This book explores the tradition of left wing political thinking in the culture of fans of professional football in Europe. It sets out to chronicle and celebrate the fraternal, communal and radical tradition of football - seen to best effect in demands for democratic fan ownership and control of clubs, in fan campaigns against racist and fascist mobilisation of football supporters, and in a firm commitment to anti-corporatism. Drawing on the rich and varied traditions of fan cultures across Europe, the book examines how football, as a cultural form, carries with it the possibility of promoting the voices of the disenfranchised and the marginalised, and so the basis for nurturing solidarity against oppression, alienation and exploitation current in modern capitalist society. This book was published as a special issue of Soccer and Society.

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 fans and football culture represent a unique prism through which to view contemporary society and politics. Based on in-depth empirical research into football in Poland, this book examines how fans develop political identities and how those identities can influence the wider political culture. It surveys the turbulent history of Poland in recent decades and explores the dominant right-wing ideology on the terraces, characterised by nationalism, ‘traditional’ values and anti-immigrant sentiment. As one of the first book-length studies of fandom in Eastern Europe, this book makes an important contribution to our understanding of society and politics in post-Communist states. Politics, Ideology and Football Fandom is an important read for students and researchers studying sport, politics and identity, as well as those working in sports studies and political studies covering sociology of sport, globalisation studies, East European politics, ethnic studies, social movements studies, political history and nationalism studies.

This book takes a close look at discrimination in football in order to illuminate our understanding of the interaction between sport and wider society, politics and culture, particularly in terms of the (re)production of identity. It presents insightful and diverse international case studies, including the shadow of fascism in Italian football; fan activism against racism, sexism, and homophobia in US soccer; migrant football clubs in Germany, and the use of football club history in the teaching of antisemitism. Together they demonstrate the damaging societal consequences of unchecked resentment and discrimination in football fan cultures but also the potential for fan activism as a socio-positive force. This is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in football or fandom, the sociology of sport, cultural studies, or political science.

European National football came together in the summer of 2012 for the 14th occasion. This book sets out to examine the enduring social tensions between supporters and authorities, as well as those between local, national and European identities, which formed the backdrop to the 14th staging of the European National football tournament, Euro2012. The context of the tournament was somewhat unique from those staged in previous years, being jointly hosted for the first time by two post-Communist nations still in the process of social and economic transition. In this respect, the decision to stage Euro 2012 in Poland and Ukraine bore its own material and symbolic legacies shaping the tournament: the unsettling of neo-liberal imaginings and emergent ‘East-West’ fears about poor infrastructure, inefficiencies and corruption jostled with moral panics about racism and fears surrounding the potentially unfulfilled consumerist expectations of west European supporters. The book seeks to explore the ideologies and practices invoked by competing national sentiments and examine the social tensions, ambiguities and social capital generating potentials surrounding national, ethnic, European identity, with respect to national football teams, supporters and supporter movements. This book was published as a special issue of Soccer and Society.

This Handbook offers an analysis of the relation between football and politics, based on over 30 case studies covering five continents. It provides a detailed picture of this relation in a wide number of European, American, African, and Asian states, as well as a comparative assessment of football in a global perspective, thus combining the general and the local. It examines themes such as the political origins of football in the studied country, the historical club rivalries, the political aspects of football as a sports spectacle, and the contemporary issues linked to the political use of football. By following the same structure with each study, the volume allows for the comparison between largely investigated cases and cases that have seldom been addressed. The Handbook will be of use particularly to students and scholars in the fields of sport studies, political science and sociology, as well as cultural studies, anthropology and leisure studies.

This volume draws together scholarship across a number of disciplines – history, sociology, media and cultural studies, political science, Slavonic Studies – to examine the significance of the sport of football within Southeastern Europe, with an especial focus on countries of the former Yugoslavia. The volume is timely as there is growing recognition inside and beyond the academy that football is a key cultural site in which the tensions within the region have and continue to be reflected. Important issues such as resurgent nationalism, ethno/religious identity construction, and collective masculine identity are played out in relation to the sport of football. The papers within the volume explore these and other themes in detailed case studies that will be of interest to academics and policy makers concerned with wanting to know more about how football should be considered within agendas focused on reconciliation and a socially inclusive future. This book was published as a special issue of Sport in Society.