Description
Book Synopsis Since the 1990s, an increasing number of young men in Cameroon have aspired to play football as a career and a strategy to migrate abroad. Migration through the sport promises fulfillment of masculine dreams of sports stardom, as well as opportunities to earn a living that have been hollowed out by the country’s long economic stalemate. The aspiring footballers are increasingly turning to Pentecostal Christianity, which allows them to challenge common tropes of young men as stubborn and promiscuous, while also offering a moral and bodily regime that promises success despite the odds. Yet the transnational sports market is tough and unpredictable: it demands disciplined young bodies and introduces new forms of uncertainty. This book unpacks young Cameroonians' football dreams, Pentecostal faith, obligations to provide, and desires to migrate to highlight the precarity of masculinity in structurally adjusted Africa and neoliberal capitalism.
Trade Review “[This book] is a welcome addition to the literature on African masculinity, global professional sport, neoliberalism, and Pentecostalism. I find it particularly laudable that the book is concise and relatively short. Its main arguments and analytical observations are well written and empirically saturated.” • JRAI (Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute)
“Overall, the book is a very exciting journey into one of the shadiest corners of the global football industry… [It] is an important analytical contribution to the fields of sports science, ethnography, and other disciplines focusing on contemporary postcolonialism, the global economy, and young masculinities. It contains an impressive breadth in its research overview as well as a clarifying depth in its analysis…Kovač’s book is an eye-opener for anyone prepared to see and understand. Football’s systematic exploitation of young men, a kind of trafficking, is going on at this very moment and the question is whether the majority of us wants to keep the current order or try to change it. After reading Kovač’s book, I am doubtful that this system is sustainable in the long run." • idrottsforum.org
“This is an extraordinarily high-quality book, destined to make a mark in Africanist scholarship. Simply by demonstrating the connection between football and Pentecostalism in Cameroon, Kovac’s manuscript takes a step I have never seen before, examining a kind of confluence of two global movements into a local production of masculine subjects.” • Sasha Newell, Université libre de Bruxelles, author of The Modernity Bluff: Crime, Consumption, and Citizenship in Cote D'Ivoire
“Tells the fascinating story of young Cameroonians, who opt for football as a career to bring them global mobility and attain what the author calls ‘moral masculinity' … The story is full of unexpected turns, bringing in a wide array of aspects and actors.” • Peter Geschiere, University of Amsterdam, author of The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe
Table of Contents List of Figures
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Precarity, Spirituality, and Masculinities
Chapter 1. Dreams of Mobility: Football between Politics, Economy, Spirituality, and Transnational Markets
Chapter 2. “This Is a Business, Not a Charity”: Political and Moral Economy of Football and the Production of the Suffering Subject
Chapter 3. Becoming Useful and Humble: Moral Masculinities in Uncertain Times
Chapter 4. “Tapping the Power”: Ruptures and Continuities in the Spiritual World of Football
Chapter 5. Anxious Athletes, Spiritual Wives: Football, Pentecostalism, and the Body
Conclusion: Masculinities, Faith, and the Production of Aspiration
References
Index
