10 - Competition and Constructedness: Sports, Migration and Diversity in Singapore

Summary

INTRODUCTION: SPORTS, (IM)MIGRATION AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN SINGAPORE

Sports migration is fast becoming a significant dimension of transnational studies. Up to about the latter part of the 1990s, the most significant sports migration moves were probably confined to soccer (one of the most popular and monied sports in the world), and even these were largely intra-continental (and occasionally trans-Atlantic) movements into the English Premier League and the Serie A. From the late 1990s onwards however, a number of select but highly publicized moves of East Asian players to European clubs — including Japan's Hidetoshi Nakata who started playing for Italian club Perugia in 1998, and Shunsuke Nakamura who moved to Reggina in 2002, China's Li Tie who moved to Everton in 2002, South Korea's Park Ji-Sung who moved to Holland's PSV Eindhoven in 2003, and others — marked the beginning of a more open era of sports migrations and their impact on fandom, merchandising, tourism, media and related industries. Unlike players from earlier eras, who might have moved to another country for reasons other than sports (education, family/personal factors, political reasons) and had longer periods of acculturation and naturalization before often going on to play for their adopted country, the sports migrations of the late 1990s onwards were often specifically for employment and career development, could be for a short duration only, and often only involved club representation, resulting in somewhat divided loyalties and club-nation conflicts. The late 1990s also saw the professionalization of Rugby Union, and the movement of many Pacific Rim players to Europe to play for clubs in England, Ireland, France and Italy. Other Asian athletes who made well-publicized moves to Western teams include Japanese baseball players Hideo Nomo, who moved to the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1995, and Ichiro Suzuki who moved to the Seattle Mariners in 2001, as well as Chinese basketballer Yao Ming, who moved to the Houston Rockets in the 2002 draft pick.

Sports migration is a very interesting phenomenon within global migration for a number of reasons. In the first place, migrant sportsmen run a huge socio-economic gamut: it is the top performers and top earners who garner the most public attention when they change clubs and move transnationally, while in almost all sports there are much lower-ranked professionals who barely earn their keep and are not dissimilar to other “abject cosmopolitans” (Nyers 2003).