Legionnaire (sport)
A legionnaire is an athlete who pursues his professional sporting activity outside of his home country. The term is used almost exclusively for players in team sports who are active in foreign leagues.
Legionnaires are often an integral part of the national team in their country of origin. However, this was not always the case, the first professionals playing abroad were still excluded from the national team, as they were accused of being “greedy and unpatriotic”, for example. Some professionals are naturalized in their host country in order to be able to play for the national team there (example: Qatari men's national handball team ).
The higher the status of a sport in a country and the stronger it is in an international comparison, the greater the reputation and income of the athletes. It is therefore interesting for foreign players to find a place in a team in these countries. An example here are the typical American sports American football , baseball and basketball . Even less talented players for the conditions of their home country can appear as legionnaires abroad if the level of play in their home country is above that of most countries. Thus, as players, their talent does not come close to the best in their country, but they still stand out from the average of the target country.
term
The term "legionnaire" is borrowed from the military , synonymous with "mercenary". At first it was mostly used with negative connotations and contained the stereotypical characteristics of the athletes of being older than average and earning high salaries, and combined this with the accusation of leaving your home country because of the more lucrative salary and playing abroad, as well as Mercenaries turn their backs on their home army when they join another army for higher pay.
The term is a specialty of the German language; it does not exist in other languages. The term was first used in German-language newspapers in the 1960s.
Soccer
Legionnaires have been around in football for at least 100 years. The team of SC Germania Hamburg from 1887 , the predecessor of Hamburger SV , consisted of three Dutch, two English, one Spaniard and one Austrian in 1904.
The Bosman ruling is primarily responsible for the increase in football legionnaires in Europe from the second half of the 1990s , which declared the foreigner regulations applicable in some countries to be invalid.
Most German legionnaires play according to transfermarkt.de in the United States (226), in Austria (155) and in Switzerland (135) (as of June 2019).
While there was no foreign professional in the German team at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa , eight German national players no longer played in the Bundesliga at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Men and Sport: You should be eleven straight people , on tagesspiegel.de, on July 5, 2012. Retrieved on June 29, 2019.
- ↑ The Qatar System , on sport1.de, from January 29, 2015. Accessed June 29, 2019.
- ↑ Barbara Liegl, Georg Spitaler: Legionaries on the Ball: Migration in Austrian Football after 1945 . Braumüller (on Google Books ). Retrieved June 29, 2019.
- ↑ David Forster, Bernhard Hachleitner, Robert Hummer, Robert Franta: The Legionaries: Austrian footballers around the world . Lit Verlag, 2nd edition, Vienna 2013 (on Google Books ). Retrieved June 29, 2019.
- ↑ Legionnaires , on transfermarkt.de. Retrieved June 29, 2019.
- ↑ Football legionnaires: The Germans are storming abroad , on faz.net, from July 9, 2013. Accessed on June 29, 2019.