Participants’ views of the potential of international youth football tournaments for development in the Global South

Abstract

This paper investigates the potential of international youth football tournaments for youth development in the Global South. The tournaments under study were East Africa Cup in Tanzania, and Norway Cup in Norway. Through qualitative interviews with tournament participants, we addressed the following research question: What are the participant’s views of the potentials of Norway Cup and East Africa Cup in dealing with development issues facing youth in the Global South? Our findings demonstrate that all interviewees consider the tournaments potentially beneficial for youth development in the Global South. In the analysis, we identified four different categories, mostly representing positive outcomes of tournament participation. We argue that a functionalist neo-liberal notion of sport is visible in the data material. Thus, our findings correspond with Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) research showing how reproductions of the SDP functionalist discourse ‘continue to be leveraged through sport and sealed into the success story of SDP’.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their thanks to the coordinator of ‘the Urban Youth and Sport for Development Project’, Mr Subramonia Ananthakrishnan as well as to the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

Notes

1. Numbers from 2015, acquired through the Norway Cup and East Africa Cup websites.

2. The information in this section regarding East Africa Cup and Norway Cup is drawn from the interviews as well as the websites of both tournaments: www.eacup.org (East Africa Cup) and www.norwaycup.no (Norway Cup).

3. Until 2014, one of the projects through which teams from countries in the Global South could participate in Norway Cup, was the Norway Cup-project. The Norway Cup-project was a co-operation between Norway Cup, Norad, and NIF that aimed at strengthening projects in the Global South through empowering the participants. It started in the beginning of February every year when the team was approved, and ended in October. During these months, the project was divided in three phases; before, during and after the stay in Norway. The first phase was the recruitment phase, when the team consisting of 16 players and 4 leaders was recruited, and a preparation course was organized in the team’s home community in cooperation with NIF. The second phase took place in Norway where the teams stayed for approximately two weeks and paired up with a Norwegian friendship team. The first week was spent in the friendship team’s local community, before the two teams travelled together to Norway Cup. Towards the end of Norway Cup, Norway Cup project participants attended an ‘Evening for the Future’, which was a planning process that resulted in a specific work plan for activities that should be implemented upon their return home. The final phase of the project ran from their return home until October during which time the team was committed to implement the work plan. The agreement with Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD) ended in 2014, and for the 2015 tournament Norway Cup needed to find their own sponsors in order to bring teams for the Global South to the tournament.

4. A film featuring the 2014 Norway Cup Peace Conference can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2qQBE5633c#t=191.

5. The findings are clustered for the benefit of the analysis. However, in many cases the findings fit into several clusters.