Abstract
This article investigates the domestic, intra-state labour mobility of professional footballers. Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with a snowball sample of 49 male professional footballers who represent a range of career trajectories; the specific object of 19 interviews was to examine meanings and experiences tied to job relocation. An interactionist perspective was employed to highlight the ways in which players came to define, control and negotiate their workplace social realities. The article explores the working contexts that lead players to find new employment and appreciate the temporally oriented workplace situations that colour their experiences. The interview data illuminate the way ‘work’ opportunities are denied, how players are marginalised from the club’s central activity, and why these contexts lead to the dilution of feelings of job security. The conclusion argues that the spirit of community needs to be retained in professional football, and offers direction for further research for an activity that has become somewhat instrumental and expedient.
The issue of labour migration has dominated academic enquiries into the problem of the mobility of professional sports workers for two decades (Bale and Maguire, 1994; Maguire and Falcous, 2011). A great deal of academic and journalistic attention has focused on international sports labour migration, which in the football industry has drawn a searching spotlight onto legal challenges to regulatory trade frameworks, the issue of the power of players to control their (global) career movements, and to elements of their working conditions (Bowers, 2003; Northcroft, 2011; Szymanski and Kuypers, 1999). Research on football players who seek work across national borders has focused on macro issues describing the patterns of mobility and issues of global labour flows (Maguire and Stead, 1998; Poli, 2010), and micro examinations of motivations and cultural (re)adjustments (Magee and Sugden, 2002; Poli, 2010; Stead and Maguire, 2000). Even so, international labour migration is nothing new to the professional game (Lanfranchi and Taylor, 2001; McGovern, 2002), although such movement constitutes historically only a fraction of all player mobility in this industry.
Numerous scholars of labour migration in professional football have made passing reference to intra-national or ‘domestic’ migration, 1 yet such mobility is never examined by them as part of a broader conceptual approach (see Elliott and Weedon, 2011). The complete picture of labour movement (both inter and intra-national) in 2010 across all four English professional leagues, however, is revealing. In total there were 1566 player transfers, including temporary loans in the English professional game. 2 Of this total figure, there were 765 intra-national transfers, 544 intra-national loan transfers and 175 international transfers (plus 82 international loan transfers 3 ). Approximately 25% of the playing workforce experiences some type of permanent or temporary job move each season (Bates, 2011; Professional Footballers Association (PFA), July 2011 4 ). These figures for labour mobility are interesting for they highlight, firstly, the comparatively modest percentage of international movement by players and, secondly, pose a question about why intra-national or domestic football league mobility has been all but neglected as a research focus. The purpose of this article, therefore, is to offer a preliminary sociological investigation of relocation in English league football, the objects of which are threefold: (i) to (re)examine the sports migrant literature from a sports work perspective; (ii) to offer empirical data that reveal a range of critical issues for players who move between clubs; and (iii) to advance preliminary comments that address the unintended consequences for players who regularly move clubs in order to fashion a career in this profession. This article stands in contrast to published studies that have focused centrally on the destination countries to which players relocate and their individual incentives for moving. We are less interested in global patterns of flow, and more concerned with comprehending the experience of employment-led mobility for professional footballers.
Mobile for work in sport
Few studies exist that examine the inter-connections between athletic employees and their complex relationships with work and place (Sugden, 1996; Vertinsky and Bale, 2004), even though it is well understood that being mobile for work is fundamental for many professional athletes, who commit themselves to tours (e.g. golfers and tennis players) and national and global competition (e.g. track and field athletes and skiers). Drawing on more general work on the impact of globalisation and transnational processes, broader examinations of issues linked with international sports labour migration have enriched the sociology of sport and, conversely, informed mainstream globalisation debates (Elliott and Maguire, 2008; Giulianotti and Robertson, 2009; Maguire, 1994). The issue of the mobility of athletes globally relates to the movement of work forces across national boundaries, as well as to issues of race (and diaspora), culture and identities, and to the political economy of sport (Carter, 2011a). Accordingly, research has raised questions about the relationship between sport and nationalism (Miller et al., 2000), the development of indigenous labour talent (Klein, 2006; Maguire, 1994), the impacts on ‘host’ and ‘donor’ nations (Darby, 2002; Grainger, 2006; Maguire, 2004), and to the exploitation of ‘foreign’ professional athletes (Darby et al., 2007).
