African football migration: Aspirations, experiences and trajectories

By Paul Darby, James Esson and Christian Ungruhe

The global success of football icons like Samuel Eto’o, Didier Drogba and Mohamed Salah has fuelled the migratory projects of countless young men across the African continent who dream of following – literally and figuratively – in their footsteps. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic research, African football migration captures and chronicles the aspirations, experiences and trajectories of those pursuing this highly prized form of transnational migration. In doing so, the book uncovers and traces the myriad actors, networks and institutions that affect the ability of young people across the continent to realise social mobility through football’s global production network.

The book sheds critical light on the barriers to social mobility erected by neoliberal capitalism, and how these are negotiated by aspiring African footballers. It also generates original interdisciplinary perspectives on the complex interplay between structural forces and human agency, as young players navigate an industry rife with commercial speculation. While a select few reach the elite levels of the game and build a successful career overseas, the book vividly illustrates how for the vast majority, ‘trying their luck’ through football results in involuntary immobility in post-colonial Africa. These findings are complemented by rare empirical insights from transnational African migrants at the margins of the global football industry and those navigating precarious retirement from careers as players.

African football migration offers essential coverage of why and how African youth and young men have become actors in the global football industry, revealing the complex implications of transnational mobility, both imagined and enacted.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jan 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526120298

Book preview

African football migration

ffirs01-fig-5001.jpg

Globalizing Sport Studies

Series editor: John Horne, Visiting Professor of Sport and Social Theory, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan

Public interest in sport studies continues to grow throughout the world. This series brings together the latest work in the field and acts as a global knowledge hub for interdisciplinary work in sport studies. While promoting work across disciplines, the series focuses on social scientific and cultural studies of sport. It brings together the most innovative scholarly empirical and theoretical work, from within the UK and internationally.

Books previously published in this series by Bloomsbury Academic:

Global Media Sport: Flows, Forms and Futures

David Rowe

Japanese Women and Sport: Beyond Baseball and Sumo

Robin Kietlinski

Sport for Development and Peace: A Critical Sociology

Simon Darnell

Globalizing Cricket: Englishness, Empire and Identity

Dominic Malcolm

Global Boxing

Kath Woodward

Sport and Social Movements: From the Local to the Global

Jean Harvey, John Horne, Parissa Safai, Simon Darnell and Sebastien Courchesne-O’Neill

Football Italia: Italian Football in an Age of Globalization

Mark Doidge

Books previously published in this series by Manchester University Press:

The Greening of Golf: Sport, Globalization and the Environment

Brad Millington and Brian Wilson

Sport and Technology: An Actor-Network Theory Perspective

Roslyn Kerr

Sport in the Black Atlantic: Cricket, Canada and the Caribbean Diaspora

Janelle Joseph

Localizing Global Sport for Development

Iain Lindsey, Tess Kay, Ruth Jeanes and Davies Banda

Mega-Events and Social Change: Spectacle, Legacy and Public Culture

Maurice Roche

African football migration

Aspirations, experiences and trajectories

Paul Darby, James Esson and Christian Ungruhe

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Paul Darby, James Esson and Christian Ungruhe 2022

The right of Paul Darby, James Esson and Christian Ungruhe to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 2026 7 hardback

First published 2022

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover

Children playing football in

front of Fort Apollonia, a former

British colonial trading post in

Beyin, southern Ghana (Christian

Ungruhe, 3 September 2007)

Typeset

by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd

Paul dedicates this book to Dianne, Oliver, Oran and Grace and to the memory of his mother, Rosaleen Darby.

James dedicates this book to Siobhan, Zak, Kofi and Kathleen-Ruby.

Christian dedicates this book to Anna, Hannes and Lea.

Contents

Series editor's preface

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Theorising African football migration

2 The history, geography and regulation of African football migration

3 ‘Producing’ African labour for the global football industry

4 Speculation in and through football migration

5 ‘Becoming a somebody’ through football

6 Luck, sackings and involuntary immobility in football

7 Navigating liminality in foreign football industries

8 Hope and precarity in transnational football careers

9 Post-playing-career transitions and struggles

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Series editor's preface

There is now a considerable amount of expertise nationally and internationally in the social scientific and cultural analysis of sport in relation to the economy and society more generally. Contemporary research topics, such as sport and social justice, science and technology and sport, global social movements and sport, sports mega-events, sports participation and engagement and the role of sport in social development, suggest that sport and social relations need to be understood in non-Western developing economies, as well as European, North American and other advanced capitalist societies.

