Moving players, traversing perspectives: Global value chains, production networks and Ghanaian football labour migration

Abstract

This article examines the production and transnational export of Ghanaian football labour. It does so via a cross-disciplinary approach that utilises perspectives rooted in the sociology of development (global value chains) and economic geography (global production networks). The article is underpinned by two central arguments. Firstly, it contends that the GVC framework is useful in accounting for how Ghanaian players are produced and prepared for the international market, identifying the key agents and agencies involved, mapping the geography of production and export and assessing the institutional context within which the trade operates locally, nationally and internationally. The second draws on the GPN perspective to argue that while Ghanaian football labour migration remains a process contoured by uneven asymmetries of power that favour actors, stakeholders and entities in the global North, there are currently segments of the production–export chain where power is much more diffuse and some benefits are captured in the global South. The paper draws on interview data and observations gleaned from four periods of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Ghana between January 2008 and June 2011.