WOLRDVIEW:Soccer stars learn skills at top clubs then return to boost homelands – doctors should do same, writes PAUL GILLESPIE
A NUMBER of puzzles about the contemporary world are illuminated by how the World Cup manifests changes arising from the globalisation of international affairs. This makes it fascinating even for a fitful and ill-informed fan of the sporting spectacle like me.
Far from homogenising cultures, soccer draws out their local particularities. The game has one of the world’s most globalised labour markets, yet World Cup teams rest on territorial citizenship. Supposedly homogeneous national identities are thereby challenged by multicultural realities. And the geography of soccer excellence offers some clues about changing patterns of geopolitical power.
Globalisation is a contested concept because it was abused during the 1990s to argue that capitalist internationalism is eliminating cultural differences. Acknowledging the compression globalisation brings to the world and the intensification of consciousness about it being a single place the sociologist Roland Robertson nevertheless criticises the view that it will undermine diversity.
He uses the term “glocalisation” to describe how local cultures adapt and redefine global products to suit their particular needs, beliefs and customs. Soccer, he argues, exemplifies these relations between universals and particulars in modern capitalist internationalism – whether from corporate financing, labour mobility and recruitment, branding, corruption and inequality, or creating hybrid collective identities.
Out of some 2,600 professional players in the five top European leagues – England, Spain, Italy, Germany and France – almost 800 are expatriates, defined as those born and recruited in a country different from the one where they play. Pointing this out, Branco Milanovic, a World Bank specialist in global inequalities, says soccer embodies globalisation like no other sport.
There has also been a huge increase in the proportion of players on national teams playing abroad – by up to 500 per cent from 1976-2006. Only three of Ghana’s 23-strong squad play nationally, and none of Nigeria’s. Until the mid-1990s there was a strict protectionism in European soccer, with at most two or three foreign players allowed per club.
The change flows directly from a 1995 ruling by the European Court of Justice in the case of Jean-Marc Bosman, a Liège player who complained that these rules and his club’s refusal to allow him transfer flouted Article 48 of the Treaty of Rome on freedom of movement and non-discrimination. The ruling lifted limits on EU players, and soon afterwards other limits on African, East European or Latin American players.
Over the next 15 years European soccer was transformed by commercialisation of this new labour mobility. In a perfect capitalist cycle the richest teams in Germany, England, France, Italy and Spain buy the best players, collect trophies, boost their popularity, develop an international fan base, sell more jerseys and advertisements, so enhancing their profitability to buy even better players.
Milanovic says such inequalities are mitigated at national rather than club level, because of citizenship rules. Players return home to play, boosting the performance standards of Latin American, central and eastern European or African teams in the World Cup. As a result, differences between national teams have steadily decreased. At the last three World Cups the average difference in goals per game between winning and losing teams has ranged between 1.2 and 1.3, as opposed to 1.7 some 30 years ago. The decrease is sharper for the top eight national teams: from 1.6 to 1.
Although other researchers dispute some of these statistics, the trend seems to be borne out by the dismal performances of France, Italy and England this year and the much better record of Uruguay or Paraguay, not to mention Argentina and Brazil. Latin America does best of all the continents, echoing emergent trends in world politics.
Germany breaks the European trend, and for an illuminating reason. After its citizenship laws were changed from jus sanguinis or bloodline criteria to jus soli or birthplace ones in 1999 its postwar 4.5 million immigrant population had the opportunity to choose German nationality if they were born there.
Ken McCue of Sport Against Racism Ireland points to the resulting multicultural background of Germany’s team in South Africa. The fact that most of its team plays in the home league, together with a progressive development programme for “new German” players at club level, gives Germany an advantage. McCue campaigns tirelessly for a similar recognition of “new Irish” talent. It is made more difficult by the legal change to our naturalisation laws in 2005, as well as by the short-sightedness of Irish sports officialdom.
Germany’s positive experience is in contrast with that of France which looks at its own largely immigrant team and cries “not us”. There is a contradiction between the increasingly multicultural reality and essentialist national identities to which best citizenship – and soccer – practice must adapt.
Milanovic believes soccer offers a model to alleviate global inequalities, were rich countries benefiting from immigration in other professions like medicine to oblige doctors to return home regularly to spread their skills and talent as soccer players must do.
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