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Since Islamist-conservative Recep Tayyip Erdogan took over power in Turkey, the country has gone through a massive social transformation. Football, the quintessential form of entertainment in Turke...

We analyse key circumstances and events in the early life and development of the Argentine soccer player Lionel Messi. We critically considers the influences and choices which helped shape his stel...

Football, or soccer, is a simple game. It requires very little in the way of practical resources. Markers for a goal, a ball-shaped object. This simplicity enables the sport to be undertake...

‘Football does not ask for faith; it compels examination.’1Eric Dunning died on 10 February 2019 and, with his passing, the academic world bid farewell to the father of the sociology of sport. In c...

This conceptual introduction seeks to frame and provide a context for the following special issue on “Football from below in South-Eastern Europe”. The special issue focus on fan activism and protest aims to understand, theorize and interpret the efforts of football fans both visible as (sub-)political actors in public space and/or as collectives engaged in experiments with new forms of club ownership and direct/participatory democracy. This introduction first details various features of the South-Eastern European context, before exploring how the texts relate to each other in terms of fan, activist and academic positionalities. Following this, one dimension to the concept of protest ‘from below’ - namely that of a strict ‘people/politics' (narod/politika) opposition - is explained and critiqued. Finally, thematic gaps within the special issue are identified and possible areas for future research are discussed.

In 1988, Andrei Markovits first published the argument that soccer in the United States encounters an ‘exceptional’ experience because America’s ‘hegemonic sports culture’ has ‘crowded out’ the sport by virtue of historically determined factors, including popular acceptance. Twenty years after USA ’94, it seems appropriate to revisit this idea. In this paper, I utilize survey data from multiple sources to make three arguments. First, interest in soccer among the public has been generally stable over time; second, relative to other countries, American fans are not discernibly exceptional; third, what discerns fans are characteristics that appear to be a function of the sport’s diversity. This makes the ongoing ‘exceptional’ characterization ironic, as the binary continues to serve those who deride soccer as ‘un-American’. While Markovits has identified a critical period in soccer’s past, moving beyond the deterministic exceptionalist model is imperative for future research on the American game.

This essay takes as a case study ‘the Golombiao’: a government strategy of the Colombian state (South America), which aims to transform the practice of recreational soccer to promote coexistence, social participation and gender equity in armed conflict zones. The practice of ‘Golombiao’ is similar to soccer but some of its rules are formulated by the people who play it. Winning depends on several factors, among them, the respect for the collective rules. I propose to compare this government strategy with the conceptual apparatus of bioethics. Bioethics is a bridge between the sciences and other disciplines used to understand and propose alternatives to specific cases where life is threatened. Bioethics has some relations with the objectives proposed by the Golombiao. This government strategy defines life as a process of reflection and of collective action, and also seeks the construction of community solidarity using the transformation of sport as a tool.

Coaches Across Continents uses a three-year Hat-Trick Initiative to work alongside partners in developing communities globally. This paper examines their Chance to Choice curriculum, and shows how ...

The popular impression of British soccer’s relationship with the rest of the world until the late 1950’s was one of selfish, arrogant, isolation. The reality however, was quite different with frequent and multi-dimensional contact between the ‘Home Nations’ and the rest of the soccer world. \ud This paper acknowledges their self-imposed absence from the FIFA and as a consequent their non-participation in the first three World Cups. However, it demonstrates that at almost every other level Britain remained at the centre of world soccer; as regards the laws, playing international matches, club tours and the migration of players and referees.\ud It reflects on the circumstances that helped to substantiate the myth, focusing on an attitude of superiority, the ban on foreign professionals being ‘employed’ in British soccer and the alleged inferior style of foreign soccer and refereeing standards. This is in contrast to the globalised product that is today’s English Premier League.\ud Key Words\ud FIFA, Football, World Cup, Isolation, Globalization, English Premier League.

This is a personal narrative account of the history and ideas of Easton Cowboys and Cowgirls. I’ll firstly describe the achievements and history of the club. I’ll look at what makes it different, even within the anarchist or activist ‘scene’, what its values are (and how these manifest themselves) and the way that the club organizes itself. I’ll also discuss the club’s future and whether its unique approach to sport and community organization can be sustained over a number of generations.

