You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book examines the deep connections between football and politics, and explains what those relationships can tell us about sport and wider society. With the game occupying a preeminent place on the world sporting stage, this book argues that the political significance of football has never been greater. The book explores the politics of football governance and the international organisations that run the game, as well as the interaction of footballing authorities with government at all levels. It shows how football clubs and supporter groups have leaned left - such as FC Sankt Pauli - or right – such as SS Lazio – and have been significant voices in secessionist debates and the promotion of religious identities and ethno-centrism, and how football has been used by fascist and communist regimes to project political ideology. The book also considers key contemporary political issues in football, such as surveillance, discrimination, and human rights. This is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in football, in the politics or sociology of sport, in international relations, government or political ideology, or in the intersection of politics and culture.
This book explores the meanings, significances, and impacts of the complex identities that soccer fans, especially those of men's soccer, represent worldwide. The chapters in this volume construct and reconstruct fandom in terms of diverse fan affiliations from local to global level, and from national to transnational spaces. Soccer or (association) football is a game where fans come alive with one goal. It is soccer’s fanbase that has made it the most popular mass spectator sport in the world. Since the sport’s growth and its codification in the late nineteenth century, soccer and its followers became markers of varied identities. This volume is an attempt to understand the soccer fanâ€...
In The World at Your Feet: One Man's Search for the Soul of the Beautiful Game, Tim Hartley takes us on a footballing world tour. We meet fans in Hong Kong who refuse to bow to China, help clear the goats off a pitch in Africa and kick off the chanting at a bizarre game in North Korea. Back home, Hartley visits all 92 Premier and Football League grounds and watches a prisoners' team desperate to play a competitive match. Using wry observation and detailed research, The World at Your Feet unfurls the good, the bad and the ugly of football. It is brutally honest, informative and often very funny. This is a rough guide with a difference. The power of football across the world is put in the balance and measured, its successes raised up, its failings laid bare. Hartley rails against the excesses of professional football but he never loses faith and through his travels he finds the soul of the game is still alive and kicking. If you want a global health check of the game we sometimes struggle to love, then you really need The World at Your Feet.
The Netherlands has been one of the world's most distinctive and sophisticated football cultures. From the birth of Total Football in the sixties, through two decades of World Cup near misses to the exiles who remade clubs like AC Milan, Barcelona, Arsenal and Chelsea in their own image, the Dutch have often been dazzlingly original and influential. The elements of their style (exquisite skills, adventurous attacking tactics, a unique blend of individual creativity and teamwork, weird patterns of self-destruction) reflect and embody the country's culture and history. This book lays bare the elegant, fractured soul of the Dutch Masters and the culture that spawned them by exploring and analysing its key ideas, institutions, personalities and history in the context of wider Dutch society.
FC Sankt Pauli - the football club in the red-light district of Hamburg; a transvestite chairman; terraces populated by punks, pimps and prostitutes; a club run by anarchists, united under the skull and crossbones flag. This is the cliché that has been lazily peddled, one which attracts clueless stag parties from the Reeperbahn to the Millerntor stadium. But it's not the real St Pauli. In Pirates, Punks & Politics author Nick Davidson puts the record straight, intermingling the history of FC St. Pauli, and the district it represents, with an account of his own involvement with the club. Back in 2007 Davidson travelled with his father to watch his first game at the Millerntor. What he found ...
WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION Chosen as a Book of the Year by New Statesman, Financial Times, Guardian, Observer, Rough Trade and the BBC Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize Longlisted for the Jhalak Prize 'Restlessly inventive, brutally graceful, startlingly beautiful ... a landmark debut' Guardian 'Oh my God, he's just stirring me. Destroying me' Michaela Coel 'A poet of truth and rage, heartbreak and joy' Max Porter 'Takes us into new literary territory ... impressive' Bernardine Evaristo, New Statesman (Books of the Year) 'It's simply stunning. Every image is a revelation' Terrance Hayes What is it like to grow up in a place where the same police officer who...
None
You can see them, but you don't know them. Ultras are football fans like no others. A hugely visible and controversial part of the global game, their credo and aesthetic replicated in almost every league everywhere on earth, a global movement of extreme fandom and politics is also one of the largest youth movements in the world. Yet they remain unknown: an anti-establishment force that is transforming both football and politics. In this book, James Montague goes underground to uncover the true face of this dissident force for the first time. 1312: Among the Ultras tells the story of how the movement began and how it grew to become the global phenomenon that now dominates the stadiums from the Balkans and Buenos Aires. With unprecedented insider access, the book investigates how ultras have grown into a fiercely political movement, embracing extremes on both the left and right; fighting against the commercialisation of football and society – and against the attempts to control them by the authorities, who both covet and fear their power.
From German unification to the birth of the Bundesliga and beyond, this book tells the history of Germany's cult football club and its famously left wing fan base.
Kicks, Spits, and Headers documents two years of football by a self-proclaimed accidental footballer. Coming of age during the student and worker revolt of the 1960s-1970s, the Italian 'hot autumn, ' Paolo Sollier brought these countercultural energies and Marxist politics on to the football pitch, inadvertently becoming an icon along the way. Here he describes, in lucid and humorous prose, the challenges of trying make sense of and balance the tensions and contradictions between being a professional footballer and a political militant