Abstract
This article investigates the rationale leading growing numbers of West African males to pursue a career in professional football, by taking the particular case of male youth in Accra and exploring how and why they are drawn into the football industry. Football is used as a lens to extend contemporary geographical debates over the agency, resourcefulness and entrepreneurialism of young people residing in the Global South. The transition from junior to senior secondary school is found to be a pivotal moment within many of the biographical accounts collected in Accra. I use theorisations of youth in sub-Saharan Africa to conceptualise this moment as a vital conjuncture, and shed light on how a career in football is now seen as a way to circumvent an education system considered to lead to unemployment, or unacceptable employment. Significantly, against a backdrop of neoliberal reform and an absence of state welfare, the perception that a career in professional football offers a means to create an income and be self-sufficient is very appealing. But it also offers more than that. It provides a means to demonstrate one’s masculinity, specifically, displays of wealth through conspicuous consumption, behaviour that young Ghanaians refer to as living the X-Way. It is argued that for male Ghanaian youth, the professional football player who is able to draw upon his latent sporting bodily capital and live the X-Way embodies resourcefulness. He is his own enterprise, a Foucauldian ‘entrepreneur of self’.
Highlights
You yourself go to any part of Accra and in any small place you will see people playing football, and you will ask yourself ‘are these not supposed to be in school?’ (Herbert Adika, the Ghanaian Football Association – GFA).The extensive global media coverage dedicated to professional, European football, and the cult of stardom attached to footballers plying their trade on this lucrative stage, are claimed to have popularised the myth of a career in football as a means of upward social mobility (Christensen and Sørensen, 2009; Poli, 2010)
In a context where the supply of educated labour exceeds demand, as appears to be the case in Accra, the ensuing ‘qualification inflation’ fuels the perception that returns from education are in decline or insufficient
Examining why young Ghanaian males are prioritizing a career in professional football offers a novel insight into how amidst socio-economic uncertainty, West African youth attempt to acquire markers of social status associated with adulthood
Summary
You yourself go to any part of Accra and in any small place you will see people playing football, and you will ask yourself ‘are these not supposed to be in school?’ (Herbert Adika, the Ghanaian Football Association – GFA). I begin by discussing how male Ghanaian youth claim that the spiraling cost of privatised education compels them to ‘drop out’ during the transition from junior to senior secondary school, and turn to a career in professional football. This moment in their lives is precisely the type of time space Johnson-Hanks refers to as a vital conjuncture, ‘a socially structured zone of possibility that emerges around specific periods of potential transformation in a life or lives’ At the vital conjuncture outlined above, they pursue a career in professional football and attempt to become ‘entrepreneurs of self’
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