Soccer is the most popular mass spectator sport in the world, gaining huge media coverage and reaching all levels of society in countries all around the world. More than just entertainment, soccer has proved to be a reflection of national, cultural, community and ethnic identity as well as an indication of the development and international status of post-colonial nation states. For those nations still at the fringes of the modern global game, soccer represents a vision of potential commercialisation, capable of generating foreign reserves and bringing in considerable economic power. This book explores aspects of the development of soccer in countries which have recently been marginalised in world soccer or have only erratic success on the international stage. These fringe nations include a greater part of Africa, the USA, Australia, Israel, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Burma, Indonesia, Thailand, Maldives and Sri Lanka, and while these countries are rarely noticed by the global football media, they nonetheless have great potential to excel, and many have a rich soccer heritage that still holds a place of central importance in the every day life of the people. This book was previously published as a special issue of Soccer and Society.

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.

Soccer, the most popular mass spectator sport in the world, has always remained a marker of identities of various sorts. Behind the façade of its obvious entertainment aspect, it has proved to be a perpetuating reflector of nationalism, ethnicity, community or communal identity, and cultural specificity. Naturally therefore, the game is a complex representative of minorities’ status especially in countries where minorities play a crucial role in political, social, cultural or economic life. The question is also important since in many nations success in sports like soccer has been used as an instrument for assimilation or to promote an alternative brand of nationalism. Thus, Jewish teams in pre-Second World War Europe were set up to promote the idea of a muscular Jewish identity. Similarly, in apartheid South Africa, soccer became the game of the black majority since it was excluded from the two principal games of the country – rugby and cricket. In India, on the other hand, the Muslim minorities under colonial rule appropriated soccer to assert their community-identity. The book examines why in certain countries, minorities chose to take up the sport while in others they backed away from participating in the game or, alternatively, set up their own leagues and practised self-exclusion. The book examines European countries like the Netherlands, England and France, the USA, Africa, Australia and the larger countries of Asia – particularly India. This book was previously published as a special issue of Soccer and Society.

The Middle East and North Africa are experiencing the most fundamental transition in their post-colonial history. It is a transition that is changing the borders of nation states as well as their political and social structures. Conflicting visions of what those structures should look like have ensured that transition will take years, and these deep-seated differences have ensured that the transition process is volatile, brutal and bloody. The balance of power shifts like quicksand.Shifting Sands: Essays on Sports and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa is a compilation of essays that constitute a first stab at exploring the importance of sports in general and soccer in particular in the political, social and cultural development of the Middle East and North Africa since the beginning of the 20th century. In doing so, the book provides a new, fresh and unique perspective that contributes to understanding the turbulence sweeping the region that is fundamentally changing its geopolitics and political and social structures.

The Sociology of Sport has grown since its inception in the late 1950s and has become robust, and diverse. Many countries now boast strong scholars in the field and this volume reflects the fascinating research being done. This innovative volume is dedicated to a review of the state of the area by region.

This is the first book to offer a comprehensive overview of the history, development and contemporary significance of sport in Asia. It addresses a wide range of issues central to sport in the context of Asian culture, politics, economy and society. The book explores diverse topics, including the history of traditional Asian sport; the rise of modern sport in Asia; the Olympic Movement in Asia; mega sport events in Asia; sport governance and policy; gender, class and ethnicity in Asian sport, and Asia’s sporting heroes and heroines. With contributions from 74 leading international scholars, it offers a new perspective on understanding Asian sport and society, telling the story of how sport in this mega-region is coming together and reshaping the world in the process. It also provides readers with a wide lens through which to better contextualise the relationships between Asia and the world within the global sport community. The Routledge Handbook of Sport in Asia is a vital resource for students and scholars studying the history, politics, sociology, culture and policy of sport in Asia, as well as sport management, sport history, sport sociology, and sport policy and politics. It is also valuable reading for those working in international sport organisations.

FIFA, the world governing body of association football, declared 'The Future is Feminine' in a 1995 press release. Since then, football has been claimed as the fastest growing participation sport for women globally. An estimated twenty million women play the game around the world, and that figure is on the rise. However, the history of women's participation goes back to at least 1895 and in our enthusiasm for the present, the memory of that longer history can be overlooked or forgotten.A Beautiful Game examines contemporary women's football internationally, with case studies from England, the United States, China and Australia. In each case study, Jean Williams considers the evolution of the women's game against a backdrop of issues, such as media representation, access to facilities, lack of resources, coaching, sponsorship, talent identification, training and professionalisation. The author examines contentious questions, such as why women are absent from the highest levels of professional football, combining source material from archives, oral history and artefacts.A Beautiful Game analyses the status and image of the women's game from the late nineteenth century to the shifting social values of the present.

The late Victorian and Edwardian officer class viewed hunting and big game hunting in particular, as a sound preparation for imperial warfare. For the imperial officer in the making, the ‘blooding’ hunting ritual was a visible ‘hallmark’ of stirling martial masculinity. Sir Henry Newbolt, the period poet of subaltern self-sacrifice, typically considered hunting as essential for the creation of a ‘masculine sporting spirit’ necessary for the consolidation and extension of the empire. Hunting was seen as a manifestation of Darwinian masculinity that maintained a pre-ordained hierarchical order of superordinate and subordinate breeds. Militarism, Hunting, Imperialism examines these ideas under the following five sections: martial imperialism: the self-sacrificial subaltern ‘blooding’ the middle class martial male the imperial officer, hunting and war martial masculinity proclaimed and consolidated martial masculinity adapted and adjusted. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

This book examines how football, as a mass spectator sport, came to represent a novel, unique cultural identity of Bengali people in terms of nation, community, region/locality and club, contributing to the continuity of everyday socio-cultural life. It explains how football became a viable popular social force with a rare emotional spontaneity and peculiar self-expressive fan culture against the background of anti-imperial nationalist movement and postcolonial political tension and social transformation. In the process, it investigates certain key questions and problems in the social history of football in Bengal, which have hitherto been ignored in the existing works on the subject. The author offers some original arguments in treating football as a cultural phenomenon, setting it squarely in the context of Bengali politics and society. It strengthens the premise that social history of South Asian sport can be meaningfully understood only by looking beyond the sports field. The study, using sport as a lens, has tried to consider some relevant themes of social history, and brings forth important issues of political and cultural history of 20th-century Bengal. Simultaneously, it highlights the transformed role of football as an instrument of reaction, resistance and subversion. It indicates that the football field of Bengal proves to be a mirror image of what society experiences in its cultural and political field, through a series of historical projections of identity, difference and culture.

This volume investigates the way in which football supporters around the world express themselves as followers of teams, whether they be professional, amateur or national. The diverse geographical and cultural array of contributions to this volume highlights not only the variety of how fans express themselves, but their commonalities as well. The collection brings together scholars of North and South America, Europe, Asia and Africa to present a global picture of fan culture. The collection shows that while every group of fans around the world has its own characteristics, the role of a football fan is laced with commonalities, irrespective of geography or culture. This book was previously published as a special issue of Soccer and Society.