, 1976-95

% (No.) % (No.)

Region 1976-85 1986-95 Total No.

Celtic (Sco, Irl, N.I.) 80.3 (288) 56.5 (281) 569
Europe 5.8 (21) 11.9 (59) 80
Scandinavia 2.8 (10) 10.7 (53) 63
Commonwealth 2.5 (9) 8.7 (43) 52
Central and E. Europe 5.0 (18) 5.6 (28) 46
Africa 1.7 (6) 2.6 (13) 19
Latin America 1.9 (7) 1.6 (8) 15
USA/ Other 0.0 (0) 2.4 (12) 12
Total 100.0 (359) 100.0 (497) 856

Source: Patrick McGovern, ‘Globalization or Internationalization?: Foreign Footballers in

the English League, 1946-95’, Sociology, 36, 1 (2002), p. 30 (Table 1).

Table 2: Origins of Foreign Imports Registered with Football League Clubs,

September 1980

Country of Origin No.

Yugoslavia 11
Argentina 4
Holland 4
Poland 3
Denmark 2
Israel 2
South Africa 2
Belgium 1
Finland 1
Italy 1
Spain 1
Switzerland 1

Source: Data drawn from Professional Footballers’ Association, Work Permits File, 1978-
80. List of Foreign Players, 29 September 1980.

64 ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������
H. F. Moorhouse, ‘Blue Bonnets over the Border: Scotland and the Migration of Footballers’, in Bale and
Maguire (eds), Global Sports Arena, p. 81; Bob Crampsey, The Scottish Footballer, Edinburgh: William
Blackwood, 1978, p. 32.
taylor | football, migration and globalization | www.idrottsforum.org | 2007–03–14 17

The crucial change to occur in the British migration system over the last twenty years has
been the transformation of England particularly (but also Scotland to a lesser extent) into
a major importer of football talent. The British or Celtic dimension of recruitment was
still evident but declined further still from the late 1970s. Whereas 80.3 per cent of the
non-English and Welsh players in the Football League between 1976 and 1985 came from
Scotland, Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland, this figure dropped to 56.5 per cent
in the subsequent ten years (Table 1). Indeed, McGovern has shown that from the mid-
1980s the volume of Scottish and Irish signings in English football fell below those com-
ing from ‘international’ destinations for the first time.65 Much can be made of this move
towards what is often seen as an ‘international’ or ‘global’ dimension of recruitment. The
rapid increase in the number of foreign players in British football in the 1990s can hardly
be questioned. There were just 11 foreigners in the Premiership in the 1992/93 season, but
this figure rose to 66 in 1995/96 and had reached 166 by the 1998/99 season. And while
English clubs had recruited players from 23 different countries before 1985, ten years later
this figure had reached 41, and by 2005/06 there were 60 nationalities represented in the
Premiership alone.66 All this certainly suggests an increasing diversification of migratory
routes into British football and an emerging global dimension to its labour recruitment
strategies. What is more, the importation of leading players from France, Italy, Spain and
directly from South American countries does suggest that this particular UK-based migra-
tion system is beginning to establish more permanent links with other systems. Yet all this
should not deflect us from the salience of recurrent patterns of migration, based on well-
established circuits – involving players from Scandinavia, the Netherlands and the British
Commonwealth as well as the UK itself – and on social ties and networks which tend to be
relatively limited in geographical scope.

