Picturing The Beautiful Game

The world's most popular sport, soccer, has long been celebrated as “the beautiful game” for its artistry and aesthetic appeal. Picturing the Beautiful Game: A History of Soccer in Visual Culture and Art is the first collection to examine the rich visual culture of soccer, including the fine arts, design, and mass media. Covering a range of topics related to the game's imagery, this volume investigates the ways soccer has been promoted, commemorated, and contested in visual terms. Throughout various mediums and formats-including illustrated newspapers, modern posters, and contemporary artworks-soccer has come to represent issues relating to identity, politics, and globalization. As the contributors to this collection suggest, these representations of the game reflect society and soccer's place in our collective imagination. Perspectives from a range of fields including art history, sociology, sport history, and media studies enrich the volume, affording a multifaceted visual history of the beautiful game.

From the Oval to the Crystal Palace : the FA Cup Final and its depiction in the Victorian illustrated press / Alexander Leese -- The footballer as the figure of the new man in Italian and Russian avant-garde, 1910s-1930s / Przemysław Strożek -- Imagining reality : critical responses to the commercialization of the beautiful game / Ray Physick.

A powerful, passionate exploration of a game in turmoil Football has never been richer, more hyped, more central to Britain's culture than today. Yet never has it been in greater turmoil. Once, football was about passion, community, beauty. The game celebrated and honoured its past, striving to uphold the values that had made it great. Today, football is about money. Its richest club, Manchester United, earned pound]146 million last year; yet since 1992-34 of the Football League's 72 clubs have been insolvent. The game is in danger of losing its lifeblood - and its soul. David Conn, the game's premier investigative journalist, sets out on a journey through the heart of English football, exploring how our national sport has failed - and who is to blame. Travelling from Highbury's art deco stands to provincial non-league outposts, Conn interviews players, managers, agents, chairmen and fans, building up a picture of a game mired in crisis, from the casino that is today's Premiership all the way down to the lowest leagues. For every all-conquering Manchester United or 'Chelski', there are ten clubs in desperate straits, ready to implode. Along the way, there are new revelations on the Hillsborough tragedy of 1989, where 96 people died because of failures which football has never fully addressed; on the decline and fall of Sheffield Wednesday; and on the formation of the Premier League itself, born from an influx of TV money, bitterly divisive and bitterly regretted. Yet, at its heart, football is a game deeply loved by millions. This is a book for those who keep the faith, who believe that the sport itself, stripped of the greed and self-interest blighting its organisation, still has values, and can still be beautiful.

Cody and the Lions are playing great soccer, even if their team has only eleven players. But the arrival of an international company to build a factory on a nearby lake splits the team in two: Cody and his teammates who are worried the factory will pollute the lake vs. the players whose families will benefit from the jobs and opportunities the company will bring. Cody and his friends decide to organize a marathon soccer game to bring attention to the environmental impact of the factory in the hopes people will put pressure on the town council to vote against it being built. The marathon soccer game tests Cody to the limits of his strength. But it also tests his friendship, teamwork, courage, and faith that he can deal with the emotional effects as well as the physical effects of surviving cancer. Very much a book that can be read on its own, The Beautiful Game is a sequel to David Skuy's highly successful 2013 novel Striker.