The series Globalizing Sport Studies is thus in line with a massive growth of academic expertise, research output and public interest in sport worldwide. At the same time, it seeks to use the latest developments in technology and the economics of publishing to reflect the most innovative research into sport in society currently underway in the world. The series is multi-disciplinary, although primarily based on the social sciences and cultural studies approaches to sport.

The broad aims of the series are to: act as a knowledge hub for social scientific and cultural studies research in sport, including, but not exclusively, anthropological, economic, geographic, historical, political science and sociological studies; contribute to the expanding field of research on sport in society in the United Kingdom and internationally by focussing on sport at regional, national and international levels; create a series for both senior and more junior researchers that will become synonymous with cutting edge research, scholarly opportunities and academic development; promote innovative discipline-based, multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinary theoretical and methodological approaches to researching sport in society; provide an English language outlet for high-quality non-English writing on sport in society; and publish broad overviews, original empirical research studies and classic studies from non-English sources.

The Globalizing Sport Studies series has always been interested in transnational topics and transdisciplinary research. It is therefore immensely pleasing to see the publication of African football migration that provides a very timely account based on innovative research and engagement with the latest writing on the subject. Using West Africa as its geographic location, the book is informed by research conducted for over a decade by three authors coming from the three disciplines of anthropology, geography and sociology. It offers a comprehensive overview of the history, networks and institutional structures involved in the migration of young African men and youth in the global game of football.

As with so many other projects conducted since 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic impacted on some aspects of research that were to be part of the underpinning of this book. Most notably, the pandemic put a brake on the movement of those men who relied on intra-regional and international migration, and thus hampered continuing research into their experiences. Additionally, the absence of research findings about the mobility of African women footballers is a direct effect of the restrictions on conducting research in 2020 and 2021. This is admirably accounted for in the preface to the book.

The book overall is a valuable contribution to understanding the various issues that male migrant African football players face and have to respond to, before, while and after they encounter different forms of local, regional and national reaction, including racism, in the foreign leagues in which they play. It offers insights into the precariousness of their careers and makes a great contribution to understanding all the work that goes on behind the making of contemporary football players. In this respect, it will be of interest to teachers, researchers and students in sport studies, African studies, migration studies, as well as sociology, geography and anthropology.

John Horne

Edinburgh, 2021

Preface

Doing research with African migrant football players, past and present, and with African youth who aspire to play the professional game abroad and who pursue this goal with a dedication, diligence and focus that belies their youthful age is a thrilling, rewarding and challenging experience. We have shared aspiring players’ excitement and worries about upcoming matches or trials and listened to professional players reflect on the progress of their career trajectory. We have watched from close quarters their efforts and daily toil in exacting conditions. We have been privy to their future hopes for self and family as well as their insecurities and fears of not succeeding, and the sting of shame that this brings. We have also observed the countless challenges, setbacks and victories they navigate in their quest to ‘make it’ as professional footballers.

The players’ stories of overcoming adversity and reaching their goals, and of their career struggles and heartbreak at unfulfilled ambitions, certainly piqued our intellectual curiosities as academics and our more general interest in football and the lives of football players. Indeed, despite uncertainty and precarity and the relentless nature of the physical, psychological and emotional demands that characterise the pursuit of a career in what is an intensely competitive and often unforgiving industry, we cannot deny a little bit of vicarious identification and envy. Each of us played football in our childhoods and dreamt of playing professionally, or more specifically turning out for our respective teams, Liverpool, AC Milan and Borussia Mönchengladbach. However, unlike those who participated in our research, we did not possess the talent, dedication, willingness to make sacrifices or the appetite that we have witnessed first-hand over the years of our research with African footballers.

It is this dedication that African youth and young men show towards the game, and their commitment to securing and sustaining a career in the global football industry, that makes their football migration life projects, achieved or envisaged, deeply fascinating and admirable – and worthy of the academic inquiry that we expose them to in this book. However, this forms only part of our motivation to write a book about African football migration. In keeping with the accelerating flow of talented footballers out of the continent since the 1990s, the academic discourse has gathered pace since the first studies appeared during that decade (see Chapter 1). We believe that this is a timely juncture to offer a comprehensive perspective on the history, structures, geographies, temporalities, networks and outcomes of African football migration and to situate these in the context of the global game.

