The significance of the Corinthians Football Club, founded in 1882, has been widely acknowledged by historians of football and by sports historians generally. As a ’super club’ comprising the best amateur talent available they were an important formative influence on football in Britain from the 1880s to the 1930s. As a touring club - they first travelled to South Africa in 1897 and made regular forays into Europe and also to Canada, the United States and Brazil - they were the self-proclaimed standard bearers for gentlemanly values in sport. Indeed for many years they were most famous football club in the world, drawing huge crowds and helping to ensure that the version of football emanating from the English public schools and universities in the mid-nineteenth century became a global game. Though their playing strength and influence waned after the First World War, they remained a significant force through to 1939, upholding ’true blue’ amateurism at a time when football was increasingly associated with professionalism and seen as a branch of commercial entertainment. Whilst much has been written about the Corinthians, mainly by club insiders, this is the first complete scholarly history to cover their activities both in England and in other parts of the world. It critically reassesses the club’s role in the development of football and fills a gap in existing literature on the relationship between the progress of the game in England and globally. Most crucially, the book re-examines the sporting ideology of gentlemanly amateurism within the context of late-nineteenth century and early-twentieth century society.

Simon Kuper's New York Times bestseller Soccernomics pioneered a new way of looking at soccer through meticulous empirical analysis and incisive -- and witty -- commentary. Kuper now leaves the numbers and data behind to explore the heart and soul of the world's most popular sport in the new, extraordinarily revealing Soccer Men. Soccer Men goes behind the scenes with soccer's greatest players and coaches. Inquiring into the genius and hubris of the modern game, Kuper details the lives of giants such as Arsè Wenger, Jose Mourinho, Jorge Valdano, Lionel Messi, Kakáand Didier Drogba, describing their upbringings, the soccer cultures they grew up in, the way they play, and the baggage they bring to their relationships at work. From one of the great sportswriters of our time, Soccer Men is a penetrating and surprising anatomy of the figures that define modern soccer.

"This collection explores soccer's development in the United States as waves of immigrants arrived and America's cities began to industrialize and become major cultural hubs in the late-nineteenth century. While America is largely known today as one of the few countries in which soccer is not its primary sport, this collection aims to shed light on the US's little-known soccer history by focusing on immigration and immigrant stories playing out in major American cities"--

Drawing on wide-ranging archival research, this authoritative new history examines the cultural diplomatic role played by British football in international affairs, British foreign policy, and international football during the 1930s. For British governments, soccer diplomacy emerged as a favoured instrument of soft power when facing Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Hirohito’s Japan, and Stalin’s Russia on and off the field. Examining the evolving relationship between successive governments and the Football Association, this book records how governments, though publicly espousing the distinctive autonomy of British sport, pursued privately a progressively interventionist role regarding international matches played by England and Football League clubs. Embedding its central themes in the wider context of international relations, the war of ideas between the liberal democracies and the dictatorships, and international football, the book also interrogates one of the most shocking moments in British sporting history, when England players gave Nazi salutes in Berlin in 1938, an episode in which virtue signalling was used in support of footballing appeasement. Offering readers an informed historical perspective on some of the modern world’s most significant issues, from the divide between dictatorships and liberal democracies to the use of sport as cultural diplomacy aka cultural propaganda, this book is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in the history of Britain, sport history, football, international politics, diplomacy or international institutions.

October 10, 2017. The U.S. men’s soccer team loses in Trinidad and Tobago, and fails to qualify for the 2018 World Cup. Winning soccer’s greatest prize never seemed more distant. Immediate fixes—a new coach, a revamped professional league, a commitment to coaching education—won’t put the USA in the global elite. The nation is too fractious, too litigious, too wrapped up in other sports, and too late to the game. In Why the U.S. Men Will Never Win the World Cup: A Historical and Cultural Reality Check, Beau Dure shows what American soccer is really up against. Using hundreds of sources to trace more than 100 years of history, Dure delves into the culture that only recently lost its disdain for the global game and still doesn’t have the depth of soccer insight and passion that much of the world has had for generations. The difficulty isn’t any single thing—the mismanagement of failed leagues, the inability to agree on a path forward, the lawsuits that stem from an inability to agree, or the unique American culture that treasures its homegrown sports. It’s everything. And yet, Why the U.S. Men Will Never Win the World Cup is ultimately optimistic. Dure argues that with the right long-term changes, the U.S. can build a soccer environment that consistently produces quality players, strong results, and a lot more fun on the international stage. Soccer fans and skeptics alike will find this a fascinating examination of America’s past, present, and future in the beautiful game.

