This book delves into the complex, yet fascinating evolution of football. From a relatively unruly mob game played on festival days, the game was adopted, codified and 'civilised' by the major English Public Schools and then diffused into the wider society to become a codified, modern sports-form. The birth of the Football Association in 1863 in London provided compromise rules, enabling teams geographically divided by distance and football's differing interpretations to oppose each other, which marked a pivotal moment for the sport. Thereon, history records the establishment of the FA Cup, football's internationalisation, the advent of professionalism and, perhaps finally, the establishment of a national league structure, all of these developments originally taking place in the British Isles. Within this multifaceted framework, eminent sociologists and historians have attempted to wrestle with these processes. As a result, over the past two decades, researchers and academics have reached the conclusion that, although a solid grounding in the macro-history of football is required, testing the existing hypotheses and questions in the early development of the game is best explored by drilling down deeply into local studies using a micro-historical approach. Consequently, many of the chapters included in this book, on Staffordshire, Norfolk, London, Sheffield, East Lancashire, Rugby School, follow this methodology. This book is an essential read for students, scholars and academics of sports studies, history, sociology, development and management, as well as an engrossing read for anyone interested in the early history of football. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Soccer & Society.

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World football is in crisis. The corruption scandal engulfing FIFA is arguably the biggest story in the history of modern sport and a watershed for sport governance. More than a decade ago, John Sugden and Alan Tomlinson laid the foundations for subsequent investigations with the publication of Badfellas, a groundbreaking work of critical sport sociology that exposed the systematic corruption at the heart of world football. It was a book that FIFA and Sepp Blatter tried to ban. Now re-issued to combine the original contents of Badfellas with new chapters covering the current crisis, this book points to the ways in which FIFA’s new administration can learn from the Blatter story. The prequel traces the course of Sugden and Tomlinson’s game-changing investigation into FIFA, while the sequel updates the FIFA story from 2002 onwards and provides a chronology of crises and scandals within the FIFA narrative. Demonstrating the vital importance of critical investigative methods in sport studies, Football, Corruption and Lies: Revisiting Badfellas, the book FIFA tried to ban is essential reading for anybody looking to understand Blatter’s rise and fall.

George Plimpton's follow-up to Paper Lion, one of his personal favorites among his classic books -- repackaged and including a foreword from Steve Almond and never-before-seen content from the Plimpton archives. In Mad Ducks and Bears, George Plimpton's engaging companion to Paper Lion, Plimpton focuses on two of the most entertaining and roguish linemen and former teammates -- Alex Karras ("Mad Ducks") and John Gordy ("Bears"), both of whom went on to achieve brilliant post-football success. A more reflective, less madcap book than Plimpton's other work, Mad Ducks and Bears is no less truthful and searching. In this fond exploration of football's values and follies, Plimpton rejoins his two teammates to discuss their careers in this brutal but captivating game. The result is an astute exploration into the fascinating lives and motivations of the players at home, in the locker room, and on the field.

In The Turning Season, Michael Wagg goes in search of hidden histories and footballing ghosts from before the fall of the Berlin Wall. He revisits the 14 clubs that made up the 1989 DDR-Oberliga, East Germany's top flight. From Aue in the Erzgebirge mountains to Rostock on the Baltic Sea, this quirky account of his whistle-stop tour is for fans who know that football clubs are the beating hearts of the places they play for. There are portraits of the lower levels as well as the big league, stories of then and now that celebrate the characters he met pitch-side. There's Mr Schmidt, who's found a magical fix for the scoreboard at Stahl Brandenburg; Karl Dr&össler, who captained Lokomotive Leipzig against Eusebio's Benfica; and the heroes of Magdeburg's European triumph, last seen dancing in white bath robes, now pulling in to a dusty car park by the River Elbe. The Turning Season turns its gaze on East German football's magnificent peculiarity, with 14 enchanting stories from a lost league in a country that disappeared.

Association football is the richest, most popular sport in history with a multicultural global following. It is also riven with corruption, racism, homophobia and a violence that has for decades resisted all attempts to tame it. Cashmore and Cleland examine football's dark side: the unpleasant, sleazy and downright nasty aspects of the sport.

This ambitious and fascinating history considers why, in the space of sixty years between 1850 and 1910, football grew from a marginal and unorganised activity to become the dominant winter entertainment for millions of people around the world. The book explores how the world’s football codes - soccer, rugby league, rugby union, American, Australian, Canadian and Gaelic - developed as part of the commercialised leisure industry in the nineteenth century. Football, however and wherever it was played, was a product of the second industrial revolution, the rise of the mass media, and the spirit of the age of the masses. Important reading for students of sports studies, history, sociology, development and management, this book is also a valuable resource for scholars and academics involved in the study of football in all its forms, as well as an engrossing read for anyone interested in the early history of football.