Without wishing to draw what might appear to some to be naive parallels between the comparatively comfortable labour conditions of three middle-class academics located in universities in Northern Ireland, England and the Netherlands, and those experienced by African footballers, it could be argued that writing a book shares some analogies with their migration project. James Joyce, the famous twentieth-century Irish writer, once said that the craft of writing requires the author to ‘be an adventurer above all, willing to take every risk, and be prepared to founder in his effort if need be’ (cited in Power, 1974: 45). While Joyce was discussing writing novels, short stories and poetry, his words not only resonate with our experiences of accessing, capturing and chronicling the lifeworlds of African migrant footballers, but also encapsulate what those players must do on an almost daily basis in their efforts to enact and reproduce the transnational mobility required to enter into and sustain a career in the global football industry. Both enterprises – writing a book and chasing what is a utopian, and for most an unrealistic, dream – are unpredictable, all-consuming, arduous, exciting, engaging, promising and, not least if the envisaged outcome is eventually accomplished, intensely rewarding.

As we show in this book, African football migration is a process that connects individuals to networks of actors and institutions that can facilitate (and curtail) their ambitions. Equally, this book is a product of a collective, collaborative effort involving a sociologist, a geographer and an anthropologist. Working together certainly accentuated the positive sides of writing and enabled us to cope a bit more fleet-footedly with the challenges that we encountered along the way. We feel that our various disciplinary lenses, methodologies and writing styles provoked ‘outside-the-box’ thinking, stimulated our discussions and provided opportunities to learn from each other's expertise and approaches. We believe that this book is stronger and more comprehensive for this collaboration and possesses relevance beyond a single discipline.

Nevertheless, producing this book was a process of unimagined uncertainties. While our research engagement in the field of African football migration stretches back to 2008, most of our writing was undertaken during what was a tumultuous 2020 and early 2021. The wider impact of the COVID-19 pandemic continues to unfold and it is likely that it will have ramifications for the way we live our lives long into the future. A policy brief by the OECD (2020) suggested that the COVID-19 crisis has posed particular challenges for immigrants around the world, pointing to its disproportionate impact on them in terms of health, jobs, education, language training and public opinion. The closing of international borders, a key element in the fight against COVID-19, has also created significant problems for millions of people across Africa whose lives and livelihoods are tied to intra-regional and international migration. According to Teye (2020), travel restrictions and the closing of legal channels for migration are being keenly felt across West Africa, the geographic focus for this book, and may force more people to become caught up in irregular migration and trafficking – practices that encompass football migrants.

In light of this, it will come as no surprise to learn that the pandemic has generated unique challenges for African migrant footballers and those with aspirations to become transnationally mobile professionals. For many, the pandemic put their migration projects on hold (see Chapter 8). Following the initial outbreak, leagues and other competitions were either suspended or cancelled, and those that resumed mostly did so without fans in attendance. This has created pressures on club revenues, leading many to take measures to reduce labour costs. As a consequence, contractual uncertainty for existing migrant players has grown and the number of international transfers has declined for the first time in a decade (Ahmed, 2020; FIFA, 2020a). This has sharpened the precarity faced by African migrant players abroad. But, in a context where clubs are less willing to speculate in the transfer market, it also creates the risk of effectively placing a moratorium on the hopes of countless talented young African players, leaving them bereft of alternative routes to productive livelihoods.

With far less serious implications, COVID-19 also challenged our book project. With offices, nurseries and schools closed during several lockdowns, writing the book became a family affair, and, at times, it seemed better for everyone if we sought peace and quiet away from our makeshift home offices and the demands of home-schooling our young children. Thus, park benches and deserted car parks, locations that we never imagined would be conducive to writing, became regular sites for progressing our manuscript. Travel restrictions made it necessary to adjust the scope of the book to some degree. While a planned fieldwork trip to further interrogate African footballers’ migration to South-East Asia was cancelled at the last minute, our enforced immobility also prevented us from conducting planned research with female footballers and other actors relevant in African women's football migration. While we have been able to incorporate primary data on African football migration beyond the prominent Africa–Europe nexus, this book is now entirely about male players – and we cannot deny a certain unease with this.