It is unsurprising that forms of ‘mobile work’ in sport have been theorised to date largely in terms of concepts connected with globalisation processes, given Bale and Maguire’s (1994) influence on studies of geographical labour mobility among elite athletes. Interest in the movements and motivations of sports migrants has largely mirrored academic attention on alternative types of ‘mobile’ work (Elliott and Maguire, 2008), which have been presented as a manifestation of broader social dynamics, including the transformative potential of technology, the diminishing importance of ‘place’ in a world of globalising flows, and the commodification and increasing ‘abstraction’ of space (Castells, 1996; Felstead et al., 2005; Urry, 2002). These have been fruitful theoretical frameworks through which to explore the notion of ‘mobility’ concerned with the work people do, but they have exacerbated the tendency to concentrate on specific types of ‘mobile work’. There has been, for example, an increasing prevalence of work-oriented studies on information and communications technology (Felstead et al., 2005), concentrating on work tasks that can be undertaken ‘anytime’ and ‘anywhere’ (Wiberg, 2005). By contrast to workers for whom space maybe abstract and of declining importance, the professional activities of athletic labourers underscore the pre-modern importance of place and corporeality and the persistence of ‘social’ and ‘physical’ space.
Initially, mobile work (including sports work) aroused interest from academics whose concern had been on social, temporal and spatial transformations rather than in a detailed examination of the jobs undertaken (Felstead et al., 2005; Pyöriä, 2003). Numerous studies of work and workplace contexts linked mobility with career ‘freedom’; attention was drawn to idealised types of ‘portfolio’ careers (Gold and Fraser, 2002); scholars discussed emancipation from spatial constraints and related forms of alienation (Lefebvre, 1991). In the context of professional football, much has been made of the introduction of employment laws related to labour relations, specifically the 1995 Bosman ruling and the apparent ‘freeing’ of trade restrictions on players seeking work within the European Union. These transfer system changes have signalled significant transformation in this occupation; namely the increase in player bargaining ‘power’ as a result of their freedom from contract restraints, the extensive materialisation of networks of player agents and transfer ‘deal’ brokers, and the sharp rise in (inter)national player mobility (Magee, 2002). Thus, analysis has focused on the indispensable social networks that facilitate players looking for work internationally; for Poli (2010), who adopts a relational approach to comprehend footballers’ mobility, such networks are dynamic, yet spatially identifiable.
In examining why sports migrants seek work internationally, scholars, for example, Maguire (1999) and Magee and Sugden (2002), have classified athletes according to their migration experiences and movement patterns, identifying pioneers, settlers, returnees, mercenaries, nomadic cosmopolitans, the exiled, the expelled and ambitionists. In the context of domestic mobility, however, such ways of conceptualising individual outlooks have three drawbacks: firstly, they have been based solely on international migrants; secondly, these typologies individualise the range of motives, isolating individual drives separately from those networks of relationships in which they are embedded that constrain their ability to exercise choice free from traditions, obligations and expectancies (Carter, 2011a); thirdly, these classifications unavoidably freeze process and underplay the subjectivities of players who must negotiate practical, day-to-day micro issues, including family relocation (or separation, disruption and reorganisation), children’s education and the rupturing of kinship loyalties and friendship ties, in addition to language and cultural practicalities (Carter, 2007; Magee and Sugden, 2002; Stead and Maguire, 2000).
The strengths of the migration literature stem from the fact that this research complements strikingly wider ranging explorations of global flows of labour (Giulianotti and Robertson, 2009; Maguire, 1999). Yet while such globalisation approaches have become ascendant, they have inadvertently displaced other formerly dominant sociological viewpoints. In this article I intend to set out an initial examination of the processes bound up with intra-national labour migration from a sociology of sports work perspective to offer insights that will augment those developed within the literature to date, including an appreciation of the domestic ‘circulation’ of labour, an analysis of workplace ‘control’, and a reinvigoration of the concerns players-as-workers bring to their jobs – security, solidarity, tradition, opportunity and, of course, pay. The work-centred approach adopted is facilitated by the implementation of several sensitising concepts drawn from symbolic interactionism; a perspective that has long been associated with the study of occupational careers (Hughes, 1958). While acknowledging this theoretical preference and its ‘micro’ foundations, the interactionist tradition can vary greatly as it relates to concepts such as identity, role, lifeworld and the notion of ‘interaction’ itself (Atkinson and Housley, 2003). Even so, this micro approach does scrutinise the negotiated ordering of everyday and institutional – workplace – practices, including processes bound up with labour mobility. In spite of the evident social structures that enable and constrain the employment activities of the players involved in this study, their narratives must – can only – be comprehended as enacted by real individuals in the ongoing processes of daily life (Dennis and Martin, 2005). We do not wish to downplay structural factors, but here we want to foreground conceptual ideas related to the construction of meaning, the notion of ‘control’, negotiation and temporality as they are understood by professional footballers. Interactionism is well-placed to shed light on the inter-related concepts of workplace culture, emotion and identity (Strangleman and Warren, 2008), and to respond modestly to the following questions: How do players experience job-led relocation? Under what conditions do players move clubs?
