The FIFA World Cup isn’t only about football. It’s about people and their emotions, about places and their vibes. Reporters covering this event get the chance of a lifetime to soak in the atmosphere and tell a tale worth remembering. But when the deadline is looming under challenging circumstances every day, churning out a light-hearted piece is no laughing matter.

This is not a book about football. Well, it is, in a sense, but it's also a book about overcoming the odds. About being rejected from the sporting mainstream, but fighting back. About training for an international tournament with only a single ball. It's about representing one country, but being forced to live your life in another. About finding sporting representation as a rank outsider; overcoming political superpowers to find a place. It's about scrambling a team together in a few weeks to represent millions of people, or fronting a multi-continental organization on a near-bankrupt shoestring because it's that important to your indigenous reindeer-herding Scandinavian ethnic minority that they have their own global, international outlet. Those last two paragraphs probably sound like hyperbole. I couldn't quite believe it either, but every word of them is real. Follow me on a journey down a footballing rabbit hole, where sport and politics mingle in glorious, positive harmony. This is CONIFA

Soccer, the most popular mass spectator sport in the world, has long been a site which articulates the complexities and diversities of the everyday life of the nation. The imaging and prioritization of the game as a ‘national’ or an ‘international’ event in public opinion and the media also play a critical role in transforming the soccer culture of a nation. In this context, the FIFA World Cup remains the grand spectacle for asserting the identity of the nation. This book intends to offer eclectic perspectives and discourses on the FIFA World Cup, and to throw light on the changing dimensions of football and sports culture in terms of identity, race, ethnicity, gender, fandom, governance, and so on. On the one hand, it focuses on the significance of the FIFA World Cup for nations in terms of hosting, performance, playing style, and identity formation. On the other, it looks beyond the World Cup to highlight the growing importance of a host of perspectives in sport in general and football in particular with reference to art, fandom, gender, media, and governance. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

Although soccer had long been the world’s game when Michael J. Agovino first encountered it in 1982, here it was just a poor cousin to American football, to be found on obscure UHF channels and in foreign magazines. But as Agovino himself passionately pursued soccer, Americans got wise and turned it into one of the most popular sports in the country. Agovino’s love affair with soccer is a portrait of the game’s culture and an intimate history of the sport’s coming of age in the United States. Agovino’s quest takes him from the unkempt field in the Bronx where he taught himself to play to some of the sport’s most storied venues and historic matches. With Agovino we travel from school fields to Giants Stadium, then from England to Germany, Italy, and Spain, along the way taking in the final days of the North American Soccer League, the 1994 World Cup, and the birth of Major League Soccer. Offering the perspective of fan, player, and journalist, Agovino chronicles his obsession with the sport and its phenomenal evolution.

He barely remembers his dad. She’s all about community. Can he let go of anger and harvest a passionate new life with a sweet country girl? Brisbane, Australia. Justin Wheeler wishes it was just another ordinary day. Living with his mum after her marriage fell apart, the listless software developer grew up without a phone call, a birthday card, or even a letter from his birth father. So when the man dies and bequeaths him his rural dairy farm on the Sunshine Coast, the bitter young man reluctantly attends the funeral, intending to liquidate the property. Freya Montgomery brought her college know-how back home. Intelligent and capable, the determined marketing pro hopes to nurture her agricultural township while keeping the handsome son of a deceased neighbor from selling out to a developer. And when their instant attraction leads to a meeting with her family to discuss a possible lease, the optimistic beauty can’t help but hope she can convince the smartly dressed stranger to stay. Stunned when he falls head-over-heels for the vibrant farmgirl, Justin fears he may break her heart after he receives the perfect offer for the land. And though Freya is sure their chemistry is real, the sunny young woman worries the dark clouds of his simmering resentment at his late dad will leave her out in the cold. Will the pair’s passion survive and flourish on the milk of human kindness? The Dairy Farmer's Daughter is the feel-good first book in the Heart of the Hinterland contemporary romance series. If you like fish-out-of-water heroes, opposites attract, and plenty of steam, you’ll adore Sarah Williams’s small-town tale. Buy The Dairy Farmer's Daughter to inherit happiness today!

This book explores the 2018 Men's Football World Cup in Russia through a comparison of the host cities of Ekaterinburg and Volgograd - two major but peripheral cities little discussed outside of Russia. It unpacks the World Cup at multiple scales of analysis, from global political economic processes, Russian national state spatial strategies, uneven municipal developments, the creation and distribution of soft power narratives to the domestic audience, and varieties of adoption or refusal of those narratives among host city residents. In so doing, the book offers a light and revisable framework for understanding mega-events regardless of national context.

EDRISTI CURRENT AFFAIRS Q & A _ YEARLY 2018