From this book project's conception, it was our intention to incorporate the aspirations, experiences and trajectories of female African players in a meaningful and sustained way. Having dealt with the challenges of researching men's football almost exclusively over our careers, we knew that the inclusion of girls and women was an ambitious endeavour. Nonetheless, we had begun to undertake research with aspiring African female players in Ghana, conducting initial interviews at a local football academy in 2015 and following up with them at a youth football tournament in Sweden two years later (Darby and Agergaard, 2018). The restrictions imposed by the pandemic meant that it was impossible to add further primary data on the full spectrum of female African players’ ambitions, experiences and career trajectories. These constraints on conducting further primary research and an acknowledgement of the limits of the empirical evidence we had already gathered were important in our decision to re-orient our focus to the men's game only.

Our decision to focus on the men's game was also influenced by a recognition of the gendered particularities of African football migration. This is clearly demonstrated in the small but rich body of work that has explored African women's football-related mobilities (see Chapter 1). This scholarship made it clear to us that simply generalising female players’ encounters with football migration according to those of male players would be insufficient in capturing the nuances and differences between the male and female experience. There are undoubtedly some similarities between male and female African players. Both possess the requisite talent and ambition, aspire to ply their trade at the highest level, compete with the best players, avail of professional facilities to improve their abilities and, not least, to earn a decent living by playing abroad professionally, and in doing so supporting their families at home (Botelho and Agergaard, 2011). Some of those women who have been able to secure professional careers in Europe have also been confronted with the same challenges posed by racialisation that male players have had to deal with (Engh, Settler and Agergaard, 2017). Uncertainty and precarity also manifest themselves similarly across the post-playing-career lives of male and female African football migrants (Agergaard, 2018; Agergaard and Ungruhe,

2016).

In many other ways, however, football in Africa is deeply contoured by gender, and this impacts aspirations and opportunities for football migration among female players. The infrastructure for girls’ and women's football on the continent is much less developed than its male equivalent. Whereas the game has become increasingly popular among girls and women all over Africa, they generally lack access to adequate facilities, professional clubs and leagues as well as sufficient support from local, regional and national governing bodies. Quantitatively, transnational migration for female African players is much less prominent than for their male counterparts and does not have a similar global reach (Agergaard and Tiesler, 2014). For example, in 2020 the number of international transfers of male players from Africa to leagues outside the continent stood at 1,786, generating transfer receipts of almost fifty-five million US dollars. The number of female African players making the same journey in the same period numbered fifty-eight with no discernible transfer fees being recouped (FIFA, 2020a). While there are a growing number of professional leagues and expanding media coverage in the women's game around the world, the fact that it significantly lags behind the men's game in terms of commercialisation and mediatisation, makes migration in women's football much less lucrative and speculative.

A consequence of the challenges noted above is that football migration does not fuel the hopes of female youth players to a degree comparable to male players. It also does not have the same sort of critical implications for their future life projects that it does for a whole generation of boys and young men who increasingly look to football as the one pathway to success, respectable social adulthood and acceptable masculine identities. Given these differences in scale and social meaning, we felt that it was important either to engage deeply with African women's football migration in this book or refrain from it entirely. After many discussions, and in light of the issues for fieldwork imposed by travel restrictions and other pandemic constraints, we chose the latter course. Certainly, a richer and more nuanced understanding of African football migration would have been gleaned by incorporating women's migration. We hope to pursue this further in our future research.

Of course, 2020 was not only the year of COVID-19, with all its restrictions and problematic implications for the global football industry and those who labour within it. It was also a year that appeared to open up new horizons and possibilities in terms of how issues of racialisation and racism, both overt and covert, are confronted within the game. While campaigning against racism has been on the agenda of players and coaches, clubs, supporters, and national and continental governing bodies for some time, structural racism and racialisation in football persists largely unchecked. African football migrants, and Black players more generally, live with the insidious nature of this problem throughout their careers and often beyond. However, football's embracing of the Black Lives Matter movement in the second half of 2020 may instigate more robust, committed efforts on the part of the football authorities and other stakeholders to tackle this issue. The official endorsement of a range of gestures, symbols and practices that support the Black Lives Matter message by a range of national football federations and leagues appears to represent a bigger step towards acknowledging the depth of the problem. Black players have certainly felt emboldened and have been outspoken on the structural and direct racism they experience. Yet incidents involving the use of social media platforms to hurl racist invective at Black players and the largely ineffectual response to this has raised questions about whether the incorporation of the Black Lives Matter movement into professional football will initiate significant, lasting change. At the very least, it has increased awareness of the issue of racism and racial inequality in football and of how much work remains to be done to rid it from all levels of the game. One of our hopes for this book is that it might make a modest contribution to this fight by further raising awareness of the discrimination and hardships that migrant African players encounter over the course of their careers and migration trajectories.

