‘Glocal boys’: Exploring experiences of acculturation amongst migrant youth footballers in Premier League academies

Introduction

In 1997, the Football Association unveiled the ‘Charter for Quality’ development strategy which signalled the professionalization of youth football in England, designed at the elite level to provide world class facilities, staff and training programmes to talented footballers aged between eight and 18 years. The highest tier of competition within this structure is the Premier Academy League, comprising 40 academy teams affiliated to either a Premier or Football League club, competing across four regionally organized divisions. The establishment of the academy system was accompanied by a change in the training delivered to elite young players aged between 16 and 18 years in the form of the Football Scholarship, a programme which comprises both football-specific and academic/vocational training components, thus adhering to FIFA’s (2010) regulations regarding the international transfer of minors and appearing to address a legacy of concerns for the alternative career opportunities of aspiring young footballers. These developments at youth level were embedded in the commercial success and global popularity of the English Premier League which have empowered many of its member clubs with the capital to assemble increasingly cosmopolitan workforces, helping to create a footballing landscape emblematic of increased international labour mobility across and beyond global sports worlds (Maguire, 1999).

In recent years, Premier League academies with the requisite resources have expanded their established scouting networks in the United Kingdom and Ireland to recruit young players from countries and continents farther afield. Migrant youth footballers now compete alongside indigenous players in these elite training centres, each undertaking a physically and psychologically demanding apprenticeship whilst adjusting to a new social and cultural environment. Mirroring resistance to the influx of foreign labour into English football since the inception of the Premier League in 1992, discourse surrounding the recruitment of non-indigenous footballers into English youth academies typically concerns the connotations of migrant players’ involvement in English football en masse, and is often pejoratively framed in relation to a perceived marginalization of indigenous youth players resulting from their migrations, and an associated debilitative impact on the performances of the English national team. Although the proportion of migrant players registered with Premier League academies has been shown to be relatively small in comparison with the cosmopolitan Premier League (Elliott and Weedon, 2011), where over half of the players registered are non-indigenous, the framing of migrant youth footballers as a problematic collective in academic, media and public debate has tended to deflect from consideration of the individual athlete in transition.

The migration of athletic labour is of course not a new phenomenon, as has been documented in numerous studies of historical migratory patterns in sport, notably in association football (Lanfranchi and Taylor, 2001; Magee and Sugden, 2002; Maguire and Stead, 1998; McGovern, 2002; Moorhouse, 1994, amongst others). In these studies and indeed across the field of sports labour migration, migratory phenomena have been predominantly viewed against the backdrop of globalization processes (see Bale and Maguire, 1994; Falcous and Maguire, 2010), although sociologists of sport have appropriated different strands of the globalization thesis to explain the migrations of professional footballers. Magee and Sugden (2002), for instance, set their research into the forces driving football labour migration against the political-economic backdrop of Wallerstein’s (1974) world systems theory, whilst Maguire and Stead (1998; Stead and Maguire, 2000) identify the migrations of Nordic and Scandinavian professional footballers to England as symptomatic of the interweaving political, cultural, social and economic processes which characterize globalization. This growing body of research has raised a number of salient questions surrounding the patterns and trends of players’ transnational movements, policies which contour these trends, labour rights and exploitation, the implications of migration for the players’ indigenous and host football cultures, the motives for the individual player to migrate, and their experiences therein with respect to cultural adjustment and dislocation, identity and career development.

More recently, Giulianotti and Robertson (2007) have adopted the glocalization thesis to explore how migrant (sporting) groups adapt to and resist the ostensibly homogenizing tendencies of globalization. Glocalization, as developed by Robertson (1992, 1995), elucidates ‘the simultaneity and the interpenetration of what are conventionally called the global and local’ (1995: 30) and is useful for describing and exploring how social actors at the local level interpret global processes or phenomena to suit their particular needs or desires within specific cultural contexts (Giulianotti, 2005). This approach to dissolving the global–local dichotomy is used by Giulianotti and Robertson to develop a series of ‘glocalization projects’ (relativization, accommodation, hybridization and transformation), each of which are seen as being available to a migrant upon encountering a new cultural environment. As such, they provide a framework for interpreting the experiential dimensions of migration for athletes who encounter, experience and embody tensions between the global and the local. Importantly, this approach implicitly acknowledges the process of acculturation which migrants undergo upon encountering a new (sporting) cultural environment following their international recruitment, whilst also accounting for the potential for ‘glocal’ resistance from both the migrant and the host culture.

