Over the years, I have seen more than a thousand football matches at locations across Britain and Europe, from grounds that were little more than park pitches to some of the world's best stadia. This volume contains a further one hundred football ground visits, extending into Europe to visit some of the major stadia, as well as visiting new grounds in the UK as more teams relocated in the early years of the century.

Football.

Football constitutes a vivid public ritual in contemporary European culture through which emergent social solidarities and new economic networks have come into being. This fascinating and unique volume traces the transformation of European football from the 1950s to the present, focusing in particular on the dramatic changes that have occurred in the last decade and linking them to the wider process of European integration. The examination of football illuminates how the growing dominance of the free market has changed European society from an international order in which the nation-state was dominant to a more complex transnational regime in which cities and regions are becoming more prominent than in the past. The study is supported by detailed ethnographic accounts emerging from the author's fieldwork at Manchester United and interview data with some of the most important figures in European football at clubs including Juventus, Milan, Bayern Munich, Schalke and Barcelona. It also includes a highly topical examination of racism in European football.

'The Europe of football' is one of the aspects of the history of European integration that has generated the smallest amount of academic research. However, the successive invention of sporting traditions with a European calling since the Belle Epoque, followed by the creation of various European cups during the interwar constitute at the same time an original form of 'Europe-building' and a lasting contribution to the creation of a European space and spirit. The target of the authors in this book is to look back on the genesis of European competitions that leads to the creation of the European cups now organised by UEFA. It also seeks to show how football has made possible the setting up of a partially transnational space through sports journalism. Lastly, through the study of the mobility and connections of football's actors, the different chapters will also try to identify the various phases of football's Europeanisation process on the old continent. It will lay strong emphasis on the anthropological, cultural, economic, political and social aspects of this history, notably the production of body techniques, representations, emblematic figures, consumption habits and their role in the larger context of international relations. This book was previously published as a special issue of Sport in History.

While the field of football studies has produced an abundance of literature on professional, top-league football, there is little research output to do with the non-top level football. This book explores the relationship between the top and lower leagues, laying open the drastic schisms that exist between the different levels. The study links the developments at the top level of English and German football in the past 30 years to transformational processes in lower league football. Illustrating how the hegemonic status of top football weighs hard on the spheres below, it depicts how it also serves as a blueprint for lower league football clubs’ strategies in coping with a threefold dilemma of institutional legitimacy that shows itself in economic, cultural and social dimensions. Taking the different club structures in both national contexts as a starting point, it portrays both the efficacy of institutional frameworks and how these can be challenged from below. This research will be of interest to students and scholars across football studies, sports studies, the sociology of sport, and organisation studies.

European Football in Black and White offers an engaging interpretation of a disturbing phenomenon in Europe's favorite sport: football violence fueled by racism. While many fans across Europe have used football to further destructive ethnocentric agendas, there are also pan-European initiatives in the football stadium to combat the almost endemic problem. Christos Kassimeris analyzes political ideologies that have influenced football supporters, drawing attention to the increasing politicization of football and the footballization of politics. He also considers the contributions of nationalism, social class, and media coverage before assessing attempts by various groups, from the Football Against Racism in Europe (FARE) network to the European Union, to rectify the problem. Ultimately, he concludes that football needs to be dissociated from both racism and politics for the sport to flourish. Unlike more traditional attempts to explain football violence and racism, this book seeks to establish a Europe-wide as well as a national explanatory framework for racism from a political perspective. This study will draw the interest not only of scholars across the humanities and social sciences, but also of ordinary football supporters. Book jacket.

Content As Brazil 2014 will yet again show, the FIFA World Cup is a mega-event followed by billions of spectators around the globe. This volume is the first scholarly attempt to capture the history of the FIFA World Cup in its entirety. From the first World Cup in 1930 to the one in 2010 the tournament has exerted strong influences and acted as an important indicator of political, economic, social and cultural developments. In bringing together contributions by international experts from history, cultural studies, sociology and politics this volume explores some crucial issues linked to the World Cup: from the political exploitation of the tournament for domestic purposes to its economic ramifications for the host nation and beyond; from its role for national identity and national self-representation to its potential to realize transnational modes of identity and interdependence; from its role as a global media event to its impact on the commercialization of football on the national and transnational stage. Zum Inhalt Auch bei der kommenden Fußballweltmeisterschaft in Brasilien werden Milliarden Zuschauer überall auf der Welt das Ereignis verfolgen: Der FIFA-World Cup ist ein Megaevent. Doch seine Bedeutung geht weit über das singuläre Ereignis hinaus: Seit der ersten Austragung im Jahr 1930 war das Turnier ein wichtiger Indikator für politische, soziale und kulturelle Entwicklungen. Die behandelten Themenkomplexe von Experten aus aller Welt - überwiegend Historiker, Soziologen und Kulturwissenschaftler - reichen von politischem Missbrauch des Turniers für innenpolitische Zwecke über wirtschaftliche Faktoren, nationale Identitäten bzw. ihre Selbstrepräsentationen bis hin zu der Entwicklung eines medialen Großereignisses.