Paul Darby, James Esson and Christian Ungruhe

February 2021

Acknowledgements

There are too many participants and interlocutors who gave so generously of their time to thank individually. Their stories and perspectives can be found across the following pages and we hope that the prominence of their words and insights in the text testifies to their immeasurable contribution to this book. We are indebted to all of you.

Two of our colleagues have significantly added to this book by contributing interview material with aspiring and retiring African footballers: Nienke van der Meij, who wrote her PhD thesis under Paul's supervision and was initially part of this book project but decided to pursue other ventures, and Sine Agergaard, who led the research project on African footballers’ post-playing-careers that Christian worked on. Many thanks for your valuable contributions and sharing your insights and interview material with us. There are many other colleagues, friends and family members who have offered support in a multitude of ways in our professional and personal lives during the research and writing stages of this book. They are too numerous to single out but they know who they are.

This book would not have been possible without the support of our current and previous institutions: Ulster University, Loughborough University, University College London, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Aarhus University and the University of Bayreuth. We would also like to thank the various institutions and programmes that funded our respective research projects: the UK Economic and Social Research Council, the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication, the Joint Committee for Nordic Research Councils in the Humanities & Social Sciences and the Bavarian State Ministry of Sciences, Education and the Arts.

Much of the book was written in what were unprecedented and extraordinarily trying circumstances. Beyond COVID-19, the exigencies of our jobs and life in general, the arrival of new additions to our families and the loss of loved ones all delayed progress. We thank Tom Dark, our commissioning editor, and his team at Manchester University Press for the latitude they permitted us to finally get this book ‘over the line’. Finally, we are grateful to Joe Haining, our copy-editor, for his good humour, valuable insights and going above and beyond to give the manuscript one last polish.

Introduction

Among the growing number of talented young African football players who sought out and secured a career in elite professional leagues across western Europe during the late 1980s and early 1990s, Nii Odartey Lamptey was widely considered as the most prodigiously gifted. His performances as a fourteen-year-old for Ghana at the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) U-16 World Championship in 1989, had prompted no less a footballing luminary than Brazil's Pelé to describe him as his ‘natural successor’ (Oliver, 2008). Having transferred to Europe aged fifteen, he lived up to this promise during spells as a teenager at RSC Anderlecht and PSV Eindhoven. At sixteen he was an age-group world champion, having starred in the 1991 U-17 World Cup, finishing as joint leading goal scorer. He was described by his coach at that tournament, the German Otto Pfister, as the ‘best youth player in the world between 1989 and 1992’ (interview, 9 February 2008). At sixteen, he made his debut for the Ghanaian senior national team, marking the occasion by scoring one goal and creating another. He went on to win an Olympic bronze medal aged eighteen and by the age of twenty-one he had appeared almost forty times for Ghana. The subsequent trajectory of his career is best described as erratic; it certainly did not reach the heights that numerous football commentators predicted. While he remains one of Ghana's best-known football exports, elements of his biography represent a cautionary tale for those young African boys aspiring to a future abroad as a professional footballer.

At the end of a month-long bout of fieldwork in Ghana researching the role of football academies in the country's burgeoning football export industry, Paul sat pensively on a plastic chair on the tiled front patio of the home of the now retired Lamptey. A chance conversation and some hastily snatched insights into his experiences as a football migrant in the lobby of an Accra hotel two days previously, led to a kind invitation to his house in East Legon, a prestigious residential community adjoining the main campus of the University of Ghana. An hour after our scheduled meeting time Lamptey had yet to arrive, delayed by an engagement at the Glow-Lamp International School he had founded shortly after the conclusion of his playing career. With his flight back to the UK scheduled to leave Kotoka International Airport later that evening, Paul grew increasingly uneasy. As the late afternoon sun slowly slipped out of view, so too did the prospect of an interview with a man perfectly placed to offer insights and perspectives on how young African males’ hopes and dreams of ‘making it’ as a transnational football migrant are formed, pursued and, for a minority, enacted.

