Africa and the World Cup (2)

Thank you for a really interesting article, a new contribution to what seems to be a growing area of discussion which uses football as a means of examining the wider forces of globalisation. I covered some research by World Bank economist Branko Milanovic recently which took a slightly more positive view of FIFA's regulation of player movement between clubs and infact looks towards football for possible lessons on how poor countries can harness the forces of globalisation. His paper (http://www.eldis.org/cf/search/disp/docdisplay.cfm?doc=DOC20718&resourc…) looks at the rules FIFA have used to sanction the free circulation of labour (i.e. player transfers) in the club game whilst keeping restrictive rules governing player selection for national team competitions such as the World Cup (i.e. players can only play for the country where they were born). Free circulation of labour, he finds, produced better club teams but also greater inequality between rich and poor clubs. Experience gained by players at club level, however, has helped to reduce inequality and raise standards in the national game, hence the increasingly strong showing by poorer footballing nations in the World Cup. This, Milanovic argues, shows "how forces of efficiency but also inequality unleashed by globalisation can be harnessed by the existence of global institutions to help improve the outcome for poor countries". He doesn't, however, provide a great deal of detail on exactly how this might work. You can read my article at: