Fútbol, or soccer as it is called in the United States, is the most popular sport in the world. Millions of people schedule their lives and build identities around it. The World Cup tournament, played every four years, draws an audience of more than a billion people and provides a global platform for displays of athletic prowess, nationalist rhetoric, and commercial advertising. Fútbol is ubiquitous in Latin America, yet few academic histories of the sport exist, and even fewer focus on its relevance to politics in the region. To fill that gap, this book uses amateur fútbol clubs in Chile to understand the history of civic associations, popular culture, and politics. In Citizens and Sportsmen, Brenda Elsey argues that fútbol clubs integrated working-class men into urban politics, connected them to parties, and served as venues of political critique. In this way, they contributed to the democratization of the public sphere. Elsey shows how club members debated ideas about class, ethnic, and gender identities, and also how their belief in the uniquely democratic nature of Chile energized state institutions even as it led members to criticize those very institutions. Furthermore, she reveals how fútbol clubs created rituals, narratives, and symbols that legitimated workers' claims to political subjectivity. Her case study demonstrates that the relationship between formal and informal politics is essential to fostering civic engagement and supporting democratic practices.

Fútbol, or soccer as it is called in the United States, is the most popular sport in the world. Millions of people schedule their lives and build identities around it. The World Cup tournament, played every four years, draws an audience of more than a billion people and provides a global platform for displays of athletic prowess, nationalist rhetoric, and commercial advertising. Fútbol is ubiquitous in Latin America, yet few academic histories of the sport exist, and even fewer focus on its relevance to politics in the region. To fill that gap, this book uses amateur fútbol clubs in Chile to understand the history of civic associations, popular culture, and politics. In Citizens and Sportsmen, Brenda Elsey argues that fútbol clubs integrated working-class men into urban politics, connected them to parties, and served as venues of political critique. In this way, they contributed to the democratization of the public sphere. Elsey shows how club members debated ideas about class, ethnic, and gender identities, and also how their belief in the uniquely democratic nature of Chile energized state institutions even as it led members to criticize those very institutions. Furthermore, she reveals how fútbol clubs created rituals, narratives, and symbols that legitimated workers' claims to political subjectivity. Her case study demonstrates that the relationship between formal and informal politics is essential to fostering civic engagement and supporting democratic practices.

Latin American athletes have achieved iconic status in global popular culture, but what do we know about the communities of women in sport? Futbolera is the first monograph on women’s sports in Latin America. Because sports evoke such passion, they are fertile ground for understanding the formation of social classes, national and racial identities, sexuality, and gender roles. Futbolera tells the stories of women athletes and fans as they navigated the pressures and possibilities within organized sports. Futbolera charts the rise of physical education programs for girls, often driven by ideas of eugenics and proper motherhood, that laid the groundwork for women’s sports clubs, which began to thrive beyond the confines of school systems. Futbolera examines how women challenged both their exclusion from national pastimes and their lack of access to leisure, bodily integrity, and public space. This vibrant history also examines women’s sports through comparative case studies of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico, and others. Special attention is given to women’s sports during military dictatorships of the 1970s and 80s as well as the feminist and democratic movements that followed. The book culminates by exploring recent shifts in mindset towards women’s football and dynamic social movements of players across Latin America.

The essays in this volume use football to create a dialogue between history and other disciplines, including art criticism, philosophy, and political science. The study of football provides fertile ground for interdisciplinary initiatives and this volume explores the disciplinary boundaries that are shifting “beneath our feet.” Traditional disciplines in the humanities and social sciences have come to embrace diverse research methodologies and the increased scholarly attention to football over the past decade reflects both the startling popularity of the sport and the trends in historical scholarship that have been termed the “cultural,” “interpretive,” or “linguistic” turns. This volume includes work on gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, which have challenged disciplinary fault-lines.

In the Cold War era, the confrontation between capitalism and communism played out not only in military, diplomatic, and political contexts, but also in the realm of culture—and perhaps nowhere more so than the cultural phenomenon of sports, where the symbolic capital of athletic endeavor held up a mirror to the global contest for the sympathies of citizens worldwide. The Whole World Was Watching examines Cold War rivalries through the lens of sporting activities and competitions across Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the U.S. The essays in this volume consider sport as a vital sphere for understanding the complex geopolitics and cultural politics of the time, not just in terms of commerce and celebrity, but also with respect to shifting notions of race, class, and gender. Including contributions from an international lineup of historians, this volume suggests that the analysis of sport provides a valuable lens for understanding both how individuals experienced the Cold War in their daily lives, and how sports culture in turn influenced politics and diplomatic relations.

As the world’s most popular game, soccer is unique in its ability to reflect and impact culture, society, and politics. Beyond Soccer: International Relations and Politics as Seen through the Beautiful Game provides students with a new and innovative way to learn about political science and international relations. It uses soccer players, officials, fans, and organizations to teach political science concepts—such as geopolitics, discourses, and sovereignty—and IR theories—including realism, liberalism, and feminism. This text also incorporates three common soccer discourses to highlight the possibilities of soccer as a tool for unity and social change, as a defender of established power, and as simultaneously a mechanism used by established power and an engine for social resistance. With exercises, discussion questions, and keywords included in each chapter, Beyond Soccer is a worthwhile and accessible educational tool. Primarily written for undergraduate students of all levels, this book will be valuable in political science, international relations, cultural studies, and sociology courses.

At turns lyrical, ironic, and sympathetic, Mario Filho's chronicle of "the beautiful game" is a classic of Brazilian sports writing. Filho (1908–1966)—a famous Brazilian journalist after whom Rio's Maracana stadium is officially named—tells the Brazilian soccer story as a boundary-busting one of race relations, popular culture, and national identity. Now in English for the first time, the book highlights national debates about the inclusion of African-descended people in the body politic and situates early black footballers as key creators of Brazilian culture. When first introduced to Brazil by British expatriots at the end of the nineteenth century, the game was reserved for elites, excluding poor, working-class, and black Brazilians. Filho, drawing on lively in-depth interviews with coaches, players, and fans, points to the 1920s and 1930s as watershed decades when the gates cracked open. The poor players and players of color entered the game despite virulent discrimination. By the mid-1960s, Brazil had established itself as a global soccer powerhouse, winning two World Cups with the help of star Afro-Brazilians such as Pele and Garrincha. As a story of sport and racism in the world's most popular sport, this book could not be more relevant today.

A broad-based coalition of conservative southern politicians, countercultural activists, environmental scientists, sportsmen, devout Christians, garden clubs in Atlanta, and others came together to push the Coastal Marshlands Protection Act of 1970 through the Georgia state legislature. The law was a first-in-the-nation bill to save the marshes of a state from mining and aggressive development and was a political watershed that reflected the changing nature of the state. It set a foundation that would lead to the thoughtful use of the state’s coastal resources still relevant today. And the Coastlands Wait is the history of this legislative act, as told by St. Simons lawyer and leader of the coalition, Reid Harris. Harris served as head of the environmental section of Governor Jimmy Carter’s Goals for Georgia program and later as chairman of the governor’s State Environmental Council. The coastlands coalition he led backed a groundbreaking act that, when instated, set up a permitting process to control development and to protect five hundred thousand acres of precious Georgia marshland. That coalition did not survive for long and is now seen as an unusual moment in the history of conservation, when allies as deeply diverse as conservative governor Lester Maddox and Atlanta liberals stood together.