Other Migration Systems

Another interesting example that has already been mentioned, and which we can briefly
sketch here, is what might be called the South American-South European migration sys-
tem.67 At the core of this system was the so-called ‘ethnic’ migration of the 1930s which
connected Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay as sending countries to the receiving region of
southern Europe, principally Italy but also Spain and, to a lesser extent, France. Notwith-
standing its centrality, this system had also been bound up with other continental migration
systems in both Europe and South America. Thus while Argentina has been central to this
transatlantic flow, it has also had an essential position at the heart of the South American
system, attracting players consistently from most countries in the continent from the 1930s
and 1940s onwards. What is more, the waxing and waning of different migration systems
over time is well illustrated in this case. During the 1960s and 1970s, the transcontinental
system co-existed with the transatlantic system. The former was preeminent in the 1960s,
when South American clubs, often under political influence, placed restrictions on the free-
dom of movement of the best players. At Santos, for example, Pele received the favours
of the authorities and lucrative contracts from his club but was pressurized into remaining
65 ����������������������������������������������������������
McGovern, ‘Globalization or Internationalization?’, p. 29.
66 ��������
Williams, Is It All Over?, p. 41; Poli and Ravenel, Annual Review, p. 34.
67 ���������������������������
See Lanfranchi and Taylor, Moving With the Ball, chapter 3.
taylor | football, migration and globalization | www.idrottsforum.org | 2007–03–14 18

in Brazil. Likewise, in Argentina international players were required to stay at home and
the best clubs were encouraged to invest in Argentine nationals as well as the best talent
from Peru, Brazil and Uruguay. The latter suffered particularly from this transcontinental
migration. Rafael Bayce counted 625 professional footballers who left Uruguay in the
period 1958 to 1983, of whom only one in six went to Europe compared with one in four
employed in Argentina.68
From the 1970s migration to Europe slowly increased, with the Spanish league emerging
as the principal destination for South American players, during a period when Italy main-
tained its ban on foreign imports. As in the case of the British system, we can see here that
the 1990s explosion in the migration of footballers was less ‘new’ than is often assumed
and actually built upon existing patterns and networks. The established migratory routes
from South America to Europe remained remarkably resilient and while the volume of mi-
gration undoubtedly increased, the relative distribution of nationalities throughout Europe,
as we saw earlier, stayed much the same. Careful historical analysis shows us that ‘evolu-
tion’ and ‘continuity’ are as useful in understanding these developments as ‘revolution’ and
‘change’.
Even the most contemporary examples of football migration can best be understood in
the context of established migration systems. This is clear in Takahashi Yoshio and John
Horne’s work on Japanese footballers. At first glance, the Japanese football migrant might
seem to have been a product of the age of globalization but Yoshio and Horne demonstrate
that there is a history to this phenomenon that can help us to make sense of the migratory
patterns from the 1990s onwards. They identify three specific time periods in the geograph-
ical movement of Japanese players: the ‘seeds’ of migration from the 1970s until the pro-
fessionalization of Japanese soccer and the creation of the J-League in 1993; the ‘shoots’,
from 1993 to qualification for the French World Cup in 1997; and the ‘fruits’ from the 1998
World Cup onwards. The first period witnessed the initial movement of Japanese football-
ers abroad. The majority of these migrants – 16 out of 20 in total – went to South Amer-
ica and even Okudera Yasuhiko, the first Japanese player to achieve success in Europe
– moved to West Germany after first gaining overseas experience with Palmeiras in Brazil.
During the second period, six players moved to European leagues but 10 went to South
America. The importance of South America as a destination can be explained by a range of
factors, from the broader migratory links between Japan and many South American nations
to the various informal and formal ties and networks established between players, coaches
and clubs in both regions. Only in the third period – after 1997 – did migration to South
America decline relatively, with Europe emerging as the pre-eminent receiving region and
clubs elsewhere in Asia, as well as Oceania and North and Central America, emerging as
new destinations for Japanese players. Yoshio and Horne explain this shift by reference to
the declining economic stability of South American clubs, the increased exposure of Japa-
nese players on a world stage and the ‘footballization’ of East Asia, involving the growth
of professional football infrastructures throughout the region.69 But, as in the case of the
previous systems, we should not make too much of recent changes and thus neglect the
established migratory routes between Japan and South America that remain active below
the surface.
68 ��������������
Rafael Bayce, ������������������������
‘Deporte y sociedad’ in El Uruguay de nuestro tiempo 1958-1983, Montevideo: CLAEH,
1983, pp. 49-72.
69 ������������������
Yoshio and Horne, ���������������������������������
‘Japanese Football Players’, pp. ������
69-86.
taylor | football, migration and globalization | www.idrottsforum.org | 2007–03–14 19