Research approach
The aim of the broader study was to investigate sociologically the careers of professional footballers in England. As a significant element of this qualitative research, players were interviewed about labour mobility – specifically, their experiences of transfers between clubs – and to appreciate the ways in which they acclimatised to new work settings. While players move clubs for various reasons, all job relocation in this occupation offers evident reflexive moments (Giddens, 1991) when players can look back at what was, and can ponder the untarnished possibilities of what might be.
Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with a snowball sample of 49 male professional footballers who represented a range of career trajectories. 5 Of this sample, the specific focus of 19 interviews was on job mobility and issues related to intra-national migration. All players interviewed – with one exception – had experienced job relocation; some players had transferred geographically several times. Players were sought who it was thought had particular resonance to the area of study. The first players recruited had some connection with the author, 6 and were subsequently asked to recommend other potential interviewees. Some players, however, were contacted directly by letter and asked to be involved in the project. This process inevitably took time; interviews were conducted over a seven-year period from 1999 to 2006. It was hard to control the composition of a sample that resembles a panel of expert informants, which results ultimately in a body of coherent testimony (Roderick, 2006). So while this sample may have limitations, it is important to note that players rarely grant interviews in which they respond to questions about their playing careers so candidly.
The research objective was for interviewees to talk about the process of moving clubs and to obtain details about these transitional work experiences. We were unprepared, though, for the emotive way in which players often referred to their experiences of club transfers and geographical relocation, and how closely associated they were with the other types of career contingencies discussed – for example, injury, managerial succession and variations in performance, such as a loss of form. In interview all players discussed elements of labour mobility, even those in which injury experiences were the focus, in part to draw attention to the ramifications of what an injury could mean for them. The employment histories of all players were known prior to interview, for performance at work information is publicly available. Interviewees were prompted to offer a detailed description of events, making reference to personnel bound up in the process of transferring, and to stress the meanings they attached to key features of their experiences. They were drawn to the way they reacted to the possibility of transfers to clubs higher in status, as well as ‘downward’ moves to clubs in lower divisions. Specifically, we wanted to know how the players came to define their workplace situations, and control and negotiate their social realities within the confines of this ‘closed’ workspace (Eakin and MacEachin, 1998).
In advance of the interviews we did not anticipate how preoccupied players would be in terms of the way they came to comprehend their status within the football clubs. We were taken aback by the consistency with which their narratives were so vividly marked by apprehension about their future careers. In fact, these became distinct points of interest during this process, for initially we assumed that we would meet high status, financially secure players who would discuss ‘approaches’ by clubs and agents looking for their services, the possibility of fulfilling career ambitions and the realities of adjusting to life among a new squad of players. These assumptions were largely inaccurate as, even though some elements of the above points were described, for the most part the emerging themes from the interviews were restricted to their struggles to find new employment, the ways in which they came to feel unwanted and used by managers, and the necessities of making ends meet, rather than fulfilling vocational objectives.
Geographical labour mobility in professional football
The following sections draw on evidence from the interviews; the data segments selected exemplify subjective experiences and interpretations of (geographical) labour mobility. Although the thematic analysis revealed variations among the interviewees, there were clear trends that reoccurred in player accounts; thus, the themes identified represent relatively clear positions on relocation, player job searching and career temporality. These data offer an alternative to the patterns of global movement and experiences discussed in migration literature; they are neither associated with pathways and destinations nor micro-level personal adjustments made on arrival. Emphasis is placed on the way players come to recognise that job relocation is the only means by which their professional status can be extended, and to the segments in time when they recognise their futures are undetermined and they must seek out new opportunities. Accordingly, conceptual attention is drawn to the connected notions of control, time and duration, and decision-making at work.
