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Paper short abstract:

On the back of neoliberal reform across Africa since the 1980s, young females experience a transformation of norms of social becoming. We explore how aspirations of transnational football migration reflect enlarged demands, responsibilities and possibilities that characterize this transformation.

Paper long abstract:

The growth of girls’ and women’s football in Africa and an increase in the number of professional leagues, mainly in Europe and North America, has given rise to increasing levels of international migration of African female players over the last two decades. This trend reflects the longer standing practice of independent transnational migration among African women that has been visible since the late 1980s and potentially, of enlarged possibilities and responsibilities for African females on the back of neoliberal reform across the continent. Our paper explores how these sporting, cultural and economic transformations influence the aspirations of young female footballers in West Africa. In particular, it examines the extent to which realising transnational mobility through a professional football career is viewed by young females as a strategy to improve ones’ own and family members’ life chances. We draw on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Ghana, Sweden and Denmark between 2015 and 2022 that sought to capture how young West African, mainly Ghanaian, females imagine, encounter and negotiate the possibilities of a professional football career overseas. Our findings illustrate how the above-mentioned transformations have coalesced to produce an understanding of transnational football mobility among young females in West Africa as a route, albeit a highly speculative one, to negotiate and potentially fulfill reciprocal obligations and entrustments to family. Through doing so, we begin to theorize how women’s football becomes one way to navigate the transition from the life phase of youth into respectable social adulthood.