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Theories about how Europe's clubs drive the global migration of football players argue that teams recruit in culturally similar and historically linked countries, in global value-added chains, or in their home country and abroad in far-flung countries. However, most of these theories on club behavior are empirically thin, because researchers have so far analyzed stocks of players in teams rather than flows of players between teams. To understand how teams drive the globalization of football's labor market, this study uses social network analysis to examine how teams from Europe's top eight leagues broker the global transfer network encompassing 1700 professional clubs in 82 countries. Results demonstrate that European elite teams do not scout globally, but rather recruit from rivals in European top leagues. Clubs one tier below the elite hire both in their home country and across European and Latin-American leagues. The majority of European teams focus their recruitment on their home country and occasionally hire from neighboring countries. How teams recruit in the global transfer market might thus be better understood through the interplay between the risky business of hiring players and the resources teams have at their disposal.

Globalization theorists have typically described the post-Bosman football labor market as an amalgam of global value-added chains funneling players from (semi-)peripheral countries to Europe's core leagues. However, due to their cross-sectional design, most globalization studies actually do not observe the longitudinal migratory trajectories through which players move towards, within and out of football's global core. To fill this lacuna, this study examines a unique longitudinal dataset of 4730 complete careers of male professional football players and identifies four characteristics of their migratory trajectories: (1) recurrent mobility; (2) domestic careers for 60% of the players and frequent cross-border transfers for the other 40%; (3) clear career progress towards the top teams for the elite 10% of players and circulation for the other 90%; (4) a highly skewed distribution of transfer fees leading top teams to earn and spend the bulk of transfer fees. This suggests that football's labor market is somewhat like a game of snakes and ladders in which an elite minority of players seems to be moving in tightly managed global value-added chains towards the top teams. However, the migratory channels through which the majority of players moves are much more porous, two-directional and complex than usually suggested in the literature.

This paper examines where European professional teams recruit new players in order to shed light on the functioning of global value added chains in world football. Most studies either point to the increasing internationalization of football's labor force to argue that European clubs recruit from peripheral but culturally or historically related countries or turn to the experiences of players with domestic transfers to suggest that most teams recruit within their country. This study directly examines the recruitment activities of teams active in the highest two leagues of Europe's top seven countries between the 2003/2004 season and the 2011/2012 season. Results indicate that even though Europe's football labor force looks internationalized at first sight, many international players hold dual nationality and might be more aptly characterized as domestic players who are members of the large immigrant communities who came to Europe after the de-colonization of former colonies or as part of the stream of labor migrants in the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, for most teams, domestic mobility forms the backbone of their recruitment activities, but some teams, especially in Portugal, buy football talent from teams in the global South and sell their best players to larger European teams. These results urge researchers to reconsider teams as more myopic and geographically bounded actors in global value added chains, incorporate domestic mobility into global value added chains, reconsider what counts as the core and the (semi-)periphery connected through the chains, and be wary of approaches taking countries or even leagues as the basic unit of analysis in global value added chains.