The Invention Of The Beautiful Game

Rediscovering soccer's long history in the U.S. Across North America, native peoples and colonists alike played a variety of kicking games long before soccer's emergence in the late 1800s. Brian D. Bunk examines the development and social impact of these sports through the rise of professional soccer after World War I. As he shows, the various games called football gave women an outlet as athletes and encouraged men to form social bonds based on educational experience, occupation, ethnic identity, or military service. Football also followed young people to college as higher education expanded in the nineteenth century. University play, along with the arrival of immigrants from the British Isles, helped spark the creation of organized soccer in the United States—and the beautiful game's transformation into a truly international sport. A multilayered look at one game’s place in American life, From Football to Soccer refutes the notion of the U.S. as a land outside of football history.

“Beautifully researched and engagingly told, this book captures the bitter conflicts and surprising continuities that marked the emergence of a national style in Brazil as it tells the story of the men and women who, despite their many differences, together created ‘the beautiful game.’”—Roger Kittleson, author of The Country of Football: Soccer and the Making of Modern Brazil “Compellingly shows how each segment of Brazilian society—players, club owners, and spectators, especially the usually neglected female fans—was touched by the sport that it eventually came to proudly embrace as its own.”—Amy Chazkel, coeditor of The Rio de Janeiro Reader: History, Culture, Politics “Highlights the narrative power of soccer, showing how Brazilians—from elite sportsmen and nationalist intellectuals to common men and women—infused the sport with both personal and national importance.”—Joshua Nadel, author of Fútbol!: Why Soccer Matters in Latin America Although the popular history of Brazilian football narrates a story of progress toward democracy and inclusion, it does not match the actual historical record. Instead, football can be understood as an invention of early twentieth century middle-class and wealthy Brazilians who called themselves “sportsmen” and nationalists, and used the sport as part of their larger campaigns to shape and reshape the nation. In this cross-cutting cultural history, Gregg Bocketti traces the origins of football in Brazil from its elitist, Eurocentric identity as “foot-ball” at the end of the nineteenth century to its subsequent mythologization as the specifically Brazilian “futebol,” o jogo bonito (the beautiful game). Bocketti examines the popular depictions of the sport as having evolved from a white elite pastime to an integral part of Brazil’s national identity known for its passion and creativity, and concludes that these mythologized narratives have obscured many of the complexities and the continuities of the history of football and of Brazil. Mining a rich trove of sources, including contemporary sports journalism, archives of Brazilian soccer clubs, and British ministry records, and looking in detail at soccer’s effect on all parts of Brazilian society, Bocketti shows how important the sport is to an understanding of Brazilian nationalism and nation building in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In this cross-cutting cultural history, Gregg Bocketti traces the origins of soccer in Brazil from its elitist, Eurocentric identity as 'football' at the end of the 19th century to its subsequent mythologization as the specifically Brazilian 'futebol', o jogo bonito (the beautiful game).

"In time for Brazil's hosting of the 2014 World Cup, this book uses the stories of star players and other key figures (based on over 40 interviews) to create a contemporary history of Brazilian soccer from the 1950s to the present. It also explores race and class tensions in Brazil and shows how soccer is central to the country's dramatic trajectory toward modernity and economic power"--

The first book to use the world's most popular sport to test economic theories and document novel human behavior A wealth of research in recent decades has seen the economic approach to human behavior extended over many areas previously considered to belong to sociology, political science, law, and other fields. Research has also shown that economics can provide insight into many aspects of sports, including soccer. Beautiful Game Theory is the first book that uses soccer to test economic theories and document novel human behavior. In this brilliant and entertaining book, Ignacio Palacios-Huerta illuminates economics through the world's most popular sport. He offers unique and often startling insights into game theory and microeconomics, covering topics such as mixed strategies, discrimination, incentives, and human preferences. He also looks at finance, experimental economics, behavioral economics, and neuroeconomics. Soccer provides rich data sets and environments that shed light on universal economic principles in interesting and useful ways. Essential reading for students, researchers, and sports enthusiasts, Beautiful Game Theory is the first book to show what soccer can do for economics.

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.

Just in time for the 2018 World Cup, a lively and lyrical guide to appreciating the drama of soccer Soccer is not only the world's most popular sport; it's also one of the most widely shared forms of global culture. The Language of the Game is a passionate and engaging introduction to soccer's history, tactics, and human drama. Profiling soccer's full cast of characters--goalies and position players, referees and managers, commentators and fans--historian and soccer scholar Laurent Dubois describes how the game's low scores, relentless motion, and spectacular individual performances combine to turn each match into a unique and unpredictable story. He also shows how soccer's global reach makes it an unparalleled theater for nationalism, international conflict, and human interconnectedness. Filled with perceptive insights and stories both legendary and little known, The Language of the Game is a rewarding read for anyone seeking to understand soccer better.

Football’s consolidation as the world’s most popular sport is the result of both the inherent attributes of the game, that is, its simplicity and universality, as well as the historical processes that have contributed to the expansion of this sport throughout time. Although the game has undergone very little structural transformation in the last decades, one of most notable developments in the world of football has taken place in the new application of the sport as a tool for social change. This has generated a true global social movement encompassing a multitude of actors such as national governments, the private sector, international organizations and NGOs, around the issue of development and peace through sport. With this background, the purpose of this book is two-fold: 1) Provide an overview of the history, evolution and global expansion of football, 2) bring to light the recent transformation experienced by the game as a social movement and as an agent of community change. This part includes the grassroots project “Goals for Peace” in Colombia and the Philippines, which aims at assessing the ways and extent to which this sport can be a transformative tool.