Gendered markets for multiple passports: dual nationality among female athletes

Nationality swapping is nowadays common in professional sports. An ever-increasing number of professional athletes hold at least one functional sporting nationality’ on top of the one acquired by birth. This permits them to compete for the country that offers them better reputational or financial prospects. During the men’s World Cup in France in 2018, we estimated that 26.79 per cent of the players (198 of 739) had dual citizenship. When repeating the same exercise for this year’s Women’s World Cup we found that only 6.88 per cent of the players (38 of 552) possessed more than one passport. We argue that this trend is a symptom of the interplay of gender inequalities inherent in sports industries and the male-dominated cultural symbolism of sports in national contexts.

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