In an era when many traditional football fans feel increasingly alienated from corporate ownership and commercial imperatives, sites of resistance are emerging whereby football fans seek to empower themselves and increase their influence. Few fans rival those of FC Sankt Pauli for autonomous organization which has empowered them to create an authentic vibrant democratic culture which holds great influence over their club. But this empowerment has also led them to extend their influence beyond their own club and beyond football itself. This article based on years of research with Sankt Pauli fan activists reveals how the fans are cohesively organized, autonomously, bottom-up and non-hierarchically, how that gives rise to prolific community action, and how that in turn empowers the community in a transformational and sustainable way.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the impact of the prize money distributed by UEFA for participation in the Champions League in the early rounds and to demonstrate that the impact of this money is both disproportionate compared to larger clubs and will, under UEFA’s guidelines for Financial Fair Play, run contrary to governance for larger clubs. This will show that UEFA’s interest in club governance and the impact is solely focused on larger clubs, allowing a seemingly unregulated free-for-all in financial terms at the lower end of the club game, which is unsustainable and runs contrary to UEFA’s own-stated ambitions in terms of fair play, competitive balance and financial governance.

Sportspeople are constantly urged to maintain the highest levels of conduct because of their position as ‘role models’ to children. This article reports from a study in progress which explores the experiences of elite female athletes in Britain, and focuses on qualitative interview responses of elite female footballers, all of whom were currently playing at top-flight domestic and international levels and took part in the 2012 Olympics. It explores what they perceive the position as ‘role model’ to mean, how it impinges on their sport performance, and how they work with gifted young footballers to promote sporting excellence as well as community cohesion through grass-roots outreach work. It discusses their thoughts on how role models are currently and can best be used to encourage young women’s football participation from elite down to grass-roots levels, and highlights the amount of responsibility they feel to do this.

Fan ownership has long been predicated as a possible route by which struggling Football Clubs may survive. After a long period of financial turbulence and using the Supporters Direct ownership model, Exeter City Supporters took majority control of the Club in 2003. The paper charts the progress and changes in that the model of supporter control in the 10 years from 2003, and attempts an overview and critique of the situation in 2013.

Looking at the terraces, into the pubs and the TV programme demonstrates how important football is for its followers – it is hard to believe that it is only a sport for them. In fact, a lot more is behind football than just an athletic competition. The core of the popularity of a football club is its identity. One possible model for understanding club identity analyses a club as a carrier of a group identity, in this case a regional one. Looking at the model more closely, a football club is not only a sports club – it is also seen as a symbol for a group or for a geographic entity in which it is located. Regional identity gives a football club a deeper meaning. And it is a sustainable philosophy for a club to focus on regional identity, as we see on traditional clubs like VfB Stuttgart in Germany or FC Barcelona and Athletic Bilbao in Spain. These clubs benefit in different ways from their local philosophy and furthermore these ‘tradition keepers’ have a charismatic aura, in comparison to clubs that focus...

Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model of human development was used as a framework to systematically review factors associated with drop-out from soccer among children and adolescents. Keyword searches for the population (child or youth or adolescent), sport (soccer or football) and construct of interest (drop-out or attrition or discontinued or quit) identified scholarly peer-reviewed publications from the entire contents of seven databases to 31 December 2013. Publications with participants at any level of organized soccer were eligible for inclusion. The initial search identified 137 studies with 14 ultimately meeting the inclusion criteria, 11 from Europe and 3 from the United States, and 97% (n = 1125,001) of study participants were male. The proportion of children and adolescents who dropped out from one season to the next ranged from 18 to 36%, except for one study of high-level players where the rate of drop-out was 60%. These players felt the time demands of soccer, especially ‘travelling to compe...

Radio broadcasts brought fans into the drama of the football match in real time for the first time. The indelible impact of radio shaped the development of football fandom in the early to middle 20th century. While television is now the biggest financial supporter of top-level football, owners used to worry that TV would diminish gate receipts. Mass media are often suspected of contributing to social alienation, this chapter shows how fans use television broadcasts to create social events. This essay discusses various viewing contexts such as pubs and fan clubhouses in order to illustrate how media is used by fans to create social bonds.

