Africa: SDP and sports academies

Drawing on the scholarship around the migration-development nexus, recent scholarship on the relationship between development and football migration from West Africa has shown how aspirations to migrate and the academies that seek to facilitate this articulate with varying forms of social and economic development in complex ways, and produce heterogeneous outcomes. This chapter explores these articulations in relation to men’s/boys’ football in Africa, predominantly Ghana, where academies have become increasingly visible. Through examining football academies as sites where discourses of spatial mobility and praxis of development intersect, this discussion explicates a crucial issue at the heart of debates over the migration-development nexus in the context of sport, namely the tension between sport development, the commodification of sporting talent, and aspirations to develop an individual (and their family members) through sport and thereby enact wider social development.