Introduction

Athletes are on the move. The migration of sports talent as athletic labour is a pronounced feature of sports development in the late twentieth century. The purpose of this book is to explore this phenomenon from a variety of perspectives. The book is divided into three parts: historical examples of such integration, some questions of contemporary concern about the international migration of sports talent and, finally, a section indicating some possible future global developments. This movement of elite sports talent – the subject of this collection – is referred to in terms of labour migration in order to convey to the reader how this process is interwoven with the commodification of sport within the capitalist world economy. Although it is not usual to think of sportspeople as workers, we argue that they are, in fact, not unlike other sectors of the workforce who, for various reasons, have to ply their trade in several national, continental or trans-continental locations. Again, not unlike their counterparts in other occupations, elite athletes as a group experience varying degrees of exploitation, but also enjoy some personal gains.