'A Field of Broken Dreams?': The precarious social realities of male migrant footballers from Northern Ireland

For talented young footballers from Northern Ireland (NI), the dream of a sustained professional career is dependent on their ability to migrate to England or Scotland due to the limited structure of football in NI. However, for most players who make the migratory transition ‘across the water’, their journeys are cut short: either at the end of their youth training, or in the early stages of their career, and this invariably necessitates a return to NI. Drawing on a wider project involving semi-structured interviews with 40 male returnee players, this chapter applies Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual triad to understand the various challenges and experiences of NI players upon their return migration. By employing two of Bourdieu’s lesser-known concepts, social death and second birth, the chapter highlights how players utilise varying forms of capital to exercise agency as they navigate the transition ‘back home’.