Despite sports labour migration research spanning various geographical and cultural contexts, and acknowledging related research into the migratory experiences of senior migrant players in England (notably Magee and Sugden, 2002; Stead and Maguire, 2000), comparatively little is known about the experiences of migrant youth footballers (but see Bourke, 2003). Drawing upon a series of interviews with migrant players from a range of cultural and ethnic backgrounds, and their ‘acculturating groups’ (Ward et al., 2001) of academy Directors, Managers, Coaches and Education and Welfare Officers, this article explores migrant players’ experiences of acculturation following their recruitment to Premier League academies. Whilst my principal aim is to explore the prevalent issues of adjustment and settlement associated with being a migrant, an adolescent, and an elite athlete, by embedding their experiences of acculturation within the glocalization thesis I also consider the potential for cultural adaptation, appropriation and resistance from other parties involved in and affected by their migrations. The next section of the article discusses acculturation as an experiential facet of the glocalization thesis.

Acculturation as an experiential facet of glocalization

The concept of acculturation has roots in anthropological studies of intercultural contact between people(s) of ‘alien cultures’. The following definition, which remains influential, comes from a synthesis of such research in a memorandum for the study of acculturation:

Acculturation comprehends those phenomena which result when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous first-hand contact, with subsequent changes in the original cultural patterns in either or both groups. (Redfield et al., 1936: 149)

Clearly lending itself to cross-fertilization across the social sciences, acculturation has proved of great interest to sociologists and psychologists with the latter making considerable progress in the past few decades (see Sam and Berry, 2006). Working in the field of cross-cultural psychology, John Berry has developed distinctions between ‘acculturating strategies’ through which migrants make decisions as to what extent they wish to maintain their indigenous cultural heritage and/or embrace their culture of settlement. These strategies include: assimilation, in which the migrant actively interacts with the host culture whilst showing little or no desire for indigenous cultural maintenance; separation, where indigenous cultural norms are maintained with no desire to embrace the host culture; marginalization, when neither cultural maintenance nor interaction with the host culture are desired; and integration, when both the maintenance of one’s cultural behaviours and involvement in the host society are sought (Berry, 1997). Acculturation, then, is a process of intercultural contact in which the migrant in transition actively responds to the ‘deterritorialization’ of their indigenous cultural norms whilst adapting to their host culture.

Although sociologists have historically explored acculturation through approaches akin to assimilation (e.g. Gordon, 1964), questions pertaining to intercultural contact have increasingly been addressed in contemporary sociological research by recourse to the polysemous concept of globalization. Commentators have continually noted that the seemingly boundless explanatory power of globalization has lead to it becoming the dominant thematic for sociologists in the 21st century, and that by the same virtue it remains ‘in danger of becoming the cliché of our times: the big idea which encompasses everything from global financial markets to the internet but which delivers little substantive insight into the contemporary human condition’ (Held et al., 1999: 1). Thus, whilst acculturation is concerned with the changes in individuals resulting from intercultural contact, globalization incorporates all of the myriad ways in which the world has become, and is becoming, more interconnected. Consequently, it is common to hear of the ubiquity and ‘multidimensionality’ of globalization as compromising its explanatory value. In the sociology of sport, where globalization has been particularly influential, this danger has been somewhat mitigated by critical and ongoing dialogue exemplified in the contradistinction between Rowe’s (2003: 281) contention that the cultural nationalism sport invokes might make it ‘unsuited to carriage of the project of globalization’ and the response of Andrews and Ritzer (2007: 30) who, borrowing from Ritzer’s (2004: xiii) earlier work, proclaim that ‘virtually no areas and phenomena throughout the world are unaffected by globalization’, rendering local/national sporting phenomena inseparable from the global context.

The concept of glocalization (Robertson, 1992, 1995) has been developed to bridge the ostensibly polarized distinctions between homogenous and pervasive globalization processes, and the interpretive, reflexive and resistant potentialities of local cultures. In seeking to provide a framework for researchers to explore how migrants adapt to new cultural environments, Giulianotti and Robertson (2007) draw on the concept of glocalization to explain the intercultural contact sought and experienced by Scottish football supporter groups in North America. Defining glocalization as highlighting ‘how local cultures may critically adapt to or resist ‘‘global’’ phenomena’ (2007: 134) and thereby develop specific ‘glocal’ cultures, the authors propose a typology that exhibits significant commonalities with Berry’s acculturation strategies. Specifically, they identify four ‘glocalization projects’ that social agents might appropriate when encountering a new cultural environment: transformation, in which new cultural forms are favoured and adopted to the neglect or even abandonment of the individual’s indigenous culture in a similar fashion to assimilation; relativization, which resonates with separation strategies in that individuals consciously and proactively ‘preserve their prior cultural institutions, practices and meanings within a new environment, thereby reflecting a commitment to differentiation from the host culture’; accommodation, in which migrants take a pragmatic approach to appropriating the ‘practices, institutions and meanings’ of the host culture so as to maintain indigenous cultural forms; and hybridization, in which migrants synthesize indigenous and host cultural phenomena to produce distinct glocal cultural forms (2007: 135). Although the authors do not specifically make reference to acculturation per se, they acknowledge the overlap between the terms developed in their typology and those used in the study of globalization and the sociology of migration.

