ABSTRACT
Introduction Association football is the sport that has generated the largest body of research on sport migration (Agergaard, 2008). The sport’s global reach is perhaps the main reason for this extensive interest in the ethnoscapes of football (Maguire, 1999). Due to its intersection with multiple cultures, association football has provided sport migration researchers with a range of issues around and spaces in which to conduct their research. Therefore, our aim in this chapter is to provide a brief review of selected key aspects of the existing, rich literature on sport migration in football. In doing so, we rst outline the development of migration research in association football before moving to sketch the contours of the eld that has emerged in the past decade. We consider research that has sought to illuminate the broad structures of football’s labour market system, speci cally focusing on the patterns and mechanisms that are central in the waves of migration from Africa and the southern hemisphere to European leagues. We then provide observations on the emerging interest in women’s football, followed by a few challenges when conducting research in the area of football-related migrations before closing the chapter with a brief summary and directions for future research.
