This book explores social and political issues and trends emerging around the UEFA European Football Championships. It presents a contemporary sociology of the European Championships which, despite its significance as a mega-event, has been largely overshadowed by the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup in existing literature. At a time when both sport mega-events and Europe are undergoing dramatic transformations, this book explores a range of case studies and important topics such as changing consumption patterns, new types of sport media, social media, environmental policies and emergency politics, public opposition and co-hosting. It also situates the European Championships within wider European projects and discourses of European identities, integration and enlargement. Drawing on data from recent and historical European Championships, and looking ahead to the next tournament in Germany in 2024, this book serves to open up new debates within the sociology of sport and the study of mega-events. It is a timely and ground-breaking text which will resonate with students, academics and readers who are interested in football, the sociology of sport, megaevents, digital sociology, European politics and culture or sports business.

The UEFA European football championship was the first European mega-event to take place in post-socialist Europe. Taking this as a departure point, this volume focuses on football as a realm of constructing and negotiating identities using rich ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth media analysis.

Sport has long been used as a tool for political gain and many major sporting events are now often framed as a panacea to help combat issues such as rising obesity rates, decreasing physical activity levels and wider urban decline. In reality though, fostering a temporary ‘feel-good factor’ is the most that many of these events can ever achieve even though a number are now sold on the popular rhetoric of legacy. Drawing upon a range of events and the work of international scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, this collection offers insights into the ways in which events outside of the big two are (re)positioned as part of the wider sporting landscape. The chapters originally published as a special issue in Sport in Society.

This multivolume set is much more than a collection of essays on sports and sporting cultures from around the world: it also details how and why sports are played wherever they exist, and examines key charismatic athletes from around the world who have transcended their sports. Sports Around the World: History, Culture, and Practice provides a unique, global overview of sports and sports cultures. Unlike most works of this type, this book provides both essays that examine general topics, such as globalization and sport, international relations and sport, and tourism and sport, as well as essays on sports history, culture, and practice in world regions—for example, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, Europe, and Oceania—in order to provide a more global perspective. These essays are followed by entries on specific sports, world athletes, stadiums and arenas, famous games and matches, and major controversies. Spanning topics as varied as modern professional cycling to the fictional movie Rocky to the deadly ball game of the ancient Mayans, the first three volumes contain overview essays and entries for specific sports that have been and are currently practiced around the world. The fourth volume provides a compendium of information on the winners of major sporting competitions from around the world. Readers will gain invaluable insights into how sports have been enjoyed throughout all of human culture, and more fully comprehend their cultural contexts. The entries provide suggestions for further reading on each topic—helpful to general readers, students with school projects, university students and academics alike. Additionally, the four-volume Sports Around the World spotlights key charismatic athletes who have changed a sport or become more than just an outstanding player.

The Historical Dictionary of Soccer presents a comprehensive history of the game through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, numerous appendixes that list everything from the FIFA World Player of the Year to FIFA World Cup Winners and Runners-Up to the UEFA Ch...

This book accounts for over 25 of the most influential cases in international sports law, as written by some of the leading authorities in the area. Authors from Europe, the United States, Australia, South Africa, Canada and New Zealand trace the evolution of this emerging discipline of law through an analysis of individual cases, as discussed under a number of key debates and themes in contemporary sports law, including: the “public” nature of legal disputes in sport; player employment mobility litigation; doping and the spirit of sport; TV rights holding proceedings; and enduring themes in sports law such as on-field violence, spectator safety, animal welfare and gender equality. Valuable for sports law academics, arbitrators and practitioners, sports administrators and governing bodies, but also for students (postgraduate and undergraduate) and all those with an interest in international sports law.

European National football came together in the summer of 2012 for the 14th occasion. This book sets out to examine the enduring social tensions between supporters and authorities, as well as those between local, national and European identities, which formed the backdrop to the 14th staging of the European National football tournament, Euro2012. The context of the tournament was somewhat unique from those staged in previous years, being jointly hosted for the first time by two post-Communist nations still in the process of social and economic transition. In this respect, the decision to stage Euro 2012 in Poland and Ukraine bore its own material and symbolic legacies shaping the tournament: the unsettling of neo-liberal imaginings and emergent ‘East-West’ fears about poor infrastructure, inefficiencies and corruption jostled with moral panics about racism and fears surrounding the potentially unfulfilled consumerist expectations of west European supporters. The book seeks to explore the ideologies and practices invoked by competing national sentiments and examine the social tensions, ambiguities and social capital generating potentials surrounding national, ethnic, European identity, with respect to national football teams, supporters and supporter movements. This book was published as a special issue of Soccer and Society.

The UEFA Euro 2024 qualifying is the process through which 55 European nations compete to qualify for the final tournament. The qualifying process has undergone some changes from previous editions, with a new format being implemented. In this format, all 55 teams will be split into ten groups, with the top two teams of each group automatically qualifying for the final tournament. The third-placed team in each group will proceed to the playoffs, where they will compete for the remaining four spots in the final tournament. The qualifying process will see the introduction of the UEFA Nations League playoff route, which will be used to determine the final four teams that will participate in the tournament. This route involves the 16 highest-ranked teams from the Nations League, who failed to qualify from their respective groups, competing against each other for the final four spots in the tournament. The qualifying process is expected to be highly competitive, with some exciting matches expected to be played. The UEFA Euro 2024 qualifying will be an opportunity for some of the best teams in Europe to showcase their skills and secure their place in the final tournament.

Over the past decade, European football has seen tremendous changes impacting upon its international framework as well as local traditions and national institutions. Processes of Europeanization in the fields of economy and politics provided the background for transformations of the production and consumption of football on a transnational scale. In the course of such rearrangements, football tournaments like the UEFA Championship or the European Champions League turned into mega-events and media spectacles attracting ever-growing audiences. The experience of participating in these events offers some of the very few occasions for the display and embodiment of identities within a European context. This volume takes the 2008 EUROs hosted by Austria and Switzerland as a case study to analyze the political and cultural significance of the tournament from a multidisciplinary angle. What are the special features and spatial arrangements of a UEFAesque Europe, in comparison to alternative possibilities of a Europe? Situating the sport tournament between interpretations of collective European ritual and European spectacle, the key research question will ask what kind of Europe was represented in the cultural, political and economic manifestations of the 2008 EUROs. This book was published as a special issue of Soccer and Society.