This typology of glocalization projects can be seen to bridge the ‘global–local’ dichotomy in locating specific approaches to and experiences of acculturation within a responsive glocal context. Thus, whereas the process of acculturation tends to emphasize the agency of migrants experiencing intercultural contact, I conceptualize acculturation as an experiential facet of glocalization, thereby accounting for the interplay between the distinct political economy with which youth players migrate and their individual experiences of migration. With this in mind, the next section of the article discusses the acculturation of professional footballers documented in previous research into football labour migration.

Acculturation and youth in football labour migration research

Globalization has proved the dominant theoretical lens through which to view the international mobility of athletes since the early 1990s (see Bale and Maguire, 1994; Falcous and Maguire, 2010). Whilst these analyses have addressed various sports across an array of cultural contexts, association football has been and continues to be afforded attention proportionate to the global ubiquity of the game. Interest in sports labour migration within and out of academia grew exponentially following the case of Jean-Marc Bosman (1990–1995), in which the European Court of Justice ruled that restrictions in European football predicated on the grounds of nationality constituted a restraint of trade, and therefore contravened European Union law. Amongst the multifarious implications this ruling has held for professional football, the ability of clubs to recruit and field players from across the European Union has helped those with the requisite resources to assemble cosmopolitan workforces. Moreover, the Bosman ruling exemplifies how global and continental sporting governing bodies such as FIFA and UEFA are bound by the jurisdiction of the supranational European Union. Recent policy proposals, such as FIFA’s controversial 6+5 proposal and UEFA’s ‘homegrown’ player rule, have demonstrated opposition to these neoliberal policies which ostensibly lead to an uninhibited marketplace for the movement of football labour, creating a glocal sporting context characterized by both resistance to and adaptation of policies engendered by supranational governance.

Maguire (2008) succinctly summarizes the conflation of sports labour migration with broader globalization processes:

Sports migration is bound up in a complex political economy that is itself embedded in a series of power struggles that characterize the global sports system. Migration is marked by a series of political, cultural, economic and geographical issues and pressures of which in the migrant figuration owners, administrators, agents, officials and media personnel play a prominent part in structuring the migrant’s life. (p. 447)

It might be presumed, therefore, that individuals who migrate within different political economies, at different career stages and with subsequently varying influences from vested interest parties, might have contrasting experiences of migration. In English youth football, regional policy restrictions contour the recruitment of indigenous players aged less than 16 years, and FIFA’s regulations on the international transfer of minors stipulate that players can only transfer between nations when aged over 18 years. This latter condition is subject to three exceptional circumstances: the player living within 50 kilometres of the national border of the new club; the player’s family moving to the country of the new club for non-footballing reasons; or the player moving within the European Union, in which case players over 16 years of age can be transferred. Under these circumstances, the host club are required to ‘guarantee the player an academic and/or vocational education, in addition to his footballing education and/or training, which will allow the player to pursue a career other than football should he cease playing professional football’, and to ‘make the necessary arrangements to ensure that the player is looked after in the best possible way (optimum living standards with a guest family or in club accommodation)’ (FIFA, 2010: 57). It is within these parameters that migrant youth footballers are recruited, housed, educated and trained by Premier League academies.

Of principal interest in the present context is the initial phase of adjustment for youth footballers following their migrations. Researchers have predominantly described the early stages of acculturation for migrant athletes as marked by issues of cultural dislocation, including homesickness and loneliness, language, isolation and related problems of adjustment, issues which were central to Ann Bourke’s (2003) investigation into the trend of young Irish players migrating into English football academies around the turn of the millennia. In the early stages of their migrations, Irish players were viewed as being susceptible to ‘culture shock’, whereby they ‘experience a sense of loss regarding their old cultural environment, as well as confusion, rejection, self-doubt and decreased self-esteem from working in a new and unfamiliar cultural setting’ (Bourke, 2003: 383).

