Day 120, Year of #Mygration: Migration and Football

This blog post is written by OU Research Associate, Dr Craig Walker.

Walking through the streets of Camden last night, having left a Refugee Week event I helped organise for the OU, the cheers and screams from local pubs were electric. Unless you’ve been in a cave for the past few months, it’s impossible to have missed the building fever and tensions surrounding this year’s World Cup, and England's success last night. While getting swept up in the spectacle, it made me reflect on the role of the event, the bringing together of the nations of the world in a show of healthy sporting competition. But with that, I began thinking about the personal journeys that bring the footballers to this point. On my way home, I came across an article that highlights the role of migration within football. You really can find a connection to issues of (forced) migration amid the most celebratory of occasions. It tells the stories of five footballers, all refugees, who are now on the global stage representing the nations they had to leave in one of the world’s greatest sporting events.

As a World Cup fan myself, I was also pleased to discover through my colleague next to me on the train that The Open University is also fully onboard with World Cup mania. If you need some help with predictions to improve your chance of winning that office sweepstake, this OpenLearn article by civil engineer Charles MacRobert examines research looking at the role of intuition in helping forecast who will be lifting that trophy on 15 July.