Conclusion

It has only been possible in this paper to provide a brief overview of the history of the
migration of footballers and its relationship to broader patterns of migration and notions
of globalization. Yet one or two tentative conclusions can be made. The main argument
here is that much of the movement of footballers across national and continental borders
in football’s own ‘age of migration’ is actually based on established systems and networks.
The story is of the adaptation of existing patterns rather than any radical breach with the
past. Thus the importation by English clubs of greater numbers of foreign footballers over
recent years can be seen as an extension of the traditional migratory systems which brought
Scottish, Welsh and Irish players to the Football League from the 1880s, South African and
other Commonwealth athletes from the interwar years and Scandinavians, Argentinians and
Yugoslavs from the 1970s. Similarly, in many respects players such as Gabriel Batistuta
and Ronaldo were treading similar paths in the 1990s as Orsi and Cesarini did in the 1930s.
Borges’ observation of the historical development of Algarvian migration is equally appo-
site to the movement of football players: ‘Migration does not occur in a vacuum, nor is it a
spontaneous phenomenon. People build migration paths on previous traditions, using past
experiences and the useful information gained from them.’70
This is not to place too much emphasis on continuity. Nobody would deny that the na-
ture of the international football market, like the labour market more generally, underwent
considerable modifications from the 1990s, not least in the sheer volume of player move-
ment. According to the authors of the official centenary history of FIFA, for example, 1478
international transfer requests were processed in the year 2000 alone.71 In Europe, particu-
larly, there has also been significant diversification in the geographical origins of recent
soccer migrants, with players from outside the continent, particularly Africans and Latin
Americans, increasing in proportion and influence. More than this, there are signs of the
integration of these different regional and intercontinental systems, with the system based
around Europe – and the major European leagues – forming a central core for aspirant foot-
ballers throughout the world. Yet for all this, it is difficult to deny that the ‘historical and
72

cultural roots’ so often alluded to but rarely examined in detail continue to underpin many
of the contemporary systems and networks of football player migration. Indeed it remains
clear that where these players choose to go – and where clubs decide to look for players
– is not indiscriminate, but often determined by long-established colonial, cultural, linguis-
tic, social and personal connections. To understand the migration of footballers in the ‘age
of globalization’, we must be conscious of its history.

Selected bibliography (collated from the footnotes by the editor)

Antonucci, Gianni, Bari 90, 1908-1998, Bari: Corcelli, 1998.

Bale, John and Joseph Maguire (eds), The Global Sports Arena: Athletic Talent Migration in an
Interdependent World, London: Frank Cass, 1994.

70 �������������������������������������
Borges, ‘Migration Systems’, p. 207.
71 �������
Pierre �����������������������
Lanfranchi, Christiane �����������
Eisenberg, Tony
����������������������������
Mason and Alfred Wahl, 100 Years of Football: The FIFA
Centenary Book, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004, p. 97.
72 Poli, ‘Football Players’ Migration’, pp. 221, 230-31.
taylor | football, migration and globalization | www.idrottsforum.org | 2007–03–14 20