This essay focuses on the contexts away from the stadium where fans congregate, organise, develop and learn to perform their fandom. I define the concept of performance and show how it applies to fandom. I describe how, in small to medium scale, face-to-face settings, fans are able to form bonds and validate each others’ fandom. For some, fandom is an extension of playing the game as in Holland, where one might play in the amateur ranks of one of the famous professional teams. In Italy, organised fandom follows from a history of neighbourhood social clubs. I describe the Roma Club Testaccio as the epicentre of Roma fandom, and how it serves to educate fans in Roman-ness. Hardcore fan clubs support the team home and away, and I describe one of my own intense experiences travelling on the bus with some of the most notorious hardcore fans in Italy. Italians can also visit the grounds at which their beloved team practices and where they can catch a glimpse of the players up close, and connect with other devot...

‘Casuals’ culture can be perceived as a postmodern phenomenon, which modifies and changes the football supporter culture in a fully blown consumerist era, where symbol movement is faster every day and implies minimal costs. Throughout this article, I attempted to prove the existence of a certain type of ‘bricolage’, created by recycling a set of brands, symbolically redefined by ultras groups. At the same time, the internalization of the ‘casuals’ movement by Romanian fanatical supporters also denotes the emergence of strong elements of hyper-consumerist culture, of differentiation and status, both at the level of individuals in the groups, as well as at the level of rival supporters groups. ‘Casuals’ style naturally matches the entrance of football and of the culture of supporting a team into postmodernity.

This article looks at the ways in which female football fans in England have responded to and become involved in the cooperative supporters’ trust movement. It examines the history and development of the movement, which offers a new, democratic and equitable way for supporters to become involved in the life of their club, and become part of a new, wider fan community, broader than simple club allegiance. The involvement of respondents in the supporters’ trust movement is explored, profiling the ways in which they have immersed or distanced themselves from the trust concept and community, and comparing their experiences as they have described them in interview. I argue that the trust movement offers the opportunity for supporters to help the game progress in a way that is advantageous to all fans, not just females; and this seems to be an element of the movement that has great appeal to women.

Through a critique of various social, cultural, political and technological changes in English football as a result of the Taylor report into the safety of football stadia post-Hillsborough in 1989, this paper explores the way in which the modern ‘safe’ all-seater stadium is often experienced by fans in a hyperreal and relatively passive fashion. The paper then considers some of the challenges posed by these developments and the potential for fans to renegotiate and adapt in the face of a middle classing of football discourse. Finally, the paper examines the social control agenda inherent within the neoliberal development of all-seater stadia, whilst highlighting the response of the English Football Supporters Federation and their ‘Safe Standing Campaign’. The paper will conclude by offering a tentative critique of an innovative response by Manchester City F.C. supporters and their participatory ‘Poznan’ celebration in all-seating areas based on auto-ethnographic interpretation.

This paper introduces an experimental model to measure the holistic performance of professional football clubs. The model utilizes a selection of established financial and sporting indicators, which are weighted in accordance with their perceived relative importance and in relation to components of financial management and governing body regulations. The paper uses data pertaining to clubs competing in the English Premier League to demonstrate the outputs of the model. The authors argue that although the model is experimental, it still provides a useful platform to analyse performance of football clubs through further scientific investigation.

This study sets out to explore prevalent attitudes amongst the Israeli-Jewish majority towards Arab footballers playing for Israel’s national team via an analysis of online reader comments (‘talkbacks’) posted by Jewish–Israeli readers to 360 online articles discussing the Israeli national football team between the years 2012–2014. Whilst some readers demonstrated a sense of support and empathy with the Arab players, the majority of Jewish–Israeli readers, however, showcased in their ‘talkbacks’ a persistent pattern of minimizing and underplaying Arab–Israeli footballers’ contribution to the national team. Despite the fact that some readers did warm to the prospect of having ‘their own Arab’ play for the national team (that is to say, an Arab footballer who also plays for the domestic team they support), most Jewish–Israeli readers continued to vocalize their protest over the ever-increasing number of Arab players in the Israeli national team.

Men’s football has long been marginalized within New Zealand culture, struggling for acceptance as an appropriately masculine and truly national sport. New Zealand’s unexpected qualification for the men’s 2010 FIFA World Cup – for only the second time in the nation’s history – created a space for media and public reimagining of football’s connection to New Zealand identity and its place in the sporting landscape. In this paper, we investigate the dynamic interaction between news media discourses and public perceptions via analysis of 1112 online news articles and photographs, and 1423 online public comments on news and fan websites. We conclude that media discourses that masculinized, ethnicized and nationalized the national men’s team were taken up by the public in complex ways that moved the national team closer to the centre of New Zealand sport, but did little to disrupt public perceptions of the sport as a whole.

