International Labor Migration and Sport Economics: A Systematic Review of
the Literature
International labor migration, Sports economy, Systematic Literature Review, Athletes.
The International Expatriation in Sport is a segment of international labor migration with particularities in its flows, however, it is also part of the globalization process, contributing to and being a consequence of inequalities in the field of sports economics. The present work aims to analyze international labor migration associated with the economy of sport, using as a technical procedure of analysis the systematic literature review method. The systematic literature review is a method capable of identifying, selecting, evaluating, and synthesizing the relevant evidence available on a topic based on a research question. The primary studies used for this systematic literature review were obtained from the Scopus and Web of Science journal databases. The research protocol used in this study refers to the one developed by Transfield et al., (2003). The corpus textual extracted after the use of the inclusion and exclusion criteria makes up a total of 31 articles, published between the years 2005 and 2022. The results obtained from the corpus analysis show a total of 59 authors and co-authors, distributed in 17 countries, with a higher concentration in the United States and the United Kingdom. These authors published their work in 19 journals, the three main ones being the Journal of Sports Economics, Leisure Studies, and the International Journal of Sport Management and Marketing. Soccer stands out as the most prominent sport in the articles. The main contexts of the application of sports economics in international labor migration are competitive balance, performance within the sports market, and the motivational factors for sports expatriation.