Bayly, C. A., The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons, Oxford:
Blackwell, 2004.
Ben-Porat, Amir, ‘The Political Economy of Soccer: The Importation of Foreign Soccer Players to the Israeli
League’, Soccer and Society, 3, 1 (2002).
Borges, Marcelo J., ‘Migrant Systems in Southern Portugal: Regional and Transatlantic Circuits of Labor
Migration in the Algarve (Eighteenth-Twentieth Centuries)’, International Review of Social History, 45
(2000).
Brettell, Caroline B. and James F. Hollifield (eds), Migration Theory: Talking Across Disciplines, London:
Routledge, 2000. Nicolau Casaus, Gamper, Barcelona: Labor, 1984.
Casaus, Nicolau, Gamper, Barcelona: Labor, 1984.
Castles, Stephen and Mark J. Miller, The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the
Modern World, London: Macmillan, 1993.
Ciuni, Roberto, Il pallone di Napoli, Milan: Shakespeare and Company, 1985.
Colomé, Gabriel, ‘Football and National Identity in Catalonia: FC Barcelona and Español’, in S. Gehrmann
(ed.), Football and Regional Identity in Europe, Münster: Lit Verlag, 1997.
Crampsey, Bob, The Scottish Footballer, Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1978.
Darby, Paul, ‘The New Scramble for Africa: African Football Labour Migration in Europe’, European Sports
History Review (2000).
Dietschy, Paul, ‘Football Players’ Migrations: A Political Stake’, Historical Social Research, 31, 1 (2006).
Eisenberg, Christiane, ‘From England to the World: The Spread of Modern Football, 1863-2000’, Moving
Bodies, 1, 1 (2003).
Gillmeister, Heiner, ‘The First European Soccer Match: Walter Bensemann’, The Sports Historian, 17, 2
(1997), pp. 1-13.
Gillmeister, Heiner, ‘The Tale of Little Franz and Big Franz: The Foundation of Bayern Munich FC’, Soccer
and Society, 1, 2 (2000).
Hare, Geoff, Football in France: A Cultural History, Oxford: Berg, 2003.
Hargreaves, John, ‘Globalisation Theory, Global Sport, and Nations and Nationalism’, in J. Sugden and A.
Tomlinson (eds). Power Games: A Critical Sociology of Sport, London: Routledge, 2002.
Hatton, Timothy J. and Jeffrey G. Williamson, ‘International Migration 1850-1939: An Economic Survey’,
in T. J. Hatton and J. G. Williamson (eds), Migration and the International Labor Market, 1850-1939,
London: Routledge, 1994.
Held, David, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt and Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformations: Politics,
Economics and Culture, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999.
Hoerder, Dirk, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium, London: Duke University
Press, 2002.
Hopkins, A. G. (ed.), Globalization in World History, London: Pimlico, 2002.
Houlihan, Barrie, ‘Sport and Globalization’, in B. Houlihan (ed.), Sport and Society: A Student Introduction,
London: Sage.
Johnes, Martin, Soccer and Society: South Wales, 1900-1939, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002.
Jolinon, Joseph, Le joueur de balle, Paris: Ferenczi, 1931.
Jose, Colin, American Soccer League, 1921-31: The Golden Years of American Soccer, Lanham: Scarecrow,
1998.
Koser, Khalis and Helma Kutz (eds), The New Migration in Europe: Social Constructions and Social
Realities, London: Macmillan, 1998.
Kritz, Mary M. and Hani Zlotnik, ‘Global Interactions: Migration Systems, Processes, and Policies’, in M.
M. Kritz, L. L. Lim and H. Zlotnik (eds), International Migration Systems: A Global Approach, Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Lanfranchi, Pierre and Matthew Taylor, Moving With the Ball: The Migration of Professional Footballers,
Oxford: Berg, 2001.
Lanfranchi, Pierre and Alfred Wahl, ‘La professionnalisation du football en France (1920-1939)’, Modern &
Contemporary France, 6, 3 (1998).
Lanfranchi, Pierre, Christiane Eisenberg, Tony Mason and Alfred Wahl, 100 Years of Football: The FIFA
Centenary Book, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004.
Lucassen, Jan, Migrant Labour in Europe: The Drift to the North Sea, London: Croom Helm, 1987.
Magee, Jonathan and John Sugden, ‘“The World at Their Feet”: Professional Football and International Labor
Migration’, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 26, 4 (2002).
Maguire, Joseph and John Bale, ‘Sports Labour Migration in the Global Arena’, in Bale and Maguire (eds),
Global Sports Arena.
Maguire, Joseph and David Stead, ‘Border Crossings: Soccer Labour Migration and the European Union’,
International Review of the Sociology of Sport, 33, 1 (1998).
taylor | football, migration and globalization | www.idrottsforum.org | 2007–03–14 21

