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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