A rich portrait of English Football from the end of the Second World War to the present.

Over the past century, the impact of football on Germany has been manifold, influencing the arts, political debates, and even contributing to the construction of cultural memories and national narratives. Football Nation analyses the game’s fluid role in shaping and reflecting German society, and spans its focus on modern German history, from the Wilhelmine era to the early 21st century. Expounding on topics of gender, class, fandom, spectatorship, antisemitism, nationalism, and internationalism, a diverse group of interdisciplinary scholars offer a novel approach to understanding the many influences of football throughout its extensive history which until recently has only been available to a German-speaking readership.

Learn more about the biggest game of the college football season that has determined the national champion since the late 1990s. The title also features informative sidebars, fun facts and quotes, a glossary, a timeline, a list of bowl records, and further resources. Aligned to Common Core Standards and correlated to state standards. SportsZone is an imprint of Abdo Publishing, a division of ABDO.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library as part of the Opening the Future project with COPIM. This book explores the pivotal role that football played as part of Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos’ national unity project centred on the peace process with the FARC. Football has huge political and social capital in Latin America, and has often been rhetorically deployed by governments for various ends; rarely, however, has football’s power and potential been used in such a deliberate, strategic and active way towards a national peace process and targeted such enduring divisions that have historically impeded a sense of a united nation and national identity. Football in Colombia is understood popularly as one of the few things capable of uniting the country, a belief that Santos seized upon as the national team had a successful campaign in the 2014 World Cup. This first book on Colombian football in English explores previous iterations of football nationalism in the country, including the El Dorado and ‘Narcofootball’ eras, before analysing Santos’ three-pronged strategy empowering professional and amateur football, including the use of political speeches and Twitter, legislation and public policy, and Sport for Development and Peace campaigns, with a particular focus on football in the FARC demobilisation and reincorporation camps following the historic peace agreement.

This book investigates the use of football to create, shape and promote Spanish, Catalan and Basque national identities and explores the utilization of soccer to foster patriotic feelings, exposing the often dark vested interests behind the propagation of national narratives through soccer.

In recent years, scholars have understood the increasing use of the St George’s Cross by football fans to be evidence of a rise in a specifically ’English’ identity. This has emerged as part of a wider ’national’ response to broader political processes such as devolution and European integration which have fragmented identities within the UK. Using the controversial figurational sociological approach advocated by the twentieth-century theorist Norbert Elias, this book challenges such a view, drawing on ethnographic research amongst fans to explore the precise nature of the relationship between contemporary English national identity and football fan culture. Examining football fans’ expressions of Englishness in public houses and online spaces, the author discusses the effects of globalization, European integration and UK devolution on English society, revealing that the use of the St George’s Cross does not signal the emergence of a specifically ’English’ national consciousness, but in fact masks a more complex, multi-layered process of national identity construction. A detailed and grounded study of identity, nationalism and globalization amongst football fans, English National Identity and Football Fan Culture will appeal to scholars and students of politics, sociology and anthropology with interests in ethnography, the sociology of sport, fan cultures, globalization and contemporary national identities.

Football, Nationality and the State examines the complex and ever-changing relationship between football (its development and structure), nationality and the state. Divided into two parts the book first deals with the existence of more than one football nation within the same political state. Using international comparisons the authors argue that these divisions may result from football's early history and development, regional movements for independence, or the growth of a language cleavage. The second part of the book goes on to examine the structure of football as an extension, or reflection, of the structure of the state. Resulting structures include the imposition of state socialism on sport, the presence of democratic politics in the organisation of football clubs and the links between big business and football.

Far and away the most popular sport in the world, football has a special place in Middle Eastern societies, and for Middle Eastern states. With Qatar hosting the 2022 FIFA World Cup, this region has been cast into the global footballing spotlight, raising issues of geopolitical competition, consumer culture and social justice. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book examines the complex questions raised by the phenomenon of football as a significant cultural force in the Middle East, as well as its linkages to broader political and socioeconomic processes. The establishment of football as a national sport offers significant insight into the region's historical experiences with colonialism and struggles for independence, as well as the sport's vital role in local and regional politics today-whether at the forefront of popular mobilizations, or as an instrument of authoritarian control. Football has also served as an arena of contestation in the formation of national identity, the struggle for gender equality, and the development of the media landscape. The twelve contributions to this volume draw on extensive engagement with the existing body of literature, and introduce original research questions that promise to open new directions for the study of football in the Middle East.

Is football an athletic contest or a social event? Is it a game of skill, a test of manhood, or merely an organized brawl? Michael Oriard, a former professional player, asks these and other intriguing questions in Reading Football, the first contemporary book about football's formative years. American football began in the 1870s as a game to be played, not watched. Within a brief ten years, it had become a great public spectacle with an immense following, a phenomenon caused primarily by the voluminous commentary about the game conducted in popular newspapers and magazines. Oriard shows how this constant narrative in football's early years developed many different stories about what the game meant: football as pastime, as the sport of gentlemen, as a science, as a game of rules and their infringements. He shows how football became a series of cultural stories about power, luck, strategy, and deception. These different interpretations have been magnified by football's current omnipresence on television. According to Oriard, televised football now plays a cultural role of enormous importance for men, yet within the field of cultural studies the influence of football has been ignored until now. From the book: "A receiver sprints down the sideline, fast and graceful, then breaks toward the middle of the field where a safety waits for him. From forty yards upfield the quarterback releases the ball; it spirals in an elegant arc toward the goalposts as the receiver now for the first time looks back to pick up its flight. The pass is a little high; the receiver leaps, stretches, grasps the ball--barely, fingers clutching--at the very moment that the safety drives a helmet into his unprotected ribs. The force of the collision flings the receiver backward, slamming him to the turf. . . . This familiar tableau, this exemplary moment in a football game, epitomizes the appeal of the sport: the dramatic confrontation of artistry with violence, both equally necessary."

This Handbook offers an analysis of the relation between football and politics, based on over 30 case studies covering five continents. It provides a detailed picture of this relation in a wide number of European, American, African, and Asian states, as well as a comparative assessment of football in a global perspective, thus combining the general and the local. It examines themes such as the political origins of football in the studied country, the historical club rivalries, the political aspects of football as a sports spectacle, and the contemporary issues linked to the political use of football. By following the same structure with each study, the volume allows for the comparison between largely investigated cases and cases that have seldom been addressed. The Handbook will be of use particularly to students and scholars in the fields of sport studies, political science and sociology, as well as cultural studies, anthropology and leisure studies.