Paper short abstract:

How do young male football players in Sierra Leone maintain their dream of embarking on a journey to the professional game overseas? This paper explores expectations and the informal livelihood strategies that footballers employ in pursuing transnational football mobility.

Paper long abstract:

Football migration from Africa to Europe is a long-established phenomenon and today numerous West African nations are a well-known source of talent for the global football industry. The fact that Sierra Leone is not particularly renowned as a talent hotbed, however, does little to deter young players from pursuing their dream of ‘making it’ as a professional footballer abroad. How do they maintain the dream in the grimness of the precarious environment? This paper explores expectations and the informal livelihood strategies that young men in Sierra Leone employ in their pursuit of transnational football mobility.

The research draws on data from a year-long, multisided-ethnographic study involving 50 interviews with players and football experts in Sierra Leone and Scandinavian countries. The concept of ‘hustle’ / ‘dreg’, often described as actively seeking out patrons and profitable opportunities and getting by through innovation and resilience in order to achieve upward social mobility, will be explored in more nuance. Being a 'dreg man', carries a pejorative connotation and many of the young footballers see themselves as possessing a higher social status, and calling, than a street hustler operating on the margins of society, their everyday experience might be very similar.