The 2010 World Cup will be the first ever held on the continent of Africa. This book features introductory essays on the cultural importance of soccer, the World cup, this tournament in particular, and on African soccer. The book contains an introductory essay, table, analysis of team players, coach, history, flag, foods, and uniforms for each of the 32 teams.

Africa’s World Cup: Critical Reflections on Play, Patriotism, Spectatorship, and Space focuses on a remarkable month in the modern history of Africa and in the global history of football. Peter Alegi and Chris Bolsmann are well-known experts on South African football, and they have assembled an impressive team of local and international journalists, academics, and football experts to reflect on the 2010 World Cup and its broader significance, its meanings, complexities, and contradictions. The World Cup’s sounds, sights, and aesthetics are explored, along with questions of patriotism, nationalism, and spectatorship in Africa and around the world. Experts on urban design and communities write on how the presence of the World Cup worked to refashion urban spaces and negotiate the local struggles in the hosting cities. The volume is richly illustrated by authors’ photographs, and the essays in this volume feature chronicles of match day experiences; travelogues; ethnographies of fan cultures; analyses of print, broadcast, and electronic media coverage of the tournament; reflections on the World Cup’s private and public spaces; football exhibits in South African museums; and critiques of the World Cup’s processes of inclusion and exclusion, as well as its political and economic legacies. The volume concludes with a forum on the World Cup, including Thabo Dladla, Director of Soccer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Mohlomi Kekeletso Maubane, a well-known Soweto-based writer and a soccer researcher, and Rodney Reiners, former professional footballer and current chief soccer writer for the Cape Argus newspaper in Cape Town. This collection will appeal to students, scholars, journalists, and fans. Cover illustration: South African fan blowing his vuvuzela at South Africa vs. France, Free State Stadium, Bloemfontein, June 22, 2010. Photo by Chris Bolsmann.

Introduces the host nation, teams, players, and stadiums of the 2010 World Cup championship.

This text presents a comprehensive preview of football's greatest tournament. It is packed with photographs and expert analysis of each team, its star players and its prospects in the finals. It also features a guide to each of the stadiums and host cities.

This edited volume addresses key debates around African football, identity construction, fan cultures, and both African and global media narratives. Using the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa as a lens, it explores how football in Africa is intimately bound up with deeper social, cultural and political currents.

Written in an informative yet accessible style to appeal to young readers, this fun-packed guide is bursting with features on the tournament's teams, star players, stadiums and cities, and contains all that young fans need to know about the World Cup. Bursting with 100 amazing action-packed photos, this fantastic book includes a preview of the 2010 FIFA World Cup as well as profiles of all of the tournament's star players. Fill-in the progress chart and solve the many fun puzzles and quizzes all based around the World Cup.

This groundbreaking book provides a critically informed analysis of the impact and legacy of mega-sporting events through the lens of South Africa's 2010 FIFA Soccer World Cup and its associated developmental paradigm. It challenges mainstream thinking and mega-event praise singers by providing concrete evidence to show that this sporting spectacular was little more than a front for massive accumulation and extraction of wealth, alongside increased sporting and socio-economic inequality. Contributors to this volume examine the sports accumulation-complex, economic promises, construction companies, trade unions, strikes, international solidarity, the struggle to trade, sex work, climate change, as well as case studies on the building of individual soccer stadiums. Eddie Cottle is the regional policy and campaign officer of the Building and Wood Workers' international (BWI) for Africa and the Middle East. This is a timely reminder that the 2010 World Cup nation-building illusion in fact disguised a reality of greed, elite enrichment and nepotism - and left us with a terrible financial hangover.' Terry Bell, columnist at Independent Newspapers, Business Report, and independent economic/labour analyst Book jacket.