ICS Working Papers Nº1/2014

ICS

W O R K I N G P A P E R S

2014

to integrate their academic training with intensive football practice, which

competes in numbers with migration in the (semi-)professional realm. For the

latter see the abstract for the paper by Sara Booth and Katie Liston at the

workshop Sports as a Global Labour Market – Female Football Migration , 03-

04

December

2010,

University

of

Copenhagen,

at

http://www.diasbola.com/uk/foomi-events.html.

[11] These are the players who were announced by their Federations to be called to

their national squads until 16 June 2011, accordingly to FIFA sources. By the

beginning of the tournament only 304 players in total were capped, among them

61 with contracts in clubs abroad (20 per cent).

[12] Williams (2011) explains that various national football associations use differing

criteria for the designation and classification of amateur, semi-professional and

professional players. Instead of following the politicized, gender-blind officious

language, she uses the biographies of women players who gathered professional

experience in various decades since the 1960s, in order to describe important,

iridescent shades of grey between these three core concepts, thus also paying

tribute to the development history of this sport discipline. In order to enable

international comparability, this paper distinguishes as follows: Professional

leagues are those that pay a salary to all players, as usual at differing rates, but in

any case sufficient to cover the basic expenses and costs of living at least to the

standard of the national minimum wage. Semi-professional leagues are those

that do not pay a salary to all players, but an allowance to most, and that also

employ some full professionals. Amateur leagues are those where a minority

receives an allowance and only individuals (mostly migrants) earn a

remuneration that enables them to concentrate exclusively on football. In some

amateur leagues, e.g. the Cypriot, Austrian and Swiss, there are individual clubs

who would be called semi-professional or even professional by these criteria. At

least a few professional players are also found in semi-professional and even

second division amateur clubs.

[13] At accessing the team rosters, I have surveyed the geographic mobility of 799

players which comprised forty women’s national squads during the season

2008/2009 (see table online in Tiesler 2010a and resulting figures in Tiesler

2010b). 187 of them (23.4 per cent) had been on the move. Among the forty

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