Mediated Football

Football has become one of the most mediated cultural practices in modern Western societies, providing players, officials and spectators with implicit and often hidden discourses about race/ethnicity, national identity and gender. This book provides new and critical insights into how mediated football as a contested cultural practice influences, and is influenced by, discourses and stereotypes about race/ethnicity, nation and gender that operate at the local, national and global level. It analyzes both contemporary media representations and the ways these representations are negotiated, interpreted and used by football media audiences. These issues are explored across all media genres (print media, television, online, social media, film, and so forth) in a multidisciplinary and cross-cultural manner, with contributions from diverse disciplines and countries. This book was originally published as a special issue of Soccer and Society.

Based on long-term and detailed ethnographic research, this book uses Malta as a critical case study to explore the dynamics of contemporary football. Examining Maltese football in the context of the island's unique politics, culture and national identity, the book sheds light upon both Maltese society and on broader processes, both local and global, within the international game.

American football and postmodernist theory are both objects of popular and scholarly interest that reveal remarkable sociological insights. Analysis of media-driven commercial football documents how narratives of sportsmanship/brutality, heroism/antiheroism, athleticism/self-indulgence, honor/chicanery, and chivalry/sexism compete and thrive.

Football has emerged as an important symbolic field through which various social, cultural, political, economic, and historical dimensions and antagonisms are negotiated. This volume covers a variety of themes illuminating the multiple ways that football impacts on people's everyday lives. Using anthropological research methods and data collected from ethnographic fieldwork, the contributors scrutinize not only the social fields of football fans and the specific socio-cultural contexts in which they are embedded, but also other actors beyond the pitch, and the possibilities for both agency and subversion. Taking into account processes of Europeanization, globalization, commercialization and migration, the collection offers fresh insights into fan identity formations and practices and highlights the importance of anthropology's self-reflexive and actor-centred perspective.

This volume draws upon social science and historical approaches to provide insights into the world of women’s football and female fans. It gives an in-depth analysis of the development of the women’s game in different European countries and examines the experiences of female fans. An overview about women’s football in Europe shows the rise and development of the game and the increasing inclusion of girls and women in football and fan communities. To date, there has been a lack of research on female participation in football, but drawing on research studies from various European countries, the volume explores a range of issues, including how girls and women become football fans and players, how women combine football with their everyday lives, and how they may encounter stereotypes and barriers when they challenge male dominance by entering this traditionally male sport. This collection will be of interest to students and scholars in a range of fields, including sports sociology, sport sciences, gender studies, leisure studies, women’s studies as well as fandom and cultural studies.

This book presents a kaleidoscopic view of the multidisciplinary field of research developed within Brazilian social sciences to study football as a major cultural and social phenomenon in the country. As a contributed volume, it brings together chapters authored by researchers from different disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, political science, history, geography, economy, communication studies and physical education, who contributed to make Brazilian football a multifaceted object of study for the human and social sciences. The book is divided in four parts. The first two parts are dedicated to the "classic" areas, in which the best known research lines are concentrated: part one focuses on politics and history, while part two is dedicated to sociology and anthropology. The third part brings together studies from other four different areas: communication studies, geography, economy and physical education. The fourth part is organized not by disciplines, but around transversal themes, such as gender, violence, fans and racism. The varied approaches and different interpretations brought together in this book seek to provide an overview of the fertile academic debate that has stimulated the renewal of scientific research on football in Brazil, which makes Football and Social Sciences in Brazil a useful resource for researchers from different disciplines within the human and social sciences interested in the study of football as major cultural and social phenomenon all over the world.

Recent decades have seen a fundamental change and transformation in the commercialisation and popularisation of sports and sporting events. Corpus Approaches to the Language of Sports uses corpus resources to offer new perspectives on the language and discourse of this increasingly popular and culturally significant area of research. Bringing together a range of empirical studies from leading scholars, this book bridges the gap between quantitative corpus approaches and more qualitative, multimodal discourse methods. Covering a wide range of sports, including football, cycling and basketball, the linguistic aspects of sports language are analysed across different genres and contexts. Highlighting the importance of studying the language of sports alongside its accompanying audio-visual modes of communication, chapters draw on new digitised collections of language to fully describe and understand the complexities of communication through various channels. In doing so, Corpus Approaches to the Language of Sports not only offers exciting new insights into the language of sports but also extends the scope of corpus linguistics beyond traditional monomodal approaches to put multimodality firmly on the agenda.

The 2010 South African World Cup launched African football onto the global stage. This volume brings together top scholars on African football to explore a range of issues such as gender, identity, nationalism, history, cyber-fandom, the media and fan radicalization.