Title  Fintar Fronteiras: migrações internacionais no fututebol português (Original)
 Dribble Past Borders: International Migrations in Portuguese Football (EN)
Author  Carlos Nolasco
Advisor  José Manuel Mendes e João Peixoto
Year  2013
Institution Univeristy of Coimbra 
Degree  PhD
Area  Sociology of Labor Production and Business
Keywords International migrations; Sport migrations
URI https://hdl.handle.net/10316/23782

Abstract

Football is currently one of the most important social events. Nowadays, sport results are not only mere victories and defeats, but also the expression of cultural, political and economical gains and losses. In a context of intense competition, increased by the dynamics of globalization, the football universe seeks to maximize performances, and this demands a never ending search for players with physical features, technical and tactic skills and competitive mentality, able to turn fans, clubs and investors’ expectations into victories. When those players can’t be found in a Portuguese-based search, or the demand and supply relation suggests other labour markets, they are looked for abroad, prompting migratory processes. Thus, as in other areas where a high international mobility of workers can be detected, relevant processes of international mobility of players also occur in football. An increasing number of professional football players have been moving between countries, determining the way competitions occur. Portuguese football has not remained indifferent to those migratory dynamics. Although it is not a recent process, it has lately become more important due to the huge amount of foreign footballers who play for Portuguese clubs, and to the high number of Portuguese players in foreign leagues. The thesis aims at understanding the migratory dynamics of Portuguese football. Its bottom line is the sociological significance of sports and particularly of football as an expressive social phenomenon of contemporary societies. The point of departure is the idea that contemporary societies are marked by the “turbulence” of migration which is noticeable in the diversity and complexity of people flows. Professional football as an occupation is considered to provoke international migrations of sport labour, which, in spite of its peculiarities, is part of the dynamics of the “migration era”. The object of analysis is Portuguese football, consisting of any football played in Portugal, including by foreign players in Portugal and by Portuguese players abroad. The main hypotheses presented is that the migratory process of football players is a movement of workers, in a context of globalization, where the Portuguese society, being a country of both emigration and immigration, plays the role of “turntable” of players between the periphery and the centre. The present investigation work implies the use of a plural methodological strategy, which combines quantitative and qualitative approaches as a strategy to widely cover the reality we are focused on. Through empirical work, we notice that Portuguese football migrations follow global sport dynamics, but sustaining a particularity: there are simultaneous movements of arrival and departure of players and the Portuguese clubs are therefore origin and destiny of migration flows. These movements follow two trends: on the one hand, football market’s characteristics, which simultaneously attract and reject players; on the other hand, historical and social affinities, which make players migrations part of the wide Lusophone migratory system.