Maguire, Joseph and Bob Pearton, ‘Global Sport and the Migration Patterns of France ’98 World Cup Final
Players: Some Preliminary Observations’, Soccer and Society, 1, 1 (2000).
Martin, Simon, Football and Fascism: The National Game under Mussolini, Oxford: Berg, 2004.
McGovern, Patrick, ‘Globalization or Internationalization?: Foreign Footballers in the English League, 1946-
95’, Sociology, 36, 1 (2002).
Massey, Douglas S., Joaquin Arango, Graeme Hugo, Ali Kouaouchi, Adela Pellegrino and J. Edward Taylor,
‘Theories of International Migration: A Review and Appraisal’, Population and Development Review, 19,
3 (1993).
Molnar, Gyozo, ‘Mapping Migrations: Hungary Related Migrations of Professional Footballers after the
Collapse of Communism’, Soccer and Society, 7, 4 (2006).
Munck, Ronaldo, ‘Introduction: Globalisation and Labour Transnationalism’, in R. Munck (ed.), Labour and
Globalisation: Results and Prospects, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2004.
Nicolini, Giogio, La storia del Napoli, Rome: Editrice Italiana, 1967.
Osterhammel, Jürgen and Niels P. Petersson, Globalization: A Short History, Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2003.
Poli, Raffaele, ‘Football Players’ Migration in Europe: A Geo-Economic Approach to Africans’ Mobility’, in
J. Magee, A. Bairner and A. Tomlinson (eds), The Bountiful Game?: Football Identities and Finances,
Oxford: Meyer & Meyer Sport, 2005.
Poli, Raffaele, Les migrations internationals des footballeurs: Trajectoires de joueurs camerounais en Suisse,
Neuchâtel: CIES, 2004.
Poli, Raffaele and Loïc Ravenel, Annual Review of the European Football Players’ Labour Market,
Neuchâtel: CIES, 2006.
Pozzo, Vittorio, Campioni del Mondo, Quarant’anni di storio del calico italiano, Rome: CEN, 1960.
Salt, John, ‘A Comparative Overview of International trends and Types, 1950-80’, International Migration
Review, 23, 3 (1989).
Scholte, Jan Aart, Globalization: A Critical Introdution, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000.
Seed, Jimmy, The Jimmy Seed Story, London: Phoenix, 1957
Sellek, Yoko, Migrant Labour in Japan, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.
Stead, David and Joseph Maguire, ‘“Rites de Passage” or Passage to Riches? The Motivation and Objectives
of Nordic/ Scandinavian Players in English League Soccer’, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 24, 1
(2000), pp. 36-60.
Strikweda, Carl, ‘Tides of Migration, Currents of History: The State, Economy and the Transatlantic
Movement of Labor in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, International Review of Social History,
44 (1999).
Taylor, Matthew, The Leaguers: The Making of Professional Football in England, 1900-1939, Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 2005
Tramontana, Elio and Gianni Virnicchi, Il Napoli dale origini ad oggi, Naples: Arte tipografica, 1970.
Vamplew, Wray, Pay Up and Play the Game: Professional Sport in Britain, 1875-1914, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Waters, Malcolm, Globalization, London: Routledge, 1995.
Williams, John, Is It All Over?: Can Football Survive the Premier League?, Reading: South Street Press,
1999.
Yoshio, Takahashi and John Horne, ‘Japanese Football Players and the Sport Talent Migration Business’, in
W. Manzenreiter and J. Horne (eds), Football Goes East: Business, Culture and the People’s Game in
China, Japan and South Korea, London: Routledge, 2004.