Experiencing job relocation
In 2010, 33.6% of domestic moves were to clubs in higher divisions, whereas 26.4% were of a lateral or downward kind. Temporary loan moves accounted for 40% of all employment-led movement; of these, 90% were to clubs in the same (17%) or lower (73%) divisions. 7 Interpretations of these figures are crude as it stands; even so, they broadly indicate that, historically, most transfers are not upward, but, whether permanent or temporary, are mainly lateral or downward in nature. Although media attention is often focused on what interviewees routinely described as ‘big moves’, in actual fact all the players made reference to feelings of rejection and work vulnerability as they recognised that their playing services were, at least temporarily, unwelcome. Asked to reflect on their career movements to date, players’ descriptions often brought to light the kinds of difficulties they faced; the process of transferring can have several meanings, often contingent on their and others’ perceptions of their value, professional standing and career status (Platts and Smith, 2010). Finding new employment may bring immediate relief from the existential worries suffered by players released by clubs, it may provide a chance to reprove, and also restore faith in, their individual abilities, and this leads them often to view such moves positively (Roderick, 2006); transferring affords opportunities for players to re-establish their workplace sense of self, even for those who experience downward mobility.
All the players interviewed spoke in straightforward terms about opportunities for, and experiences of, upward job mobility. For those approached by clubs in higher leagues, all spoke of having few issues or tensions with managers, fellow team mates or club administrators and, significantly, they were mostly ever-present in the first team of their clubs. Their transfers took place relatively swiftly from the point at which an official approach was made, although of course for some there were periods of prior media (and dressing room) speculation and rumour. For example, a young Division Three player, whose narrative is representative of aspiring footballers in this sample, spoke of the way he was ‘looking for a move’; he said,
I was doing okay, not blowing my own trumpet and everything but the papers were writing nice things … I was shining in matches and people were linking me with other clubs … You keep working and it came to the point where [my manager] wanted me to sign again, but I knew that that was the time and I was going to go. And I made it clear to him that I wasn’t going to sign another contract with them.
Asked to reflect on this passage in his career, including his eventual departure to a Division One club, he said unequivocally:
When you go and play at a higher level with better players everything improves. The money improves, the training, the whole thing, everything about it improves. There’s just a little bit of self-doubt about actually making the step up but once you’ve made it, it’s the best thing you can do.
All moves that involved upward mobility were described by interviewees in simple terms; as illustrative of this, the data make clear two basic elements of such high status transfers. Firstly, the opportunity to receive high levels of pay was welcome, as the following former Premier League player declares:
It is a lot money. You’ve got to put things in reality. It is a lot of money and to earn that is great. I’d gone from two years earlier and not being wanted at a fourth division club to playing in the Premier League. It was just unbelievable.
While the sense of material security offered by high wages was inevitably a significant pull, and a factor that has been well interrogated morally by football commentators (Bowers, 2003), a second unambiguous point featured in player accounts, as the following Premier League player makes clear: ‘I wanted to prove it to myself that I was good enough at this level’.
Even though players who move to clubs of higher status may feel some degree of career ‘control’ – indeed, there has been some discussion of the fashion in which certain high profile players may ‘engineer’ transfers for financial gain (Magee, 2002) – for the interviewees in this study their choice to transfer, as opposed to resigning a contract, was compelling and experienced as a sense of duty to fulfil promise. The dominant discourse of labour movements in professional sport is concerned with the ‘winners’ of such mobility processes (Carter, 2011b). For these interviewees, their (heroic) agentic narratives, in which they described the achievement of life goals, were marked by a relative lack of reference to structural constraints and stand in contrast to the way players explained downwardly mobile transfers. In these instances, players (victimised) sense of agency can only be more adequately accounted for against a backdrop of the complex interweaving of their social locations, biographical histories and significant others (Ezzy, 2000).
Moving on as restricted agency
The labour mobility data indicate that most players move because they are surplus to requirements; for example, they are unwanted by managers or, viewed solely as commodities, they are a means of raising capital for employers. Players may find themselves rejected for diverse reasons and their subsequent search for work may be stressful because choices may be limited, constrained or non-existent.
A young, inexperienced Championship player expressed views in relation to what he considered to be his marginal position at his club as follows:
I thought that I wasn’t going to play so I thought that I had to leave the club and go to pastures greener … I honestly didn’t think I was going to play at [my present club] at that stage, so I thought I had to go. If I was going to have any sort of career then I had to get away.
