ABSTRACT
As an ethnologist, one of my main interests when dealing with football is to catch a glimpse of salient features of local culture as revealed through players’ and spectators’ behaviour. The interest may seem quite irrelevant here when focusing on the international migration of football players. This kind of migration appears at first to be highly dependent on market laws such as supply and demand or clubs’ economic resources, and not on specific features of local culture. Following this formalist economic approach one would assume that the richest clubs will afford the best foreign players whom they choose according exclusively to sports criteria within the limits set up by each national football league. This is partially true: whereas Italian clubs can afford most of the stars on the market, German clubs, which are not so well off, will be less voracious in their recruiting. So, should the only alternative left be to restrain oneself from describing such a rational and mechanical mercantile process draining football stars from the periphery to the richest centres? In that case the ethnological analysis would be much alleviated if not superfluous.
