Analysing the short-lived engagement of the Austrian beverage company Red Bull in the Ghanaian football business, Martin Kainz's book demonstrates that the transnational company treated its host community, staff and students in exploitative and openly racist ways. The book is based on six weeks of field research by the author in 2010 in the Volta region in Ghana where the so-called Red Bull Academy is located (p. 30). The interviews that Kainz held with the stakeholders of the Red Bull Academy were evaluated qualitatively following the central research question of the book: namely, ‘How are the central relations between the Red Bull Academy and the local community constructed?’ (p. 147).
The aim of most African football academies is to bind talented African trainees to the academy as early as possible in order to introduce them to the European soccer market and make a profit. In line with this practice, the Red Bull Academy aimed to acquire cheap players for a relatively low investment in order to later sell them to Red Bull teams in Europe (pp. 27ff., 46). Red Bull is known for sponsoring activities in a range of sports, and it owns soccer academies in Salzburg, Leipzig, New York and São Paolo (p. 61). However, the Red Bull Academy in Ghana was a rather ephemeral project, announcing its closure after only three years' operation in 2010 and finally closing in August 2013 (p. 23). Kainz explains that the school's failure arose from the fact that the European managers of the company did not acquaint themselves with the social structures of the local Fievie region, as a result of which they were unable to interact with their Ghanaian hosts in a sensitive manner (p. 122).
The main reason for conflict between the academy and the local community was disagreement over the plot on which the academy had been built. The land used to belong to another Austrian-sponsored soccer school, the soccer school of Lavanttal, for about two years before Red Bull took over (pp. 31ff.). The soccer school of Lavanttal acquired the land as a donation from a community of the Fievie region. But taking over a plot, in particular as a donation, implies social responsibilities. According to traditional authorities interviewed by the author, Red Bull was expected, at a minimum, to guarantee the supply of drinking water to the community and to take two boys from the community into the academy each year (p. 101). This would enable the boys to obtain a secondary education at the academy's own school and free their parents from the need to pay school fees or provide lunch money (p. 111). However, after taking over the land in 2007, Red Bull broadly ignored these communal expectations (pp. 103ff., 115ff.).
Kainz describes the role of the traditional elders and chiefs of the community extensively and explains that they represent the knowledge and the morality of their communities (p. 74). Chiefs and elders are further responsible for the management of land and the requisite traditional ceremonies (pp. 117ff.). One elder partly blamed himself in an interview for the mal-development of relations with the Red Bull Academy. He explained that local community members should have introduced the local norms and values to the European employees because they were new in the region and therefore not acquainted with its culture (p. 120). However, other interviews suggest that this might not have changed much.
Most of the author's interview partners were not only disappointed with the European management of the Red Bull Academy but also perceived the imbalance of power between the academy and themselves as distressing (p. 120). Former local employees complained about their inability to participate in decision making and explained that European staff members avoided interaction with the local community. A division between white European and black local employees, which one local employee even referred to as an ‘apartheid system’, prevailed on campus (p. 138). Clear testimony of open racism was given in an interview with a European staff member who reported calling the local employees ‘monkeys’ and ‘baboons’ (p. 138).
Despite the relevance of the topic and the enthralling presentation of the research outcomes, the book is structured in ways that sometimes lack stringency and make reading more laborious than it should be. For example, a reader might wish to have a compact chapter on the theories embedding the author's interpretations in which the relevance of the theory employed is explained to the reader. The reader is also not informed about how theory is employed or how exactly categories were abstracted from the data. Finally, the text mixes descriptive and interpretive sections in a manner that hinders a fluent reading and understanding of the argument. Particularly with regard to the author's attempt to offer interpretations from the perspective of the people concerned, transparency in data interpretation would have been helpful.
However, this does not detract from the book's qualities, and especially the author's commitment to adopting the stance of the people primarily affected by the school's practices and closure. The book clearly illustrates how transnational companies search for new sources of capital without regard for local expectations, and the author exposes the racism pervasive even in an educational institution explicitly aimed at attracting young Africans. Given that the Red Bull Soccer Academy West Africa Ltd was only one of many institutions in Ghana alone that profit from the transfer business of soccer players through the search for young talents, the book is quite worth the read.
