This book explores the diverse landscape of sport migration across various sports, examining how cultural significance and the global hierarchy shape migration patterns, networks, and decisions. The Czech Republic boasts a rich sporting heritage that traces back to the Sokol movement and has been significantly influenced by the YMCA. Sport migration continues to increasingly shape the country’s sporting culture today. Focusing on the cultural primary sports of ice hockey and football, the secondary sports of basketball and volleyball, and the developing sport of baseball, this book examines the impacts of migration on athletes, national federations, teams, and fans. Based on over twenty years of ethnographic research, the author employs multiple methodologies to examine this phenomenon of globalization, including the historical, political, economic, and sporting system contexts that influence these multi-directional global flows. Each chapter employs different methodologies to analyze migration and its effects, providing valuable insights for future researchers.

This insightful Handbook explores how sport intersects the experiences of asylum seekers, refugees, workers and migrants. Editors Joseph Maguire, Katie Liston and Mark Falcous bring together esteemed experts who draw on globally diverse cases studies to capture the complexities surrounding sport and migration, revealing how it is embedded in the wider power struggles that characterize global sport.

This book takes a close look at the experiences of migrant athletes, their precarious careers, and at what this can tell us about wider themes of globalisation, identity, race, gender, and the body. Based on in-depth ethnographic research on male Brazilian footballers and futsal players working in Central and Eastern Europe, this book helps to fill gaps in previous research on sports migration and global sports labor markets. This book uses life-history interviews to reveal how race, gender, and class are articulated in the everyday experiences of migrant athletes; how they express their religious affiliations; and how they navigate the relationships with injuries and pain that are characteristic of precarious athletic careers. This book considers the transnational networks that are essential in sustaining international athletic labor flows and the role that borders and emotions play in the lives of sports migrants and also the agency that migrant athletes can have in issues such as player development and retention. Presenting a more nuanced, ground-level perspective on sports migration and the sociological dialogue between identity, culture, and the body, this book is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in the socio-cultural study of sport, migration, globalization, or global inequalities.

In this dazzling collection of papers, leading international sport studies scholars chart the patterns, policies and personal experiences of labour migration within and around sport, and in doing so cast important new light both on the forces shaping modern sport and on the role that sport plays in shaping the world economy and global society. Contains a broad range of case studies focussing on such diverse areas as European and African soccer, Japanese baseball and rugby union in New Zealand.

This book takes a close look at branding and sponsorship in sport in the age of digital media. It examines how branding and sponsorship have evolved in response to the challenges and opportunities of new technologies. Featuring the work of leading international sport business researchers from four continents and twelve countries, the book explores key contemporary topics including esports, name and image likeness (NIL) rights, viewer experience, machine learning, social media use by athletes, sport migration, and the impact of COVID-19. It presents cutting-edge cases and new data across sports and events, including the Olympics, the NBA, international football, the rafting world championships, and collegiate sports. The book is an essential resource for advanced students, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers working in sport business and management, sport marketing, digital marketing, marketing communications, or brand management.

Cross-cultural management is an important facet of the globalized sport industry. Sport managers must be skilled at working with individuals from diverse cultures and aware of the key issues affecting sport on a global level. This book brings together cutting-edge research from leading sport scholars from around the world, to illuminate some of those important issues and to demonstrate what cross-cultural management looks like in a sporting context. Presenting case studies from countries as diverse as the US, Brazil, Poland and Venezuela, and across a range of sports from football to basketball, the book presents new empirical material derived from a range of inquiry protocols, including both qualitative and quantitative methods. It offers critical analyses of cross-cultural and managerial issues in key areas such as group cohesiveness, group communications, and misperception and misinterpretation. Making an important contribution to our understanding of both theory and practice in sport management, this book is fascinating reading for any student, researcher or practitioner with an interest in global and international sport.

Football is an incredibly powerful case study of globalization and an extremely useful lens through which to study and understand contemporary processes of international migration. This is the first book to focus on the increasingly complex series of migratory processes that contour the contemporary game, drawing on multi-disciplinary approaches from sociology, history, geography and anthropology to explore migration in football in established, emerging and transitional contexts. The book examines shifting migration patterns over time and across space, and analyses the sociological dynamics that drive and influence those patterns. It presents in-depth case studies of migration in elite men’s football, exploring the role of established leagues in Europe and South America as well as important emerging leagues on football's frontier in North America and Asia. The final section of the book analyses the movement of groups who have rarely been the focus of migration research before, including female professional players, elite youth players, amateur players and players’ families, drawing on important new research in Ghana, England, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Few other sports have such a global reach and therefore few other sports are such an important location for cross-cultural research and insight across the social sciences. This book is engaging reading for any student or scholar with an interest in sport, sociology, human geography, migration, international labour flows, globalization, development or post-colonial studies.