“Only These Feet Can Save Us”: A Case Study on the Upward Social Mobility Expectations of Young Male Footballers in Dudullu

Football is widely portrayed as a social mobility ladder for marginalized youth, yet for most it functions as an economy of hope and a site of symbolic violence. This study asks how that promise is sustained where it is least likely to be fulfilled. It examines 12 young male players aged 18–23 in Dudullu, an industrialized working-class district of Istanbul, all long-term residents competing in regional amateur leagues. Within a social constructionist framework, semistructured interviews and nonparticipant observation were analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis, with the researcher's own working-class and former-player positioning treated as an analytic resource. Two themes were constructed: (i) “only these feet can save us”: bodily capital against poverty; and (ii) “I know I’m fooling myself, but I’ll go as far as it goes”: cruel optimism and the fear of the final whistle. Rather than misrecognizing the game as fair, the players recognize it as rigged and stay because the costs of exit exceed those of staying. Their persistence is best understood not as belief but as knowingly sustained attachment—a configuration I call a treadmill ladder , where movement is real, costly, and continuous while elevation is withheld from all but a statistical few. Locating the treadmill ladder in a preprofessional, nonmigratory lower tier of a Global South urban periphery, the study extends a literature built largely around elite academies and migration pipelines.