Since the 1970s, a “Polynesian Pipeline” has brought football players from American Sāmoa to Hawaii and the mainland United States to play at the collegiate and professional levels. In Gridiron Capital Lisa Uperesa charts the cultural and social dynamics that have made football so central to Samoan communities. For Samoan athletes, football is not just an opportunity for upward mobility; it is a way to contribute to, support, and represent their family, village, and nation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and media analysis, Uperesa shows how the Samoan ascendancy in football is underpinned by the legacies of US empire and a set of imperial formations that mark Indigenous Pacific peoples as racialized subjects of US economic aid and development. Samoan players succeed by becoming entrepreneurs: building and commodifying their bodies and brands to enhance their football stock and market value. Uperesa offers insights into the social and physical costs of pursuing a football career, the structures that compel Pacific Islander youth toward athletic labor, and the possibilities for safeguarding their health and wellbeing in the future.

Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

"Uperesa’s book should not only appeal to anthropologists but also to general readers. She engagingly explains what football has come to mean to a whole range of Samoan players - in college programs and the NFL, as well as on youth and high school teams back home - and gives a compelling account of how dual systems of stratification, one based in Indigenous values and the other in capitalist imperatives, combine, for better and worse. . . . Readers interested in sports and culture in a transnational world will no doubt find Gridiron Capital engrossing." - David Lipset (Los Angeles Review of Books) "Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals." - J. A. Badics (Choice) "Uperesa’s informed research and skillful writing allows Gridiron Capital to remain both relevant and accessible to a wide range of readers both within and outside of academia and sport studies, and will likely enable these readers to place the Samoan names they know so well, other names they may not, and perhaps even American Sāmoa itself into appropriate and nuanced historical and contemporary contexts." - Garrett Hillyer (Journal of Sport History) “Gridiron Capital is written well and provides an in-depth analysis of the phenomenon that is accessible to a wide audience, resulting in a greater understanding of Samoa, sport, transnational movement.” - Bliss Wong (International Review for the Sociology of Sport)

Lisa Uperesa is Senior Lecturer in Pacific Studies at the University of Auckland.