Another young, Division One player who had been sent on loan to two separate clubs in consecutive months explained how he came to recognise his increasingly inferior standing:
I think it dawned on me eventually. I must have come back from another loan spell at Crewe and then played virtually another full season [at my club] without making any headway into the first team, and then at the beginning of the next season there appeared three new signings who were all strikers and suddenly I’m thinking: ‘Well, hold on, perhaps my days aren’t exactly going to be here’.
Similarly, a former first division player was asked to describe the way in which a transfer to a Premier league club came about. In setting the scene he spoke of his relationships with two former managers. He said:
I got on brilliant with [my former manager]. I had a really good relationship with him … I felt he was betrayed by the club. He was forced to sell players … so I wasn’t particularly happy and getting a bit disillusioned at that stage and that was towards the end of one season. And then [a new manager] came in and if they could get me out they would sort of take the money, I’d been there eight years.
When asked to describe how he acquired this idea, he said,
You just get feelings, it was just one of them feelings reading between the lines. Certainly there wasn’t any conflict between us … but I think he knew that I was [my former manager’s] boy sort of thing, so I think he was quite happy when I went in the end. They got decent money.
All the players represented have developed a sense that they must seek new employment. Their feelings result in part from organisational changes at their clubs – in these cases managerial succession and the purchasing of playing staff – that can be important career turning points. Players may feel unwanted and, thus, their concerns over future work come to be paramount. For some these feelings result from ‘reading between the lines’ as the player explains, for others their dismal work situations are unambiguous and, occasionally, public knowledge. The next quote, for example, is comprised of significant organisational change, but the circumstances described by the player are unequivocal. On the first day of preseason training he arrived at the club to find that he had not been allocated training kit or a squad number. When asked what contact he had with the manager at that stage, he said: ‘The manager wasn’t saying anything to me, he’d made it clear that it was time and that he’d let me know if anyone showed any interest’. The player was excluded from training sessions, and when asked about his situation relative to other players, he makes explicit the work situation from his perspective:
It wasn’t just me actually, there was about six of us who had turned up and we hadn’t got any kit because he’d brought probably half a dozen players in. So I mean we were all disappointed but you don’t show that in the dressing room, because everybody’s been there and everyone knows what it’s like so, you know, it usually gets treated with sort of humour and that.
In responding to the question of whether these experiences are common for players at this level of football, he said:
It’s a common experience I think. You speak to players and a lot of them, even if they haven’t been treated like this, a lot of them have been at clubs where managers have treated players in the same way. I mean it wasn’t nasty to me or anything like that, I mean it was just really, like you don’t exist. You know, he doesn’t say hello to you or anything but when you speak to him he’s civil and, I don’t know, it’s like a cold shoulder.
In contrast to those players who hold aspirations of furthering career goals, the players quoted here underscore the types of common concerns they harbour connected with their job prospects. Importantly for these footballers, work is understood in terms of actual performances and involvement in first team matches, rather than merely having employment with a professional club: a situation that does not guarantee game time.
The frequent circulation of club staff – that is, the movement of players and managers and coaches – in the contemporary game may lead players to be unsettled at repeated points in their football careers; some, from time to time, are placed in contexts in which their exits are hastened. It is clear, though, that some players may perceive themselves as lacking the necessary agency and sense of power to determine the direction of their careers at critical points in their work histories, and such fateful moments can be difficult for players to control. At these times, player goals are directed narrowly towards finding new employment and making career decisions that bring about income security; their agency is restricted and one may question what types of relocation ‘motives’ are developed by players who find themselves in circumstances where they must seek out new work. To date, very little empirical knowledge exists – beyond journalistic introspection – about how players resist attempts by others to control their labour mobility; how they feel about employers exploiting labour mobility for economic gain; or how they (players and partners) come to resolve job-relocation choices.
Relocation, choice and time
For some players their ability to control the processes bound up with job relocation and their capacity to make career choices that meet their employment needs are severely constrained. Other players more easily manage their moves for they are in stronger market positions (their services are highly valued), although player valuations are transient. Decisions, however, are rarely made in isolation and motivations to make certain job moves must be understood in relation to competing kin obligations, sensitivities and economic living necessities (Webb, 1998), and against a backdrop of their appreciation of how social and biological time intersect and structure this occupation (Gearing, 1999).
