Who Killed English Football

"Who Killed English Football?" is the product of personal research born out of a mixture of curiosity and frustration. This book was prompted by the inexorable decline of English football performance at European and World Cup events. Analysing the causes of such deterioration, simple but worrying truths are unearthed and laid bare. Club vs Country rivalry, a surfeit of money, a chimaera-like governance, "embedded" media and a foreign player invasion are all contributors to the slow death of the "beautiful game". There might be a glimmer of hope ... provided reality is acknowledged and palliative remedies introduced.

This book explores how recent football fiction has negotiated the decisive political developments in English football after the 1989/90 publication of the 'Taylor Report'. A direct response to the 1989 Hillsborough Disaster and growing concerns of hooliganism, the 'Taylor Report' suggested a number of measures for stricter regulation of fan crowds. In consequence, stadiums in the top divisions were turned into all-seated venues and were put under CCTV surveillance. The implementation of these measures reduced violent incidents drastically, but it also led to an unparalleled increase in ticket prices, which in turn significantly altered the demographics of the crowd. This development, which also enabled football's entry into other mainstream cultural forms, changed the game decisively. Piskurek traces patterns across prose and film to detect how these fictions have responded to the changed circumstances of post-Taylor football. Lending a cultural lens to these political changes, this book is pioneering in its analysis of football fiction as a whole, offering a fresh perspective to a range of scholars and students interested in cultural studies, sociology, leisure and politics.

Football Rage! follows in the footsteps of Football Mad! and Football Wild! and concludes the Football Satires Trilogy. Following the abysmal efforts of Team England at the last Football World Cup, a wave of protests has taken the football fraternity by surprise. Excess is no longer acceptable at a time of austerity and the fans are claiming their forgotten right to exercise some control over their favourite team. The demise of the old regime sends political tremors and plots abound at the very heart of Football governance as well as in the media circus. Change is in the air, sometimes welcome, often feared.

Soccer has long been known as 'the beautiful game'. This multi-disciplinary volume explores soccer, soccer culture, and the representation of soccer in art, film, and literature, using the critical tools of aesthetics, poetics, and rhetoric. Including international contributions from scholars of philosophy, literary and cultural studies, linguistics, art history, and the creative arts, this book begins by investigating the relationship between beauty and soccer and asks what criteria should be used to judge the sport’s aesthetic value. Covering topics as diverse as humor, national identity, style, celebrity, and social media, its chapters examine the nature of fandom, the role of language, and the significance of soccer in contemporary popular culture. It also discusses what one might call the ‘stylistics’ of soccer, analyzing how players, fans, and commentators communicate on and off the pitch, in the press, on social media, and in wider public discourse. The Aesthetics, Poetics, and Rhetoric of Soccer makes for fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in sport, culture, literature, philosophy, linguistics, and society.

This reference work aims to provide sports enthusiasts, journalists, librarians, students and scholars with an authorative source of information on a comprehensive range of subjects covering the history and organization of football in Britain. Over 250 entries focus on key organisations or individuals, famous clubs, major competitions, events, venues and incidents, institutions and organisations as well as key issues such as gender, racism, commercialization, professionalism and drugs, alcohol and football.

This book explores social mechanisms that drive network change and link them to computationally sound models of changing structure to detect patterns. This text identifies the social processes generating these networks and how networks have evolved. Reviews: "this book is easy to read and entertaining, and much can be learned from it. Even if you know just about everything about large-scale and temporal networks, the book is a worthwhile read; you will learn a lot about SNA literature, patents, the US Supreme Court, and European soccer." (Social Networks) "a clear and accessible textbook, balancing symbolic maths, code, and visual explanations. The authors’ enthusiasm for the subject matter makes it enjoyable to read" (JASSS)

The British have been involved in numerous wars since the Middle Ages. Many, if not all, of these wars have been re-constructed in historical accounts, in the media and in the arts, and have thus kept the nation's cultural memory of its wars alive. Wars have influenced the cultural construction and reconstruction not only of national identities in Britain; personal, communal, gender and ethnic identities have also been established, shaped, reinterpreted and questioned in times of war and through its representations. Coming from Literary, Film and Cultural Studies, History and Art History, the contributions in this multidisciplinary volume explore how different cultural communities in the British Isles have envisaged war and its significance for various aspects of identity-formation, from the Middle Ages through to the 20th century.

World football has undergone unprecedented change over the past decade. On the field, the richest European clubs have retained their pre-eminence, but with multinational playing squads backed up by global marketing industries. Club ownership rests increasingly with impersonal shareholders, rather than local business figures. Domestic and international football competitions are being transformed by the financial power of the mass media. The world's top players are paid far more than their peers from previous eras. This volume covers a wide range of topical issues which football players, fans and administrators will have to confront in the years to come.