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Football players' migrations: a political stake

2006; GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences; Volume: 31; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.12759/hsr.31.2006.1.31-41

0172-6404

Paul Dietschy,

Sports Analytics and Performance

Based on sources from FIFA archives, Zurich, the article analyses footballers' migration as a political stake from the interwar period to the post-colonisation times. Four examples are selected to study this sometimes neglected angle of the professional sport elite moves. The first one illustrates how the migration of football players fit in with the general policy of race and of national prestige in Fascist Italy. The second and the third example consider football players as sports figures representing political refu gees and other persons in exile; it deals with the case of the Basque team during the Spanish civil war and the case of Hungarian refugees in the first half of the fifties. The last example, of Mobutu's Zaire, demonstrates that the question of sports migration could also serve as a revelation of North-South relations during the sixties. From the very start of the twentieth century, the question of football players' geographical movements and their regulation constituted a major subject of concern for the leaders of European football federations. As the correspon dence exchanged between two founding fathers of the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), Robert Guerin and Carl A. W. Hirschman, shows, it was a question of preventing whether it be individual players or local clubs and associations, to play simultaneously, and in the same year, in differ ent national federations.1 Thus, the intention was to maintain the national character of football organization and to prevent the untimely movement of certain orbiting players. Although this principle seemed to be in contradic tion with the cosmopolitan and transnational character of the beginnings of continental football,2 it was confirmed in the first statutes of FIFA, which in 1904 expressed the will to develop matches between nations and to create a Address all communications to: Paul Dietschy, Universite de Franche-Comte, UFR STAPS, 31, chemin de l'Epitaphe, F-25 000 Besancon; e-mail: paul.dietschy@wanadoo.fi*. 1 Letter by Robert Guerin to C. A. W. Hirschman, 12 April 1904, reproduced in Federation Internationale de Football Association 1904-1929 (The Hague: 1929) 148. 2 Pierre Lanfranchi and Matthew Taylor, Moving with the Ball The Migrations of Profes sional Footballers (Oxford: Berg, 2001) 32-33.