A former Premier League defender playing for a southern club discussed a move to the north of England, outlining the concern that players move having to respect the personal requirements and desires of partners (and children). This player mentions his wife’s response to mobility and the key relationship between space and time as follows:
Talking to other players it can be really difficult for the wives, a lot of them don’t settle and get home sick. I can honestly say that when it comes to my football, not that I wouldn’t worry about [my wife], but I know that I can go anywhere and she would come with me, but for a lot of players it must be hard, they think that they can’t move too far away because of the wife … At the end of the day it’s probably only going to be for two or three years, which sounds a long time but when you look at it over your lifetime, it’s nothing really.
The player underscores the relative frequency of anticipated moves for players – ‘two or three years’ – and in so doing alludes to the manner in which players and partners may negotiate and rationalise their decision-making about geographical relocation and its impact on the way they come to (re)configure family living arrangements (O’Toole, 2006; Webb, 1998). Players develop their understanding of the temporal rhythms of labour mobility as an outcome of the routine circulation of club staff, their appreciation of labour relations (such as the 1995 Bosman Ruling), and because, inevitably, they experience contract (re)negotiations and job-led mobility personally.
A recurring theme in the player interviews was their comprehension of time and how it structured their working and home lives. These passages related mostly to time remaining on contracts, the start and end points in playing seasons, and the residual fear of career length and termination. An experienced player, who had played for clubs in three Divisions, talked of his tribulations concerning his career future. The player describes the sequence of unfolding events and makes reference to the passage of career uncertainty in which he became embroiled:
I didn’t know whether it was out of fear or maybe it was because it was the last year of my contract again, but I was playing very well … at the end of the season I tried to negotiate a new contract … I haggled, I spoke to the chairman once and then I haggled with the manager for about three months and I couldn’t get anywhere.
He said that throughout the summer close season a number of clubs had contacted him concerning a potential move, for he was ‘free’ from contract constraints. He went on to explain the difficulties that can arise for players who are free agents and those who find themselves in such temporally constrained and emotionally demanding circumstances:
I spoke to [two clubs] but, because there were so many players available, they were all reluctant to commit themselves. They were all offering two or three month contracts and basically I thought it was ridiculous. I mean effectively it’s a two or three month trial for a thirty-two year old defender who’s played a couple of hundred league games. I wasn’t prepared to do that.
Asked how he coped during this period he said:
It was difficult. It was a stressful summer really because of the uncertainty with the situation at my current club. It was awful to be honest … In the end he couldn’t offer me the sort of terms that I wanted.
The player grew tired of acquiescing to his working situation and decided at that point to end his football career. In interview, this player spoke of the idea of ‘freedom of contract’, which for many in this industry does not ring of the emancipation implied in so much of the literature on sports labour migration (Trumper and Wong, 2011). His statements underpin the centrality of the connected notions of duration, control and the uncertainties brought about by the way in which players may perceive time as running out.
This point was expressed neatly by an experienced Championship player who articulated his feelings about the indeterminate position in which he found himself as follows:
Oh God, yes, it frightens me to death, you know, my contract running out at the end of the season. It’s coming too quick … I’ve got to get everything ready, all my qualifications behind me. I’ve got to get my pension all sorted out so I can finish when I’m thirty-five and then I can try and get a job that I want to do. But these last two years, I just feel as though things have come too quick, which is a nightmare … I’ve got to be able to pay the mortgage.
The player said that in most circumstances having freedom of contract was ‘a good thing’, but at his age (30 years) he needed to keep playing. When asked how he coped with such insecurity, he replied:
People keep saying to me, ‘Oh, you’ll get a club, no problem, no problem’. I’m not looking to leave but my contract runs out at the end of the season so I’m waiting for them to make up their minds. They haven’t offered me a new contract at the moment and I can talk to other clubs in January. It’s quite stressful, you know, but you just keep it to yourself.
Asked whether he talked to anyone outside the club the player made the following point:
I speak to my girlfriend. In fact, recently, I said to her, ‘you know we could be living in a shed at the end of the garden at the end of this year.’ I’ve got a five year plan, up until I’m thirty-five, and if I keep getting a contract we should be all right.
In-form and highly rated players can often make choices based on individualised priorities: searching for playing experience and realising occupational aspirations may drive career decisions. The majority of (older) players are not able to continue to treat football as a vocation. The international sports migration literature tends to paint a picture of athletic labourers often in advantageous market positions with choice and flexibility (Poli, 2010; Stead and Maguire, 2000). The data collected for this study do not portray choice, freedom, player agency and distinct career paths: far from it. It is clear that, for players, football is not a time-rich industry. Pervading the ongoing experiences of occupational mobility for players is a complex mixture of relational and temporal constraint, obligations to family, and structural and economic priorities.