The notion of culture shock, or ‘cultural dislocation’ as termed elsewhere (Maguire, 1996, 1999; Stead and Maguire, 2000), is a recurring observation in sports labour migration research, though perhaps owing to the scarcity of studies which focus on athletic migratory experience specifically, one which has received little conceptual attention beyond recourse to the broader contours of globalization. Although Bourke (2003) acknowledges the process of acculturation, her definition of ‘immigrants adopting the dominant values of the majority culture in the host country’ (p. 386) can be viewed as rather unidimensional when read against Sam and Berry’s (2006) assertion that ‘acculturation is a continuous process’ in which ‘an individual may adopt different strategies at different times’ as they encounter and interact with new cultural forms (p. 19). That is, Bourke’s definition stresses the homogenizing aspects of globalization and more explicitly the assimilation of migrants into their host culture, whereas acculturation strategies, including the glocalization projects outlined by Giulianotti and Robertson, account for the resistant and adaptive potentialities of the migrant in transition as well as the potentially homogenizing tendencies of the host culture.

Support for this approach to conceptualizing acculturation comes from Ward et al.’s (2001) detailed synthesis of theoretical and empirical research into culture shock. These authors contend that a complex interaction between ‘the characteristics of the individual in transition, the acculturating group, the culture of origin and the culture of settlement’ combine to influence a migrant’s adjustment to a host country (2001: 95). Whilst Bourke’s research remains the only empirical account of how migrant youth footballers experience acculturation in the enclaves of English academies, there is substantive overlap between the issues of acculturation put forward by migrant players in the work of both Bourke (2003) and Stead and Maguire (2000), and those recounted by migrant students in Ward et al.’s (2001) volume. These migrant students recurrently cited feelings and fears of loneliness, homesickness, alienation, not making friends and speech anxiety as significant challenges to acculturation. Reflecting on their research into the migrations of professional footballers, Magee and Sugden (2002) also highlight that age could be a factor which influences a footballer’s motivation to migrate and their experiences therein. They observe that ‘by the standards of most other professions, football players’ careers are short, few lasting more than 15 years’, and that ‘during that time, players endeavour to make the most of their playing ability or body capital’ (2002: 435). Ward et al. further note that, for adolescents, ‘the stress of migration may be intertwined with the stress of adolescent identity and development’ (2001: 94). Issues of acculturation might therefore be heightened for youth footballers who are at once migrants, adolescents, and elite athletes, each undergoing social, cultural and physiological phases of development in a highly competitive and unfamiliar setting.

A focus on migrant youth footballers thereby necessitates not only a consideration of the experiential dimensions of football labour migration, but also a sensitivity to the social and cultural implications of living and working within the confines of a Premier League academy and the distinct political economy within which their migrations occur. A brief outline of the methods employed in this study now precedes the article’s central discussion of the experiences of acculturation recounted by the focal migrant youth footballers.

The closed fields of professional football: Accessing Premier League academies

The broad line of qualitative enquiry taken at the inception of this study was to explore the challenges of international migration for youth footballers recruited into Premier League academies. This began with a pilot study in a professional football academy, consisting of a series of interviews with migrant youth players and members of staff with whom they have regular contact. It was through establishing a relationship with a senior figure in English youth football during this pilot study that I was able to endorse my approaches to a further four academies, each affiliated to a Premier League club, respectively based in the North-West (N = 2), West Midlands and South-East of England.

Reflections on the pilot study, during which I was also working at the focal academy in a different capacity, secured to my mind the justification of using interviews in this larger project to explore migrant players’ experiences of acculturation in England and English youth football. In support, Roderick (2006) advocates the use of interviews when studying the lives of professional footballers for reasons of epistemology and practicality, and interviews were also the dominant methods used in previous studies of athletic migratory experience in professional football (notably Bourke, 2003; Magee and Sugden, 2002; Stead and Maguire, 2000). Interviews were secured with 16 migrant youth footballers from a range of cultural and ethnic backgrounds, representing African, Australasian, European and North American nations. Reflecting the nationality composition of the Premier Academy League in recent seasons (Elliott and Weedon, 2011), the majority of interviewees (N = 9) were from Europe, specifically Germany, Holland, Italy, Slovakia and Sweden. Australia, New Zealand, Nigeria and the US were also represented. In accordance with FIFA policy, each of the players was aged between 16 and 18 years when recruited and was originally registered on the Football Scholarship programme. Clubs intermittently include as part of, or in addition to their Scholarships a one or two year professional contract, and therefore some of the players interviewed were technically already professional footballers, though under such circumstances it is the awarding of a second professional contract that is generally viewed as a greater metric of success and stability.

It was agreed that all interviews would take place either in the participants’ respective academies or in their communal residences, in both cases surroundings which I felt would be familiar and comfortable for participants. In further seeking to create an environment in which players could speak openly, I sought to reassure them of my position as a researcher (not, for instance, a journalist or employee of the club or the Premier League) and to allow the interviews to assume a conversational style. Interviews were one-on-one, recorded and often preceded further opportunities for investigation, including extended and unrecorded conversations, tours of training grounds and stadiums, the opportunity to watch the focal players interacting in training, and ongoing dialogue with participants.

