JANUSHOPE · Two-Faced Hopes: Football, Migration, and Religion Between West Africa and Europe

Since the 1990s and the commercialization of global football, an increasing number of young people in countries like Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Cameroon have aspired to play football as a career, a strategy to migrate abroad (ideally Europe), and an opportunity for social and class mobility. For the majority, however, the dream does not come true. International media and human rights organizations regularly report about thousands of young West Africans victimized by deceitful agents, stranded as undocumented migrants, and playing for clubs under exploitative conditions. And yet, young people continue to train to migrate and play. Scholars have studied these football-related migrations, but they have overlooked the fact that religions, especially Pentecostal Christianity and Islam, play a central role in migrants’ hopeful journeys. This project investigates the intersection of football, migration, and religion among African migrants in Europe in order to study hope, conceptualized as a belief that something desired may occur in the future. It makes a crucial critical intervention: while many interdisciplinary studies assume a depoliticized notion of hope and romanticize its positive and constructive qualities, JANUSHOPE also examines the dark side of hope that perpetuates inequality and exploitation. It turns to African “irregular” football migrants in Europe to understand how a critique of the global industry’s dark side of hope might co-exist with hopes for “making it” in the industry. It investigates how their faith-based narratives of hope might both critique and reproduce inequalities of global capitalism and transnational migration. The key research methods are semi-structured interviews and ethnographic fieldwork with “irregular” African football migrants in Europe. The results will be disseminated through refereed articles and communicated to a wide global audience interested in football and to key European policy makers in fields of migration and human rights.