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to motivate sponsors. Even though women face far less (and little privileged) options
for a full-time career in the football realm, they are not to be dissuaded neither from
the game nor from their professional ambitions. Their ambition and determination, on
the one hand, and the shortage of professional contracts, on the other, elevate the
geographical mobility of players – and themselves as actors – to the central element in
a dynamic triangle of global production, popularity and mobility. This is precisely owed
to the insipient globalisation process of the discipline which might accelerate after
WWC 2011 and its recent media-documented breakthrough in popularity. Yet it is
exactly the deficits in those two pivots of the triangle that depend not on the women
themselves, but highly on investments by the sports-media-business alliance (i.e.
production and popularity), which appear to lag behind the commitment and personal
investments of the players.
Acknowledgments
This study was funded by the Portuguese Foundation of Science and Technology as
part of the project “Imagining the Modern Portugal? The role of football among
Portuguese migrants in six diasporic settings
( www.diasbola.com )and continues in
progress under the title “Moving with the Ball: The globalization of women’s football”,
funded by the João Havelange Research Grant 2012-2013.
I thank Vera Botelho for our inspiring discussions on new arising research questions on
the globalization on women’s football at the time of the FIFA Women’s World Cup
2011. Her in-depth reading of the literature on sports globalization was of major
guidance not only for our joint papers-in-progress but also helped to synthesise
respective theories in form of the dynamic triangle of global stage, global production
and global mobility.
Notes
[1]
The FIFA women’s ranking of December 2011 listed 136 countries. This
number varies and has been higher in previous years (up to 168). National
squads which remain inactive for a number of years drop out. Based on the