Sports diaspora and sevens football: An ethnographic study of African footballers in malabar region

Abstract

The growth of professional Indian tournaments in cricket, football and others attracted skilled sports stars from abroad due to the absence of such competent athletes within the domestic region. But even before the advent of professional leagues, the regional football tournaments, particularly from Goa, Calcutta, Hyderabad and Malabar, had migrant African players. Even though not trained professionally, they performed better than the local players; hence, these regions’ local tournaments and clubs became ‘hubs’ of such players from Africa. On the other side, Africa became a supplier or ‘hinterland’ of talent for Indian football clubs. The paper is an ethnographic description of the semi-participatory ethnographic observation exercise to explore the collective life of African football players in Kerala.