Heeding the importance of the ‘acculturating group’ (Ward et al., 2001) or the ‘migrant’s figuration’ (Maguire, 2008) in exploring experiences of acculturation, I also felt it important to speak with people who were in regular contact with these players. Nine academy staff including Directors, Managers, Coaches and Education and Welfare Officers, were also interviewed individually to discuss their views and experiences of recruiting and training migrant players. These interviews were unstructured, in as much as staff were encouraged to raise and discuss the issues they felt to be important in the context of migrant player recruitment, acculturation and related areas. Anonymity was assured for all participants, and professional titles and nationalities are used as identifiers in the discussion to follow.

Living the dream: The academy as an insular host culture

When recalling their early experiences in academies, a number of physical, psychological and cultural challenges were recurrently expressed by players. Central amongst these was the difficulty in adjusting to the frequency, intensity and physicality of training and match play:

In Italy I was training for two hours and then after training, straight with my friends out, and spend time with them and my family in the evening. And here, you know, you train and you go home to rest because you’re so tired after two sessions or even one because it’s so hard. So hard. So it’s different, like training hard and rest. It’s all about rest, and training, that’s it.

In Holland you train four hours a week and that was like an hour and a half and then you go home again, here it’s like nine sessions a week, eight, nine sessions, and sometimes you have a long day, like nine, ’til three, four, training.

Whilst the frequency and intensity of training was not always a surprise to players, most of them reflected that as a consequence much of their time away from the academy was and continues to be spent sleeping, resting and relaxing.

Various academy staff showed an awareness of how demanding this early phase of adjustment could be for players who were not acclimatized to English football, or indeed full-time work, and also an appreciation of how this physical commitment intersects with other aspects of adjustment for migrant players. This was neatly captured by this Education and Welfare Officer:

So it’s work, train, work, education, home, rest. And that’s it, that’s the transition . . . you go home and sleep, you just go home and crash . . . they’re doing a physically intensive job, real high expectations, and they can’t handle it. Get a foreign boy doing that with a whole different culture, lifestyle, way of interacting, can’t even watch the TV in your own country, you know, it’s a complete culture shock.

It became apparent throughout these interviews that the centrality and insularity of the academy as a socializing force in an otherwise unfamiliar cultural setting held salient implications for migrant players’ acculturation strategies. For instance, this Australian player expressed difficulty in trying to interact with the host culture outside of the academy:

I do socialize out of football with [my teammates], but you know, I would like to have that other outlet so you’re not always suffocated by football . . . I haven’t really got a social life here, so football hasn’t really affected it.

This German player further underscored the general feeling amongst the players interviewed in articulating that adjusting to life in an academy, and life in England, were not necessarily compatible:

The thing is, you’re living the football lifestyle, you know, I’m not really surrounded with people that don’t play football, ’cause you become so close, every day with the boys [in the academy team], so you try to do everything with the boys as well. And me, being from a different country, I’m not a person that says ‘no’ because I’m from another country I don’t want to become friends with someone outside of football. But I’m always with the boys from football, so that’s why I don’t really know anything about how other people live.

These players were not opposed to embracing the host culture but found that the insularity of the academy as a socializing mechanism following their migrations, and the intensity of their training programmes, limited their opportunities to do so. However, when questioned further about this, these and other players tended to concede that resting constantly away from training as a means of recovery, and having little social contact outside of the academy, were requisite sacrifices for them to improve their chances of earning a professional contract. On occasions when players did acknowledge that their Scholarship commitments inhibited alternative pursuits or opportunities, they would usually reiterate their passion for football, and aspiration to become professional, whatever the cost.

Some players were less inclined to embrace the host culture, notably two players recruited from the same club in Italy. Both players spoke of socializing with each other more than their indigenous and non-indigenous teammates, most often in an Italian coffee shop close to the training facilities:

In the academy we [all of the youth players] are together maybe like around breakfast or lunch, the table is always like me, [the other Italian] and maybe some of them, it’s not a problem, but we finish training and then we going, always we going to this Italian shop where you can have coffee or something like that, so we going there, and then we spend some times together, me, [the other Italian], in the coffee shop. And then like, we going home at six o’clock because we need some rest.

Their Coach also noted that these players were closer to each other than their teammates and often sought familiar socio-spatial environments after training:

The two Italians, they tend to keep to themselves . . . they tend to stick together a lot. There’s a little coffee house up the road, which [one of the players] said he was going to; it’s Italian and they go there, they go to Italian restaurants. They don’t mix so well outside. They tend to separate themselves a little bit. I think it’s more about the boys than any sort of trait or anything, you know.

