Main trends and patterns in Women’s Football Migration
Page  2 In the last twenty years, a phenomenon has emerged which is entirely new in the study of gender, migration, women and sport, namely the international migration of female football talent and labour. Just as boys all over the world, also a growing number of girls dream about becoming a professional footballer and pursue this dream at intensively investing into their skills over years. The number of registered players has in fact more than doubled since 2000, with now over 30 million female footballers; but until date, “making a living” as a female football player is only possible in 17 out of 168 FIFA-listed women’s football countries. This means for highly talented and skilled women in 90% of the countries that they actually have to leave their home in order to act as professionals. The percentage of top players who leave the “developing countries” of women’s football is at levels of up to 80%, while migrants constitute between 36 up to 50% of players in premier league clubs of the “core countries”. The paper will analyze main trends and patterns in women’s football migration at following these questions: a) Are the fluxes mainly from South to North and North to West? Do they expand beyond traditional geographical limits and assume globalized characteristics? b) What makes women leave (structural, super-structural, subjective reasons)? c) How far do motives, experiences and outcomes of migration projects differ between the developing and core countries of WF? The logics of this migratory process shall be approached by presenting quantitative data on fluxes and qualitative material on the women’s migration projects which derived from an ethnographic case study on Portuguese players and from interviews with Norwegian and Brazilian female football migrants. The paper concludes by approaching the open question, if and how migration is increasing substantially and which are the opportunities and challenges for players, key agents and -parties involved. Nina Clara Tiesler Main trends & patterns in women’s football migration Introduction: some numbers Page  3  40 countries, 800 national squad players: 190 abroad  Extreme case Ireland: 80% top level players abroad  2000-2010: hundreds of Scandinaviens in the USA  Among ca. 170 FIFA-countries only 17-20 can provide (semi-) professional contracts  Players from 90% of these countries have to leave home in order to become professionals  Clubs in the Swedish women’s premier league Damallsvenskan: up to 50% expatriates Nina Clara Tiesler International Migration of Women Footballers
Three types of transnational players: differing women's football mobility projects in core and developing countries
Mobile players in men's football are highly skilled professionals who move to a country other than the one where they grew up and started their careers. They are commonly described as migrants or expatriate players. Due to a much less advanced stage of professionalism and production of the game in women's football mobility projects are different. At describing the cases of Brazil, Equatorial Guinea, Mexico, Colombia and Portugal, the aim of this paper is to conceptualise an umbrella category for mobile players that can include current realities in the women's game, namely the transnational player who has gained and displays transnational football experience in different countries and socio-culturally contexts. Furthermore, analyses allow introducing two new subcategories besides the “expatriate”, namely diaspora players and new citizens.
Deliberative Democracy and the Resource Curse: A Nationwide Experiment in Tanzania
Oil and gas discoveries in developing countries are often associated with short-sighted economic policies and, in response, calls to insulate resource management from populist impulses. We report on a randomized experiment testing methods to overcome this apparent tension between sound resource governance and democratic politics. Soon after Tanzania’s discovery of major natural gas reserves, we invited a nationally representative sample of voters to an intensive public deliberation of policy options featuring nationally recognized experts and small-group discussions. Democratic deliberation reinforced the public’s strong preference for rapid spending of gas revenues, but also increased support for various prudential and economically orthodox measures, including independent oversight of gas revenues, limits on government borrowing, and selling gas abroad rather than subsidizing fuel at home. These effects were driven by deliberation per se, rather than a pure information treatment, and show no evidence of contamination by facilitatoror peer-effects in group deliberations. www.cgdev.org Justin Sandefur, Nancy Birdsall, James Fishkin, and Mujobu Moyo