The promise of empowerment: football migration brokerage between west Africa and Europe

Since the 1990s, west African young men have increasingly aspired to migrate through football, i.e. to play football as a career and a strategy to migrate abroad. Key figures in their migration projects are intermediaries – agents, coaches, and club owners who seek to facilitate and control their mobility in the global market of football players. This article examines mediation of football-related migrations from west Africa to Europe in order to reflect on broader issues of global capitalism and its underlying structures of inequity. It examines questions of legality, intermediaries’ motivations, their relationships with aspiring migrants, and racial constructs of Whiteness and Blackness. Ethnographic insights into football migration mediation reveal that structural inequities have less to do with outright racism and human trafficking – two well-documented issues of global football and migration in general – and more with a speculative nature of global capitalist markets, stringent migration regimes, promises of inclusion and empowerment, and racialization of categories like opportunity, discipline, and merit.