Discussion
A great deal of career information is available on professional footballers, including playing successes, failures and financial worth and, of interest here, career movements; however, these objective data neither reveal the ways in which labour mobility is experienced – or its impact on player identities – nor do they say much about the types of workplace conditions that motivate players to seek alternative work. Approaching intra-national labour mobility from a sports work perspective has highlighted several issues: it is clear, for example, that a player’s ability to control and shape the direction of his employment trajectory cannot be divorced from the relational constraints that impact on the social milieu within which decisions about relocation are reached. These constraints are associated with labour trade relations, but also factors as diverse as organisational change, workplace identity and family and housing considerations (Webb, 1998). While adding weight to Poli’s (2010) relational approach, in which he advocates foregrounding player agency in the face of global forces, the data presented contribute to an understanding of the culture, values and conflict structures as played out in this occupation.
Research conducted on international sports labour migration has impacted significantly on studies of globalisation (Maguire, 1999; McGovern, 2002), although it has been of much less utility in helping to comprehend the way players circulate within English professional football. The interactionist lens employed here to shed light on the mobility experiences of professional footballers in contrast has focused attention on the significance of strategic workplace encounters among – but not confined to – players and managers; how players form their conduct in terms of the specific industry and cultural backdrops which, often remaining unspoken or treated as humour, govern their application; how, within the ‘closed’ confines of football clubs, players establish a definition of their situations that is both controlled and controlling. The mobility experiences discussed give expression to the construction of (the compression of) time as comprehended by players, whose narratives are marked by a consistent recourse to their feeling of workplace agency and control, temporality, staff turnover and the necessity to accommodate the perspectives of significant others.
So much of what the players reported in interview as central to their experience of mobility is connected to the combination of circumstances which, in effect, ‘push’ them away from their employers (Stead and Maguire, 2000): being denied opportunities to play and released from contracts can ultimately lead to involuntary exit from the industry itself. Underpinning their accounts, the players talked appreciably about time and its effect on their work. While their age unavoidably provides a biological clock which, sooner or later, becomes evident to them (Gearing,1999), the temporal rhythm of playing seasons and contract lengths add meaningful detail to player narratives; thus, a cogent and consistent sense of time and duration should shape the way player movements are conceptualised.
In much of the sports labour ‘migration’ literature, the specific terms employed to describe the flow of athletic talent globally have been used loosely, with few attempts to define what is encompassed, to categorise different types of geographical mobility or, even, to examine the associations between mobility, time and space among sports workers. Rather than fall back on concepts developed by globalisation theorists (Carter, 2011b: Giulianotti and Robertson, 2009), it was an implicit intention here to reclaim the social relations of player circulation in English professional football for the sociology of sports work. This article underscores player vulnerability and recognises that, in the majority of cases historically, players move as a consequence of their workplace failures rather than successes. In striving for definitional accuracy for this group of workers, a provisional attempt to distinguish between different types of (production-led) geographical mobility is set out with duration as a critical differentiating factor.
A crucial distinction is proffered between ‘migration’, where a notion of permanence of the move is involved, and ‘circulation’, including moves that are of a more temporary kind. The primary focus is on employment-led mobility: defined here to include moves of an individual player between workplace sites in different geographical locations. Workplace change may not always be associated with residential change; rather, encompassed within the term circulation, it may be linked with some kind of temporary or non-permanent move of shifting duration. 8 A great deal of the ‘migration’ literature has focused on large-scale global flows – journey start and end points – and spatial and social transformations in high-level professional sport rather than labour processes per se. The characteristics of the work of footballers are similar in kind to other highly skilled workers bound up in entertainment industries who are employed on short, fixed-term contracts and who must be mobile for work (Elliott and Maguire, 2008); this is peripatetic sports work that has rarely been examined in relation to the boundaries of space, time and labour processes (Vertinsky and Bale, 2004).
