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Which One Is the Next Soccer Star?

Faculty on the globalization of sports marketing

Young South African boys play soccer on the fields of Soweto

Larbi Ben Barek isn't well known in the United States, but to scholars of sports his story exemplifies an untold story about globalization, a panel of Duke faculty said Tuesday at the Kenan Institute for Ethics.

A poor boy from Casablanca with a marvelous way with a soccer ball, Ben Barek was in 1938 the first African player to be recruited by a European soccer club. He crossed the Mediterranean riding first class on a ship, but got off the boat through a storage exit so the Marseilles team that signed him could hide him from the many other clubs that were at the dock seeking his services.

Today, seven decades later, Ben Barek's journey is repeated every year by dozens of aspiring soccer players from Africa, Asia and the Middle East who enter European leagues and youth soccer academies. Similarly, young baseball players from Latin America constitute a growing presence in the major and minor leagues in the United States.

According to the panel, this rise of a world market in athletics not only provides an interesting perspective on globalization but also raises ethical challenges.

"The way athletes are bought and sold allows scholars to look at aspects of globalization in a different way, in a way that disappears if we focus on, for example, the WTO or the UN," said Wayne Norman, a professor of philosophy and ethics who moderated the discussion.

The prominent role of college athletics in football and basketball makes the United States somewhat of an outlier in this trend, said Laurent Dubois, professor of romance studies and history. Only baseball shares some of the characteristics of the world market seen in soccer, cricket and other sports.

It's a market that contains historical vestiges of colonialism, said Dubois, who noted how the first African soccer recruits went to the same countries that colonized their homelands, he said.

In the past two decades, the world soccer market has seen a spectacular growth of revenues, an opening of borders within Europe and the development of youth academies where players as young as 13 are brought for an education focusing on soccer, Dubois said.

It's a trend that bears some similarities to more traditional kinds of labor migration, he said. "It has its own particular form, but some of the ethical dimensions are the same as in other markets. Players end up stuck in Europe with undocumented visas."

"One difference is the likelihood of success is tiny. Only a few succeed," said Dubois, who added that many young players abandoned by their teams do not fare well.

Achille Mbembe, a visiting professor of English from South Africa, noted that the influx of larger revenues has widened the gap between haves and have-nots, with larger clubs teams dominating the market, much as occurs in other kinds of markets.

Meanwhile, the few foreign athletes who reach the top of the European leagues achieve unheard-of levels of celebrity back in their home countries. Surrounded by riches but tied to their European teams, the young stars find themselves unable to escape history, Mbembe said.

"The current soccer market has created a new form of debt and bondage [that] is not slavery but that implies a certain servitude. Its sources are historical," he said.

The growth of big budget sports has put additional pressures on an activity that has always been covered with a certain romanticism, said law professor Kim Krawiec. Her research focuses on markets that use the rhetoric of public interest to cover private interests. College athletics is one such field, she said, arguing that schools are challenged by the contradictions of linking amateur athletics with big finances.

"The NCAA says college athletes should be protected by exploitation from commercial and professional forces," she said. "The irony is, of course, that college athletics produces professional-level revenues."

Political science professor Michael Gillespie said a focus on finances shouldn't lessen the human underpinnings of sports.

"I don't know an athlete who got into the sport because they thought they were going to get paid," he said. "In the oldest piece of literature we have, the entire second chapter of Gilgamesh is devoted to a wrestling match. We enjoy competition. The need for competition is intrinsically human."

Even as finances may increase ethical concerns about athletics, the ethical dimension to sports remains strong on the playing field itself, Gillespie added. He noted how philosopher Albert Camus said everything he needed to learn about ethics came from the soccer field.

"Camus was a goalie," Dubois added with a laugh. "He also said a goalie never knows where the ball is coming from, which is in its essence, existentialism!"

The panel, co-sponsored by the university's "A World Together" initiative, was the first in a series of talks sponsored by the Kenan Institute for Ethics on ethics and sport. The second session will be on "Bending the Rules: Gamesmanship in Sports" on Oct. 21.

Many of the panelists are also part of a new consortium of faculty from across the university who are sharing research related to sports.

To listen to the panel discussion, download it here from iTunesU.