This article examines the gendered nature of sport fan ethnographies and addresses the often-overlooked relationship between a researcher’s gender identity and their research environment. It seeks to critically explore the debates that surround female researchers in masculine settings, and argues that the position of a female researcher is both enabling and limiting within the scope of data collection on football fans. Drawing on a qualitative data-set that examines football fans of Everton Football Club, observational data collected over the 2012–2013 Premier League seasons are used to illustrate how the researcher reflexively celebrated, negotiated, subverted and at times froze her femininity. The silencing of the female ethnographer in sport research is attributed to the prominent position that both male sports fans and male scholars occupy in the field. This paper advocates for an alternative approach to the study of sports fans that encourages more reflexively on behalf of the researcher.

The UEFA Champions League (UCL) tournament has become a showcase for the most elite and well-resourced clubs in Europe. In this paper, we explore whether the European flavour of this competition and the multi-national composition of the teams involved influence the sport media’s well-documented nationalistic discursive traditions. The analytical frame draws on Barthes’ work on mythologies and Wenner’s conceptualization of communicative dirt to analyse discourses relating to nation found in the coverage of the 2011 UCL tournament. We identified the presence of nationalistic discourses in the form of symbolic Englishness, intertextual references to insider English knowledge, football history and conflicts, and ‘othering’ representations of England’s opponents. The re-imposition of war imagery, stereotypes and ideological Englishness in UCL media coverage was conceptualized as the importation of communicative dirt into a multi-national context. We argue that the presence of this pervasive nationalistic disco...

Over the past 20 years, soccer in Slovenia has experienced a shift in role and perception from ‘Balkanite’ to mainstream. The purpose of this study is to understand how identity is negotiated in televised broadcasts of the domestic soccer league in this former Yugoslav country. The study uses content and discourse analyses to examine the commentary spoken during national soccer championship broadcasts on Slovenian public television and the ways players of different nationalities are represented in these games. Results show that interpretive commentary accounted for 29.2% of the total commentary, most (59.5%) of which was positive in nature. International players received significantly more overall comments, as well as more comments about athletic strength, speed and body size; home nationals in turn received more descriptions about concentration, experience and consonance. Announcers put considerable emphasis on nationality and used it to consolidate the status of Slovenia as an independent country and on...

This article draws on preliminary findings from a qualitative study of the relationships between sport, media, identity and national cultural citizenship in Greater Western Sydney, Australia’s most dynamically diverse urban region. It addresses the place of sport, including association football (soccer), in the lived experience of those who, under conditions of intensifying and proliferating ‘mobilities’, engage in the quotidian process of negotiating their orientation to nation and, especially, to national culture. It explores, in interviews with Australian residents and sport fans from a range of backgrounds, the interplay of sporting taste, media sport uses, affectivity and orientation to the national. The article concludes with the analytical observation that Australia’s historically-inherited ethnic hierarchy extends to Anglo-Australians a certain licence to play with or even repudiate national sporting loyalty, while subjecting citizens and residents from non-Anglo (especially Asian) backgrounds to ...

The aim of this article is the presentation and interpretation of the coverage of female football players in the largest German boulevard paper (tabloid) during the 2011 FIFA Women’s World Cup. Main issues are the ways in which the players are portrayed and women’s football is ‘framed’. In addition, the article explores the self-presentations of the players and their reactions to the mediated messages and images. Drawing on constructivist approaches to gender, playing football is considered as a gender performance, staged by the players and presented as well as interpreted by the media. A content analysis of the BILD newspaper shows that the game and the players were ‘gendered’, meaning that their femininity was emphasized. In addition, the paper published texts and images with a focus on eroticism and sexuality. Some of the footballers complied with these framing strategies, while others rejected any sexualization with the argument: ‘We want to market our sport, not our looks’.

Women’s football has been gaining popularity in the Netherlands over the last two decades and is currently the second-most practised team sport in the country. However, no systematic inquiries exist as to what extent and in what way the Dutch mass media have responded to this development. This study aims to addresses this gap. We examine how two national newspapers (AD and the Volkskrant) and a television programme (Studio Sport) have covered women’s football in the timeframe 1995–2013. Our results show that the total amount of items devoted to women’s football has seen a serious increase, especially in the last decade. But, as our qualitative analysis of match reports in the newspaper the Volkskrant shows, football still remains closely associated with men and masculinity, and men’s football often functions as the (silent) norm. We discuss the implications of our results and note possible avenues for future research.