As alluded to here, it would be unwise and unfounded to make any firm connections between nationality and any particular approach to acculturation. One of the players, however, felt that being Italian did have implications for his ability to integrate with teammates:

They [indigenous players] know you’re Italian, you’re from another country, so they look, they watch you, I think, differently on the pitch and off the pitch because sometimes, I feel like I’m doing something that for me is normal. And for them it’s not. Like, even the dress, or something before the game, I’m coming into the change room with a shirt or something and they, I don’t know (laughs) ’cause they’re all dressed the same. And you know, I’ve got like long hair, so you know, I feel strange.

These players’ experiences resonate with both relativization, as described by Giulianotti and Robertson (2007), in that there was an expressed desire to sustain allegiances and core meanings with their indigenous cultural heritage, and with accommodation, in that both players pragmatically sought familiar socio-spatial surroundings such as Italian coffee shops and restaurants. The embodiment of certain cultural norms related to dress and hair style are conspicuous signs of a migrant’s ties to their indigenous culture and as such, are visible deviations from the cultural norms within the acculturating group. Perhaps partly because of these expressed difficulties integrating with teammates, both players sought to build and sustain spatial, physical and cultural ties to Italy as a means of coping with problems of dislocation.

Playing away from home: Accommodation,homesickness and loneliness

As discussed, migrant youth footballers are generally removed from a number of their primary socializing mechanisms following their recruitment into academies, including family, friends and familiar social environments. That a player’s living accommodation is usually arranged through and overseen by their academy could be viewed as heightening the pressures of consistent elite performance and issues of acculturation by creating a living and working environment in which it is difficult to diversify interests, hobbies, or to ‘escape’ these pressures (although as discussed, a player’s desire to diversify interests is also a factor here). Accommodation arrangements vary between academies, and are subject to a number of variables such as a player’s age or whether his own family lives in close proximity. Most live in either a communal residence with other players, or with a host family, at least in the first year of their Scholarships.

Most of the players in this study were living with host families, though two had moved to England with family members. For those who migrated alone, narratives such as the one given below were common:

I didn’t realize until a couple of weeks, really. I just . . . in a couple of weeks, I started to miss my family and my mates in Holland, really. And that’s when I thought, wow, I’m alone . . . I was all alone, and I just wanted to stay in my room, and that’s when you start thinking, I want to be with my mates back home.

It was during extended periods of rest and recovery away from training that many of the players told of feeling particularly homesick, and often lonely. Whilst the two players who migrated with family members spoke of their help in appeasing homesickness, those who had moved alone described the importance of the internet and mobile phones in maintaining relationships in their indigenous countries. For this Slovakian player, fear of living with strangers was described as heightening feelings of isolation and loneliness during the early stages of acculturation:

I was really scared because you don’t know the family, maybe if you’re doing something they don’t like, I mean, everything was very, very bad in the family. So after training, most days I stay in my room. But now it’s fine.

It is important to reiterate here that players were speaking retrospectively about their early experiences of acculturation, and that the feelings recalled were often in contrast to how they felt at the time of the interviews, supporting Sam and Berry’s (2006) assertion that acculturation strategies can change over time. For instance, this Australian player moved from a communal residence to host family accommodation part-way through his Scholarship and spoke of two very different experiences:

Early on it was weird, ’cause they had a like, big digs [communal residence], I felt really left out, you know, footballers have big egos and, you know, they were all part of a team already. And I went there and obviously, like no one would talk to me, it was kind of like a harsh reality type of thing for me . . . since then, with the host family, I really, really enjoyed that, actually . . . for me, I stayed at the one place, like for two years, so you get really close with the family, and it was like a really good experience.

Whilst this player expressed an initial desire to integrate with the host culture, he felt that the acculturating group of largely indigenous players made this problematic upon his arrival in England. The apparent resistance of the indigenous cultural group to his acculturation strategy was, for the player, linked to their collective habitus in being ‘part of a team already’. Explanations for this resistance are myriad, though one might suggest that the strength of discourse surrounding foreign player involvement in English youth football could influence the attitudes and behaviours of indigenous players towards migrant teammates.

Language, education and glocal interpretations

A central facet of acculturation for many migrants is the acquisition or adoption of the host country’s language (Ward et al., 2001). Language was described as permeating adjustment, settlement and overall experience by players both on and off the field, particularly though not exclusively for those whose English language skills were rudimentary. For the two Nigerian players cited below, their uses of English language lead to feelings of frustration and despondency when interacting with indigenous players:

I don’t make friends [in the academy]. We just play together, and we just get back, talk together and that’s it . . . I don’t really like talk as much as other guys ’cause I can’t really understand them.