Finally, after two hours of anxious waiting, Lamptey's black SUV pulled into the driveway. Diminutive in height but stocky in stature, he offered polite apologies and invited Paul inside his home, where they exchanged pleasantries and shared thoughts on Ghana's defeat to Cameroon in the semi-final of the 2008 Africa Cup of Nations four days previously. One wall of the spacious living room was adorned with photographs of his playing days and the various trophies and awards he had picked up along the way. As he pointed out his favourites, he lingered over the Golden Ball trophy that he secured as player of the tournament while helping Ghana to its first world youth crown in 1991. This was an appropriate and vivid backdrop to the next two hours of what was an intense and sometimes emotional conversation, during which Lamptey recounted his journey from playing informally on the streets and makeshift pitches of Accra and Kumasi, Ghana's biggest cities, to a professional career that lasted almost two decades, saw him sign for thirteen clubs and spanned eleven countries across four continents. Almost exactly two years after this meeting with Paul, Christian also interviewed Lamptey as part of a separate project on the career and post-playing-career trajectories and experiences of African football migrants in Europe. In sharing with us his insights into a circuitous career that was at times rewarding but often trying, Lamptey broached many of what, unbeknown to us at the time, would become the central concerns of this book.

In keeping with our commitment to foregrounding the aspirations, experiences and trajectories of male African football migrants and to challenging tropes that depict these individuals as helpless, passive victims of wider macro-structural currents both within the football industry and beyond, we turn much of this introductory chapter over to a ‘thick’ description of Lamptey's early life growing up in Ghana, his football career and his post-playing-career path. In particular, we focus on how the game featured in his youthful future-making imaginaries before outlining how he was able to enact cross-border and social mobility. We account for his experiences as a football migrant, the routes and nodes he traversed and the nature of his encounters along the way, including those during his post-playing-career return to Ghana. Treated in isolation, his eventful career constitutes a fascinating insight into how professional migrant athletes produce and reproduce transnational mobility, a process that encompasses the multi-directional and entangled dynamics of cross-border spatial mobility and aspirations and enactments of social mobility. However, the purpose of our exposition here is to contextualise and animate the following six core questions at the centre of this book:

1. How have African players become embedded in the global football industry and what are the historical, spatial and regulatory features of their transnational mobilities?

2. What actors, networks, institutions and processes influence Africans’ opportunities to produce football-related mobility?

3. How do African youth rationalise their entry into the game and their aspirations for spatial mobility through football?

4. How have African youth encountered, experienced and negotiated the pursuit of football migration, and what are the outcomes?

5. How do African players experience and navigate transnational moves and professional careers ‘outside’, including irregular football-related migration?

6. What are the post-playing-career trajectories of former African migrant football players and how do they experience their lives after retirement?

Once we have outlined the undulations of Lamptey's personal biography, we reflect on how his experiences as a young footballer in Ghana, his career trajectory as a migrant, professional player and his post-playing-career life speak to these questions.

Nii Odartey Lamptey: a biographical vignette

Much of the media coverage and popular discourse around Nii Lamptey's career tends to focus on the interpersonal and familial relationships that influenced his journey across diverse football settings and the core narrative depicts him as an exploited, passive victim of unscrupulous football agents and a nefarious trade in football labour. These micro- and meso-level interactions undoubtedly helped to contour his career arc, and it is certainly the case that he was ruthlessly exploited in the early stages of his professional life. However, as we contend throughout this book, failing to adequately position Africans’ football-related transnational mobility within specific local cultural contexts and wider macro-level currents, and examine how individual agency articulates with these, offers only partial, atomised insights into what is a much more complex reality.

Lamptey's football talents and aspirations were fashioned in a socio-economic environment where opportunities for male youth to secure employment and stable, productive livelihoods were increasingly constricted. By the early 1980s, political and economic instability in Ghana precipitated a succession of military coups and fluctuations in global commodity prices combined with rampant debt had significantly reduced standards of living for most Ghanaians. In a bid to resuscitate the economy, Jerry Rawlings's military government turned to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund who quickly enacted structural adjustment programmes (SAPs), considered at the time as the antidote to poverty in developing countries. The neoliberal governance that came with SAPs heralded rapid privatisation and unprecedented cuts to state expenditure on public services and social welfare (Konadu-Agyemang, 2000). The outcome was increasing numbers of Ghanaians falling below the poverty line and, with the slashing of public sector jobs, a significant increase in unemployment. A further consequence of this curtailment of public spending, and one that played out in Lamptey's early life, was a rise in the number of children falling out of formal education (Esson,

2016).