This paper focuses on 119 logotypes that are depicted on European football club kits. The football clubs were selected based on their participation in the first two rounds of the UEFA Champions League competitions and in specific in its first two rounds covering a period of time from 1993 to 2010. Our research interest focuses on the significance of ideological loading in terms of the codes occurring in team logos as symbols of collective identities. Our view was, firstly, that logotypes have absorbed and internalized values and stereotypes from the wider social sphere (paradigmatic axis) and, secondly, that there is a common structuring of logos in terms of codes (syntagmatic axis). Our research is based on socio-semiotic methodology, which is not confined to a formalistic approach of texts, but scrutinizes them as an integral part of a material, socio-economic and political context. The analysis led to a series of important data referring to the structuring of team logos as well as to how these logos ar...

Why do Indians celebrate Brazilian football? Is it because Indians do not have local stars to root for? Why does it have to be Brazil? Why was a generation of football fans in Calcutta in awe of an exotic South American footballer called Pele? This essay responds to these conundrums by analysing transnational football fandom from perspectives of cultural diffusion and image-making. It situates circulation of culture in a historical study of the impact of Brazilian football, with particular emphasis on Pele, as borne out by fan culture in India. It examines if the similarities between India and Brazil in the global meridian of development had any bearing on football fandom. Next, it studies particularly how Pele’s visit to Calcutta in 1977 was registered by the overlapping categories of fans, politicians and journalists. By doing so, it offers a model of understanding moral/cultural networks of transnational fandom in terms of hero/icon/legend worship.

This essay will shed light on the reasons why Brazilian football player Zico has become the ‘God of Soccer’ in Japan by discussing Zico’s unique character and actions and the social condition surrounding him, as well as the role played by the image of a hero held by the Japanese. The study uses the existing literature on Zico’s tenure in Japan along with Zico’s own writings and anecdotes to reflect upon his legacies from various angles. While it emphasizes the ability of an interpreter in constructing Zico’s image, it also encapsulates the key moments and images Zico elicited in Japan, including his brilliant style of play, his memorable hat-trick in his opening J-League match and his figure as a father of Japanese football. The essay will try to show that Zico’s emphasis on the importance of family, as in building a ‘Zico Family’, as well as his strong sense of obligation, professionalism and integrity contributed to creating his image as a legendary human being in Japan.

Brazilian futebol has provided the world with several first-class players who have left their footprint on football history. However, no player can be compared to Socrates; Socrates was not only an icon of futebol-arte who mastered the ‘back heel’ and played for the Brazilian team in two FIFA World Cups (1982 and 1986), he was also a political activist who fought for democracy from inside the football world and who joined the Brazilian struggle for civil liberties during the 1980s. Interviews with sport journalists, an exploration of my personal memories of Brazilian futebol and the political scene, and a revisiting of Socrates’ chronicles and testimonies together demonstrate Socrates’ belief that the futebol arena was a privileged place to fight for social change. Socrates passed away in 2011, leaving an inspiring heritage of joy, futebol-arte and freedom struggle. His libertarian legacy must be acknowledged in a country where, despite being acclaimed as one of the most authentic cultural expressions of ...

Spain, for long considered the glorious underachievers of world football, have in the last five years made a spectacular transition. From having a solitary European Championship win in 1964, they have won the last three major international tournaments they have appeared in. This achievement has evoked comparisons with some of the world’s greatest teams. Yet, it was not always so good for Spain; ravaged by the civil war and with infighting amongst different regions, Spain struggled on the international arena despite two immense clubs in Barcelona and Real Madrid. In recent years, the football team has risen above these divisions and ironically, given the long-standing tensions between Catalonia and Spain, the core of their success has been through players from FC Barcelona, the Catalan-based powerhouse. A major catalyst in Spain’s stunning rejuvenation as an international football powerhouse has been midfielder Xavi Hernandez. The interesting fact about Xavi is that not only is he a fabulous player who wou...

The rise of celebrity culture is a theme that has attracted a significant amount of attention within the realm of sport and culture related studies in sociology. Indeed sportsmen and women were the pioneers of celebrity status in ancient Greek society. Associating sporting accomplishments with celebrity has now been magnified by the media and the ensuing debate on the celebrity–media nexus and the cultural changes due to globalization have acquired considerable significance in academic studies. In this essay, I endeavour to focus on Roger Milla and Didier Drogba who captured the hearts of soccer-lovers worldwide in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I will try to capture the essence of the celebrity status of these two soccer icons by evaluating their images in relation to debates surrounding African soccer, sports labour migration and the state of the domestic game. It is my argument that the two rose to iconic status because they ventured outside the continent to compete at the highest...