Summary and future considerations
The developing political and economic structures now operating within the organisation of professional football have received scrutiny, including examinations of the legal regulatory trade frameworks, the unrelenting profit-driven push by club owners for ‘success’, and the constraining opportunities for players to feel involved and fulfilled (Conn, 1997; Magee, 2002; Roderick, 2006). This work has gone some way in helping to comprehend why all types of player mobility have increased, particularly since 1995, although to date there has been little discussion by social scientists of the possible latent consequences of such high levels of circulation from a sports work perspective. Globalisation theorists have been preoccupied with examinations of routes and pathways, rather than the effects of such volumes of flows on the social selves of those embedded in this industry. This article has sought to explore the working contexts that may lead players to find new employment and appreciate the social realities that colour their experiences. The interview data illuminate the way ‘work’ opportunities are denied, how players are marginalised from the club’s central activity – defined by all as contributing to first team performances – and why these contexts lead to the dilution of feelings of job security. Yet, labour mobility patterns and rates – evidenced so often in studies of labour migration in professional football – wedded to the voices of players may potentially speak indirectly to other types of effects, which have a profound impact on employment contexts in the new capitalism of the professional football industry. These consequences are articulated here in the form of three related research hypotheses, and are outlined to provoke future debate about the human costs of (intra-national) labour mobility.
Geographical labour mobility may lead players (and family members) to experience a lack of ‘rootedness’ in terms of ‘work’ and ‘home’ life relations (O’Toole, 2006; Webb, 1998). Relocating repeatedly and for relatively short durations can be particularly unsettling for ‘football families’ and lead to situations in which players and their partners reconsider their spatial living arrangements (Carter, 2007). The work of professional football often weighs heavily in the daily timetables of the family members of players, who must also accommodate this ‘intrusion’ into their lives, their requirements, wishes and self-identities, the upshot of which may be erratic, unpredictable and dislocated lifestyles for all (Ortiz, 1997; O’Toole, 2006; Webb, 1998).
Increases in player flexibility and mobility have brought about an inconsistency and insecurity in workplace relations specifically; thus, it is asserted that teamwork is superficially constructed. Much has been made of player ‘banter’ and camaraderie, particularly by former players (Dunphy, 1987; Nelson, 1996), although the core ingredients of such changing room solidarity were historically an outcome of intra-organisational stability and, while players were bought and sold, the state of internal flux within clubs did not impact on social bonds in the way that is experienced today (Taylor and Ward, 1995). In other words, the political and economic structures that engineer high rates of mobility unintentionally result in a distorted sense among players of what constitutes workplace citizenship. The foundations of trust are undermined by career flexibility and mobility; players struggle to forge friendships (Magee, 1998) and to develop respect for the workplace motives of colleagues.
The outcomes of increased job flexibility are double-edged. High-level players have been able to secure themselves financially and subsequently relax monetary concerns (Szymanski and Kuypers, 1999). Below the top levels, however, players are subject to numerous employment and material uncertainties, a personal circumstance that dovetails meaningfully within a workplace climate augmenting a psychological fear of failure. If social bonds accrue essentially from the mutual dependency of collective enterprise (Sennett, 1998), players find it hard to work out on whom they can rely and trust, for there is a lack of understanding about the ends to which colleagues are labouring (Magee, 1998). The scarceness of thorough and durable working relations extends also to club supporters, the consumers of performances; instability characterises the dynamic interdependent relations among players, employers and consumers (fans) (Bowers, 2003; Conn, 1997). In short, for both players and supporters, there has been a loosening of their sense of commitment to each other although, as Falcous and Maguire (2005) elucidate, there are multi-layered trade-offs and contradictions at play between the relational tensions of success, entertainment, ‘local’ identities and career decision-making.
The three connected areas identified as relevant for further research allude to challenges to self-respect personally felt by players; some are rejected publicly among teammates and fans, yet must endeavour to hold themselves with dignity while searching for and securing work opportunities at clubs, some of which are lower in status. While attempting to appreciate sociologically domestic mobility, the interview data concurrently enlighten patterns of the occupational culture in the professional game. In engaging conceptually with migration literature, the scarcity of research on intra-national relocation stands out. The purpose of this article, therefore, has been to initiate a discussion of job-led domestic migration in order to draw attention to this significant employment phenomenon in professional football. Set against the backcloth of dramatic shifts of the politico-economic structures of the football industry, examining intra-national mobility has focused a work-centred sociological lens on the uncertainty promoted by flexibility, the superficiality of team camaraderie, the paucity of trust and commitment and the spectre of failing to achieve in an occupation coveted by millions, which all impact on the authenticity of players’ workplace identities and sense of dignity.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Editor and the reviewers for their generous help and suggestions.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.