A game of snakes and ladders: Player migratory trajectories in the global football labor market

Abstract

Globalization theorists have typically described the post-Bosman football labor market as an amalgam of global value-added chains funneling players from (semi-)peripheral countries to Europe’s core leagues. However, due to their cross-sectional design, most globalization studies actually do not observe the longitudinal migratory trajectories through which players move towards, within and out of football’s global core. To fill this lacuna, this study examines a unique longitudinal dataset of 4730 complete careers of male professional football players and identifies four characteristics of their migratory trajectories: (1) recurrent mobility; (2) domestic careers for 60% of the players and frequent cross-border transfers for the other 40%; (3) clear career progress towards the top teams for the elite 10% of players and circulation for the other 90%; (4) a highly skewed distribution of transfer fees leading top teams to earn and spend the bulk of transfer fees. This suggests that football’s labor market is somewhat like a game of snakes and ladders in which an elite minority of players seems to be moving in tightly managed global value-added chains towards the top teams. However, the migratory channels through which the majority of players moves are much more porous, two-directional and complex than usually suggested in the literature.