Ghana's success in securing its fourth and, at the time of writing, last victory in the continent's premier international football competition, the Africa Cup of Nations, in 1982, subsequent achievements in qualifying for five consecutive U-17 World Championships between 1991 and 1999, winning the tournament twice and finishing runners-up on two other occasions, and their bronze medal at the 1992 Olympic Football Tournament stood in marked contrast to the country's economic fortunes. These victories ensured that the game, immensely popular and well-funded in the period leading up to and immediately following independence, maintained its appeal among local youth (Darby, 2010). This was no less the case for Lamptey. Born in Tema, Ghana's largest seaport, he grew up in the nation's two largest cities, Accra and Kumasi. Lamptey's introduction to football involved playing informal versions of the game among peers. In a television feature on FIFA Futbol Mundial, an international weekly football magazine show, Lamptey describes honing his skills as a child during small-sided games, referred to in the local vernacular as muchendae. These games were played in the street or on patches of waste ground in local communities, attracted adult interest and were frequently accompanied by betting. Victorious teams and talented players often benefited from small gestures of benevolence and gratitude from those who had successfully wagered on the outcome. This became a way for children to acquire small amounts of money that helped them negotiate their daily existence. For Lamptey, it was an early introduction to the potential of the game as a source of income and an insight into how he might translate his athletic capabilities and skills into financial capital.

An unstable family life and parental abuse focused Lamptey's mind on becoming self-sufficient as he navigated what was a precarious childhood. He has spoken openly about the neglect and ill-treatment he suffered at the hands of his mother and father. His parents divorced when he was aged eight; when his mother remarried, he moved from Accra to Kumasi to live with his father, who was an alcoholic and disapproved of his son's participation in football. Fearful of the beatings his father frequently dispensed, Lamptey often slept rough on the streets (interview, 11 February 2008). Without parental guidance or encouragement, he attended school only infrequently and soon joined the growing ranks of youth dropping out of formal education. As had been the case in Accra, he filled his days playing football. He regularly turned out in school football competitions and performed with such distinction that his non-enrolment in school was overlooked (Acheampong, 2020). While the game offered escapism, it also provided material support and a small measure of security. His abilities in street versions of the game brought him to the attention of local coaches in the more organised Colts system of youth leagues and he was offered the chance to reside in or ‘camp’ with a Muslim football club, Kaloum Stars, albeit on condition that he converted to Islam. While this exacerbated his difficult relationship with his Christian father, it afforded him a place to live and a modicum of stability.

None of this is to suggest that his engagement with youth football constituted a carefree antidote to an unstable upbringing. Despite its popularity, and in contradiction to the painting of football as an escape from poverty for youth in African settings, playing the game beyond the school setting was, at this time, strongly associated with poverty and social deviance, and those who played were frequently socially stigmatised (Esson, 2016). Indeed, footballers in Ghana were, and among older generations still are, often referred to as kobolo, a Gã word that has found its way into almost all the Ghanaian languages (the plural is koboloi). It has become a common term reserved for children who drop out of school, are believed to be heading towards a life of vagrancy and who lack communitarian instincts or impulses (van der Meij and Darby, 2017). In short, and as Cobblah (2011) has observed, to be a kobolo is to be considered a ‘good-for-nothing’. This perception was reinforced by the fact that the best players tended to come from low-income communities and had little formal schooling. As a consequence, middle- and high-income families were often loath to allow their children to play football outside of the school environment. Such was the level of faith in education as the route to social mobility, poorer parents, including Lamptey's father, frequently expressed displeasure when their children prioritised football over school. Reflecting back on this stage in his life, Lamptey recalled the pejorative meaning of this label, explaining that ‘nobody want[s] to [be] kobolo, you don't have a home’ (interview, 17 February 2010).

While playing in the Colts system, Lamptey had not given much consideration to football as a potential career path, and the prospect of moving overseas to play professionally did not register as a possibility: ‘At that time, I was playing football for fun. I was very young. I didn't know anything’ (interview, 17 February 2010). This may appear at first glance to be implausible given the weight of football-related migration in the future-making projects of a rapidly increasing number of young footballers in Ghana and elsewhere on the continent (Ungruhe and Esson, 2017). However, it is reasonable to presume that Lamptey's perspective reflected the fact that while emigration more generally