ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the reluctance of academic sports scholarship and sports journalism to acknowledge how features of slavery have led to the underdevelopment of African football. This analysis is based on different personal observational positions as a licensed coach, scout, sports scientist, MBA sports graduate and evicted African. The chapter criticises this reluctance as disguising the replication of the exploitation of the black body. The intent is to assess the potential of football to reproduce specifi c features of the slave period; namely venturing into African communities and taking black children away through contemporary notions of talent identifi cation. It argues that there is a connection between marketing and business theories in football in the way they have colluded with the scientifi c constructions of black men as compatible with a specifi c physical labour role, now operational inside football.