They take the piss. When you trying to talk to them [teammates], they say, ‘what’d you say, what’d you say, what’d you say?’ So back then, you just thinking, why am I here, why am I doing this?

Interestingly, both of these players reflected that pejorative reactions to their attempts to develop their English language competency held implications for their acculturation strategies. In the first example, persistent difficulties in communication were described as affecting the player’s desire to embrace the host culture and integrate with the acculturating group. The second player quoted above, who had since developed a good command of English language, reflected that he had considered his future at the academy on a number of occasions but that, as his English improved, his ability to integrate with his acculturating group was enhanced. Whilst language is a relatively obvious influence on acculturation, here it is shown to directly influence the ability and desire of these players to adopt or adapt the norms of the host culture.

Players articulated varying responses to being mocked for their lingual differences. A player from New Zealand, for example, felt that his accent prompted ‘banter’ between him and teammates which developed into a source of camaraderie. Others expressed difficulty in understanding regional accents and coaches speaking at a fast pace. In the opinion of this Dutch player, his difficulties in acquiring English language skills held direct implications for his career development:

My first year mission was learn English and that, ’cause my English wasn’t consistent. So that’s the reason why the coach put me on the bench and gave everyone else a chance.

In each of the above examples, the acquisition of language was viewed as an essential requisite of acculturation which held direct implications for career development and social integration. These players were mocked, and in an extreme case one felt he was being punished, for ‘abnormal’ use of, or lack of, English language. Consequently, these players became involved in relationships of power in which they were subject to ‘minor deprivations and petty humiliations’ (Foucault, 1977: 178) by their acculturating group, until they achieved a status of normality by acquiring a strong enough command of English, and the ‘footballing vernacular’, to communicate on the pitch and integrate socially with teammates and host families.

The strength of English language skills also had an influence on some players’ educational experiences. As mentioned earlier, the Football Scholarship requisitely includes an educational component which for most players comes in the form of the ASE programme (Apprenticeship in Sporting Excellence). Some academies teach this programme in-house, whereas others outsource these responsibilities to local colleges. Based at an academy which holds educational training in-house, this Education and Welfare Officer explains how he and the academy cater for migrant players:

It’s a bespoke service, to be honest with you, and first we have to look at the boy’s level of English, English is the priority. You know, when they come here, they need to start interacting with conversational English because they can’t become part of the group if they’re not, so we saturate them with English lessons, you know, lots of intensive work there. I’ll phone them every evening, make them talk on the phone, because that’s a different level from face-to-face where you can sort of mime and everything, and we make sure the landladies only speak English with them, because English is the priority.

This bespoke service allows for the player, the academy and potentially other parties, to contribute to decisions about how to approach education. For instance, the priority given to English language is evidenced by the fact that several of the players in this study undertook English language tutelage as an alternative to the ASE programme. In one instance, a Dutch player decided to discontinue his language course and any further educational training midway through his Scholarship following discussions with his parents and his Education and Welfare Officer, in order to ‘focus on his football’.

For those players whose English language skills were elementary, language mastery was presented and received as being an absolute priority so as they could communicate in training and ‘become part of the group’. This would be an important transition for any worker with a rudimentary command of their host country’s language, yet it implicitly suggests the acquisition of English for the purposes of footballing and social development to be of greater importance than the ASE qualification, and indeed education more broadly. In such instances, a glocal context is created in which FIFA’s international policy on the transfer and training of minors is appropriated to suit the needs and desires of the individual migrant and other vested interest parties such as his coaches and parents. A quick and ‘successful’ acculturation strategy is thereby privileged ahead of the holistic development of the individual player and the consideration of alternative career paths. Reflections on these and related issues raised in this discussion now conclude the article.

Acculturation, glocalization and migrant youthfootballers: Some reflections

In many respects, despite years of training often since early childhood, the professional careers of youth footballers are yet to begin in earnest, and as such migration to a Premier League academy represents a corporeal and temporal investment for players who leave their indigenous cultures in the hope of successfully ‘graduating’ from Football Scholarships to senior professional contracts. Given the limited time which the Football Scholarship affords players to acquire, develop and display the necessary talent to make this transition, and that the occupation of professional footballer is associated with high failure rates amongst even elite young aspirants, acculturation processes are clearly important to career development.

Acculturation is evidently not a matter of simply adopting a strategy: the complex political economy within and through which migrant players are recruited to English academies, and the potential for resistance from the local culture following their arrivals, are highly influential in contouring a migrant’s approach to and experiences of acculturation. In these respects, migrant youth footballers encounter similar problems of adjustment to their senior counterparts, albeit within differing political-economic conditions. However, their status as adolescents renders salient matters of pastoral care which were seen to affect players’ experiences of migration in this study. That is to say, problems of acculturation such as homesickness, loneliness, language competency and dislocation from familiar environs, were linked to the centrality and insularity of the academy as a socializing force in an otherwise unfamiliar cultural setting.