The Game of Our Lives is a masterly portrait of soccer and contemporary Britain. Soccer in the United Kingdom has evolved from a jaded, working-class tradition to a sport at the heart of popular culture, from an economic mess to a booming entertainment industry that has conquered the world. The changes in the game, David Goldblatt shows, uncannily mirror the evolution of British society. In the 1980s, soccer was described as a slum game played by slum people in slum stadiums. Such was the transformation over the following twenty-five years that novelists, politicians, poets, and bankers were all declaring their footballing loyalties. At one point, the Palace let it be known that the queen -- like her mother, Prince Harry, the chief rabbi, and the archbishop of Canterbury -- was an Arsenal fan. Soccer permeated the national life like little else, an atavistic survivor decked out in New Britain flash, a social democratic game in a cutthroat, profit-driven world. From the goals, to the players, to the managers, to the money, Goldblatt describes how the English Premier League (EPL) was forged in Margaret Thatcher's Britain by an alliance of the big clubs -- Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United, Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur -- the Football Association, and Rupert Murdoch's Sky TV. Goldblatt argues that no social phenomenon traces the momentous economic, social, and political changes of post-Thatcherite Britain in a more illuminating manner than soccer, and The Game of Our Lives provides the definitive social history of the EPL -- the most popular soccer league in the world.

This book examines the role of the British in the diffusion and development of soccer on the Caribbean islands of Trinidad and Tobago, in the light of issues of race, ethnicity, colour, class and national identity, in the period 1908–1973. This role was expressed in the activities of understudied organizations like the English Football Association and the British Council, as well as oil companies like Shell and British Petroleum; through the recruitment of coaches such as Jimmy Hill and Michael Laing; the staging of tours involving teams such as Chelsea, Coventry City, Wolverhampton Wanderers and Arsenal in the 1960s; the formation of clubs, leagues and the construction of sporting facilities. Relatedly, it examines the role of the local middle classes in facilitating the commercialization of the game through professionalization and the operations of betting pools. The volume will help to give readers a better understanding of how the game served as a “double agent” of British hegemony and segregation, as well as integration and socio-political change in colonial and post-colonial society. The book will be of value to sport scholars, students, footballers and fans of the game who have an interest in its history across the world.

This edited collection is positioned at the nexus of sports, society and creative writing. In its explorations of the intersections of sports writing, analysis of literary contributions and examinations of craft, it offers rare consideration of a rich diversity of form in narratives that occur in, and as creative practice. Included in the collection are dynamic academic investigations into football writing and poetry focused on community sporting activities in Afghanistan, to those addressing the intersections of writing and boxing in the reflexive reclamation of the post-trauma self, the absence of women in the rodeo and who and what is represented in our sports shelves. This book breaks new ground in approaches to sport’s role in creative writing and what creative writing can provide in furthering our understanding of sport in society. The works in this edited book draw on a diverse range of methods to interrogate the processes, concepts and liminal spaces through an intersectional array of voices, offering analysis and insight into the application of creative writing knowledge and practice in relation to sport and its impact on wider discipline discussion and research. It is relevant to students and scholars studying and researching creative writing, sports writing, sports studies, cultural studies and sports media studies.

World of Sport examines the development of modern sport from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1960s in the light of transnational approaches to history. Critically probing existing studies and offering new insights, this volume demonstrates that while sport was a national and international phenomenon, it was invariably constructed transnationally. Taking in topics ranging from the dissemination of football codes to transpacific surfing cultures, and the touring lives of baseball and hockey players to the contact zones of international competition, it emphasises the importance of transnational perspectives in the way people around the globe experience sport. Like other forms of popular culture, sport cannot be properly understood without reference to the cross-national connections that helped to disseminate rules and regulations, circulated styles of play and performance, and drove forward regional and international competition. Drawing on case studies that range time periods and continents, World of Sport is a must-read for students and researchers interested in the place of sport in the interconnected modern world and the transnational origins of the global sporting order in the twenty-first century.

Soccer, the world’s most popular mass spectator sport, gives birth to great achievers on the field of play all the time. While some of them become heroes and stars during their playing career, transforming themselves into national as well as global icons, very few come to be remembered as all-time greats. They leave an enduring legacy and thereby claim to be legends by their own rights. While the rise and achievements of these soccer greats have drawn considerable attention from scholars across the world, their legacies across time and space have mostly been overlooked. This volume intends to reconstruct the significance of the legacies of such great men of world soccer particularly in a globalized world. It will attempt to show that these luminous personalities not only represent their national identity at the global stage, but also highlight the proven role of the players or coaches in projecting a global image, cutting across affiliations of nation, region, class, community, religion, gender and so on. In other words, the true heroes, icons and legends of the world’s most popular sport have always floated at a transnational global space, transcending the limits of space, identity or culture of a nation. This book was published as a special issue of Soccer and Society.