Rasera, Frédéric <br/><br/>
“You Are Paid to Be at the Disposal of….” 

 -  2015.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 88 
<br/><br/> The strong public exposure of professional soccer players conceals a daily professional life located upstream from the competition itself and which is much less known. Based upon an ethnographic survey within a French professional soccer club in Second League, this article shifts the focus onto the backstage of the sport-as-show. It resituates the production of a soccer team within the labor organization specific to a professional soccer club. Against the widespread image of the professional soccer player as somebody who escapes any social gravity, the paper first reiterates that these athletes are wageworkers whose careers and employment conditions are highly individualized. It then shows that for the sake of the competition, these sport-workers are confronted with a selective organization of labor that makes uncertainty a key dimension of their profession and subjects them to constant ranking practices.