This insularity was not absolute, in that players kept in contact with people in their indigenous countries, and in some instances sought people or spatial surroundings which served as a reminder of home, as well as having access to various forms of media (though language was a factor here), yet it was apparent that football, and the pursuit of becoming a professional footballer, were usually central to these interactions with the host and indigenous cultures. This was evident in further discussions regarding the content of the ASE qualification, which features physiological, psychological and nutritional components, each of which are related to and embedded within players’ physical training programmes. This can be interpreted in a number of ways, such as providing players with a qualification which could help them to gain employment in football should they cease playing (as per FIFA’s transfer regulations), or as homogenizing their learning experience into an exclusively footballing pedagogy which perpetuates the centrality and insularity of the academy in the lives of young players. Of course, this study cannot and does not purport to represent the experiences of all migrant youth players, or the cultural codes of all Premier League academies and acculturating groups, and with this in mind I do not intend to categorize here the ‘typical’ migrant youth footballer or the archetypal youth academy; rather, I have sought to represent the central problems of and approaches to acculturation recounted by the focal players and, where appropriate, to locate their experiences within a glocal context of cultural adaptation, appropriation and resistance.

On this subject, the initial reactions of the acculturating group of predominantly indigenous players were frequently cited by the players in this study as affecting their early stages of acculturation. The glocalization thesis, which posits that local social actors (can) adapt and resist what they perceive to be the result of pervasive global flows, appears to hold significant explanatory value here. At the same time, the glocalization projects outlined by Giulianotti and Robertson (2007) tell us how migrant actors might respond to their host environments in terms of indigenous cultural maintenance and embracing new aspects of social and cultural life, which renders migrants both the result of accelerated global processes and subject to the potentially homogenizing or assimilating tendencies of their host culture. Herein lies the problem with polarizing the global and the local which, as noted by Andrews and Ritzer (2007), renders many researchers ‘transfixed with identifying, and subsequently seeking to rescue, the residues of the sporting local’ (p. 41). They assess that sociologists of sport are often afflicted by and caught up within this ‘pervasive glocal hegemony’ which sees them romanticizing the local, such as ‘traditional’ supporter groups or indigenous athletes, thereby polarizing the local against the supposedly homogenizing and repressive tendencies of global flows. Thus, much of the academic commentary surrounding the involvement of migrant youth footballers in England has tended to follow popular discourse in exploring the potential consequences for the local/national game and its future players and performances. By considering how the acculturation strategies of these players have been affected by their acculturating group, their living and working environments and the wider political-economic context, players’ experiences of acculturation can be seen as occurring within a glocal context in which global flows and local customs are in constant flux, requiring active negotiation from locally situated social actors.

Questions arise here as to exactly how the local culture of, principally but not exclusively, indigenous players, academy staff and host families receive these players, and what influences their behaviours and attitudes towards players from distinct cultural, social and ethnic backgrounds. Whilst Elliott and Weedon (2011) have identified that frequent contact between foreign and indigenous youth players can foster epistemic communities in which knowledge and skills circulate between both parties, the glocalization thesis would provide a useful framework for exploring the glocal contexts, and ensuing tensions, which are created through the integration of migrant players into elite training academies. A further question relates to how different the experiences of these players are from those of indigenous players who experience intra-national migration. Experiences of intra-national migration have been largely neglected thus far in the sports labour migration field and would provide an interesting point of comparison for the findings detailed here and elsewhere. Is there a need for an acculturating strategy for players who migrate within nation-states and, if so, are they received in different ways by host cultures?

Finally, whilst FIFA’s international transfer policy is designed to ensure that migrant youth players are recruited into adequate and appropriate structural conditions and are consequently able to develop alternative skills and interests, the glocalization thesis helps to illustrate how legislation such as this is interpreted by migrant players, their parents, academy staff and other parties to suit their respective interests at a given moment. This is clearly illustrated by the adaptation of FIFA’s transfer conditions for minors with respect to education to suit the immediate desires of the migrant player and those who also have an interest in his decisions. The issue here stems from the fact that in essence, the core function of the academy is the production of professional footballers, and in an environment which can be seen to valorize the pursuit of becoming a professional footballer ahead of alternative occupations or activities, this renders the glocal interpretation of such policies by migrant players and other parties problematic. A broader critique of the political economy of English youth football would benefit from an emphasis on glocal developments and might draw on the distinct experiences of migrant youth players to identify tensions between domestic and international provisions and the needs and core functions of Premier League academies.