Scholars of Argentine futbol have explored the construction of futbol criollo and how this style of play has factored into the broader debate over national identity in Argentina. Focusing on the performance of the key Argentine personalities at the FIFA World Cup from 1958 to 1990, this essay explores how futbol represented a contested vision of the nation across five decades. After a 24-year absence at the FIFA World Cup, and in the wake of the overthrow of President Juan Peron, Argentina underachieved at the 1958 tournament. The country would later experience a number of disappointments en route to eventually winning the 1978 and 1986 World Cups. However, across this time span (and beyond) the team’s style of play and identity became the subject of intense debate. Popular discourse revealed a preference between two approaches seemingly in juxtaposition to each other. On the one hand, traditionalists favoured the criollo style, which celebrated the pibe (the young kid from the streets) and the potrero (t...

While there are a number of ways a player can be remembered after his career ends, much attention is paid to two different areas: the player’s successes and failures and any scandals by which the player may have been tainted. Which of these ultimately matters more? Does scandal outweigh what happens on the pitch? Or does failure speak louder than scandal? When considering the legacy of Michael Ballack, we find ourselves asking: will he be remembered for never winning the biggest trophies or for the scandals that dogged his last few years as a player? By looking at the legacy of Franz Beckenbauer, another world-class German player and former captain of the (West) German National Team whose career was repeatedly touched by scandals but whose legacy is largely positive, due to the fact that he experienced tremendous success on the pitch, we will perhaps be able to imagine how Ballack will be remembered. After considering two major scandals, and a few minor ones, that came at the end of Ballack’s career and l...

This paper interrogates the media articulation of football/soccer to New Zealand national consciousness during the 2010 FIFA World Cup. 541 articles from national and regional newspapers and Internet news sites were gathered and analysed using a critically discursive approach. I argue that the press re-framed football within the national sporting imagination in the context of a narcissistic nationalism. Coverage was underpinned by several interlocking themes. First, falsely positing football as ethnically inclusive by emphasizing Māori players’ presence in the national team. Second, the entrenchment of archetypes and caricatures of both others and the national self. This included the evocation of a mythic New Zealand masculinity, with specific individuals lionized as key embodiments of the fictive national character. Third, the caricaturing of other nationalities is also used to bolster the national self – in particular the Italians and Australians. Such framings resonate with long-standing themes in the ...

FC Sankt Pauli is often portrayed as a rebel football club that represents an ideal manifestation of fan centredness. But whilst the club’s reputation is mostly well earned, there is much to distinguish the fans from the club and conflict between the two is prominent and ongoing. This research, based on more than 10 years of ethnography amongst the fans and questionnaires and interviews with key individuals, looks behind the scenes to reveal how fans challenge their club, the authorities and much more beyond. Authentic voices of fan activists tell a story of fervent sport activism, fan power and resistance, alive and well inhabiting a vibrant subculture. Political praxis and protest are prolific amongst Sankt Pauli fans. By illuminating the radical sport activism of Sankt Pauli fans, this paper offers a vision for other football fans to emulate and for sport more generally to realize a more transformative potential.

The purpose of this study was to explore the experiences of female (association) football officials who officiate in amateur men’s and boys’ football matches in two UK counties (Warwickshire and Somerset). The research presents a view of men’s football from a position that has hitherto been overlooked in the social exploration of football culture. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork collected between September and December 2012, the findings provide insight into some women’s experiences of sexism and marginalization in predominantly male football contexts. Participant observations, formal semi-structured interviews and a range of informal conversations with four female match officials demonstrated a wide range of abuse that could generally be construed as sexist. The women used various strategies to overcome the hostile attitudes that often greeted their presence on the football pitch. Moreover, they continuously negotiated their identities as females and football officials in a space where men and masculinity are prevalent.

This essay looks into how soccer players are trained in Brazil and how they move through the international market. Player training was observed in ethnographic research conducted from 2001 to 2005, investigating training models in Brazil and France. Further research was done in 2005 to identify how Brazilian athletes moved across transnational borders, having a greater sociological bent. Key markets were identified for players trained in Brazil.

