Contested Fields

"Few cultural activities speak more powerfully to international histories of the modern world than football (soccer). In the late nineteenth century, this cheap and simple sport emerged as a major legacy of Britain's formal and informal empires. It spread quickly across Europe, South America, and Africa. More slowly and hesitantly, it made inroads into the sports cultures of North America and Australasia. Today, football is arguably the world's most popular pastime, an activity played and watched by millions of people around the globe. It has become the focus of a rich and diverse body of scholarly research. Contested Fields introduces readers to key aspects of the global game, synthesizing research on football's transnational role in reflecting and shaping political, socio-economic, and cultural developments over the past 150 years. Each chapter uses cases studies and cutting-edge scholarship to analyze an important element of football's international story: migration, money, competition, gender, race, space, spectatorship, and confrontation. Interrogating the costs and benefits of the game's controversial path to global pre-eminence, the book shows how and why football matters in the modern world - as a flexible and enduring part of the social fabric, and as a site of political power and resistance."--