2010 Volume 18 Issue 1 Pages 59-70
This study searched for the globalization of sports from the perspective of the sports labor migration observing the Israel Baseball League (IBL) which is a new professional baseball league that started in Israel.
The reality of the IBL is not as splendid as the image from the world professional baseball. The periphery can be seen here. But the appearance of the players of the IBL isn’t related to the image of exploited cheap laborers. Especially, from the observation to the players from developed countries, the labor as professional athlete has changed to a kind of amusements or escape from the real society.
This study analyses the feature of the IBL players as the sports labor migration, and illustrate that the globalization of sports is assuming the aspect of the mosaic expansion and osmosis in which the background and motive of the player each were involved rather than calling it a unicentric spread of the economic capital.
In the past studies, the global expansion of professional sports was often described from perspectives of the world system theory. In this context, it tends to be concluded the reason for the border crossings of professional athletes are economical factors. In this case study, IBL players as the sports labor migrants are classified into four types: “the prospects”, “the baseball laborers”, “vacation” and “ego-seeking” Though some studies illustrate the causes for transferring of athletes besides the economic factors, “vacation” and “egoseeking” types from developed countries don’t finish installing on the frame of the past studies. Therefore, these new types of sports labor migration have the possibility of developing the study for globalization.