In the twentieth century, sport, and especially soccer, was turned into a kind of universal modern language and was simultaneously transformed into a repository for constructing specificities (continental, national, regional, local). In the last two decades, this process has become a theme of reflection for anthropologists, sociologists and historians. In Brazil and Argentina, certain authors have been debating how, by using soccer, the nation is represented in its specificity, thus generating enough academic analyses to be able to compare certain results. The objective of this essay is to compare the construction of a national identity through soccer, in Brazil and in Argentina, by using some of these analyses. Certain interfaces will be explored, including, for example, the value attributed to individual players considered exceptionally talented, as well as certain peculiarities, such as distinct traditions invoked in constructing these individuals.

The FIFA (Federation Internationale de Football Association) World Cup is the world’s biggest soccer tournament and is one of the largest international sporting events. In 2014, Brazil will host the quadrennial FIFA World Cup for the second time in its history. Since this premier global mega-event involves much of the world and Brazil is a major nation that seeks to assert its position internationally, the situation is optimal for exploring various issues. Scholars have examined various aspects of the ongoing preparations. Researchers have several options worthy of exploration including, but not limited to, relevant social phenomena, the social, cultural, economic and educational impact, as well as the cultural practices related to this mega-event. The aim of this literature review is to present some key areas that should be considered in regards to the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil.

This essay explores the symbolic dimensions of soccer in Brazilian society from the perspective of sports anthropology. It discusses how the founding of the game was handled, in terms of stylization and standardization of rules. This, as the essay argues, would effect amplified representations in emotional regimes and adhesion to the game, thus making it a singular sports modality for understanding societies such as Brazil.

This essay offers a brief historical background to the evolution of women’s soccer in Brazil. It focuses on the main obstacles women faced to pursue the game, which was forbidden to women in Brazil in 1941. By analysing how the newspapers treat women’s teams, the essay will try to highlight significant changes in the stereotypes that long guided perceptions of people about women soccer players.

This essay analyses the media narrative in the coverage of the Brazilian team during the 2002 World Cup. The corpus of our work is concentrated on the sports supplements of Jornal do Brasil during the 2002 World Cup from two days before the event until two days after its end, reaching the total of 32 supplements. We focus on the hypothesis that the qualification ‘Brazil: the soccer country’, usually even more intense and singular during this worldwide event, has been decreasing and the journalistic narratives about the Brazilian soccer team do not approach soccer homogeneously as a metonym for the nation. The reflection about the role of the sports press as cultural builder is fundamental to observe how newspapers confirm and construct mythologies and identitary discourses, in spite of the journalistic objectivity, one of the pillars of the profession.

The 2012 UEFA European Football Championship (‘Euro 2012’) – Europe’s quadrennial football bonanza was held in Poland and the Ukraine between June 8th and July 1st. Occurring between Elizabeth II’s Diamond jubilee and the London 2012 Olympic Games, the eyes of the media were fixated on the pride and joy of English football, its men’s national team. With national consciousness at an all-time high, articles in England’s tabloid, ‘red-top,’ daily national newspapers The Sun and Daily Mirror were tracked for three weeks as they lavished their attentions on the national pastime. Their coverage of the English team reflected a heightened consciousness of English national identity. Drawing on Guibernau’s strategies for creating and uniting citizens around a collective national identity, this study examined how England’s popular media presented and represented England’s national identity to reflect the real and imagined versions of Englishness during this major sporting event.1 By focusing on The Sun and Daily Mir...

By the time of Euro 2012, deepening tensions of nationalism and internal social struggles were developing across Europe in worsening conditions of systemic crisis. The official football ideology of UEFA conceives Euro 2012 as a civilizing platform for mutual respect and brotherhood between competing nations. In contrast, what I call Hyper-Critical Theory conceives of football competitions like Euro 2012 as part of a de-civilising ‘sports mode of production’ that necessarily produces crisis conditions, alienation and violence on a mass scale, fostering nationalism, militarism and racism. Between these polar perspectives, the figurational sociology of sport associated with Norbert Elias proposes that major international football competitions like Euro 2012 creates and dissipates contingent tensions of ‘group charisma’ and ‘group disgrace’. Study of Euronews ‘post-national’ coverage of Euro 2012 allows their explanatory adequacy to be compared. In a competition structure like the Euros no social group – play...