Football, in many ways, is a visual endeavour. From the visual experience within the stadium itself to worldwide media representations, from advertisements to football art and artefacts: football is much about seeing and being seen, about watching, making visual and being visualised. The FIFA World Cup 2010 in South Africa has turned into a perfect example of the visual dimensions of football. Stadiums have been built and marketed as tourist attractions, mass media and internet platforms are advertising South African cities and venues, logos and emblems are displayed and celebrated, exhibitions are organised in museums world-wide. This book explores the social, cultural and political role of football in Africa by focusing on the issue of its visibility and invisibility. The contributions consider the history and present of football in different parts of Africa. They examine historical and recent pictures and images of football and football players, as well as places and spaces of their production and perception. They analyse the visual dimensions expressed in sports infrastructure, football media-scapes, and in expressive and material arts. This book thus contributes to the growing interest in football in Africa by exploring a new field of research into sports. This book was previously published as a special issue of Soccer and Society.

The spread of COVID-19 and the consequent pandemic since early 2020 have brought about unprecedented changes in all spheres of global life, creating a new sense of (in)security with social distancing, physical isolation, quarantine and lockdown becoming buzzwords to combat the disease. As in all spheres of life, the first wave of the pandemic posed serious challenges to the world of soccer, with diverse and intriguing responses across the globe. This book documents the early impressions and initial responses of various stakeholders of the soccer world to the challenges of COVID-19 in 2020. It reveals how the process of confrontation, negotiation, adjustment and overcoming against such challenges necessitated and inspired novel responses and strong improvisations from soccer bodies to players, referees to spectators, and journalists to sponsors. This process has revealed abrupt as well as radical changes in the organization, rules, spectatorship and telecast of the game, thereby affecting the game’s cultural dimensions, commercial prospects and political implications. The volume points out that the way soccer has adjusted to the ‘new normal’ standard of the ‘COVID Regime’ has elicited newer meanings and nuanced representations of the game. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Soccer & Society.

This book explores various aspects of intranational elite football in Africa, drawing on the expertise of notable scholars from across the world. Africa’s Elite Football focuses on an area largely ignored by current scholarship on African football, where interest has focused on international migration. In exploring the intranational, the book is written in two parts. The first is a general focus on the continent, and the second is an examination of country cases. The general focus of the book is on the nature of elite tier leagues, the relationship between politics and football, the media, youth academies, intranational migration and fans. Notably, chapters on topics such as intranational migration present groundbreaking scholarship in this area. Currently, football discourses on migration focus on international migration of footballers, yet the majority of migration in African football is intranational. Thus, by addressing the intranational, this book brings attention to an area that is underrepresented in the current academic discourse. The second part of the book, which focuses on country cases, covers Botswana, Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The topics explored in those cases include religiosity, health, women’s football, media and management. The coverage of health-related issues is particularly important given that several books on African football rarely broach such a topic. With its unique approach to African football, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of sports history, African studies, politics in sports and African sports.

Two leading sports authorities explore the culture of soccer around the world, considering the sport as a means to better understand a society's past, present, and future. How popular is soccer worldwide? Here's one indicator: 3.2 billion people—nearly half of the planet's population—tuned in to watch the 2010 World Cup on television. Soccer matches attract a gargantuan number of fans from around the globe due to the popularity of the sport itself but also because of the nationalism it inspires and the entertainment spectacle of the big games. Distinguished authors and sports authorities, Charles Parrish and John Nauright, examine how soccer impacts societies worldwide by shaping national identities, providing common ground for diplomatic issues, and forging economic and social development. This one-volume geographic guide studies the places in which soccer has a major impact, examining each region's teams, major tournaments, key players, and international performance. The authors organize the book geographically by region and country, with entries reviewing the history of the sport and cultural impact on the area. Each profile concludes with fascinating game-based statistics, such as winners of major tournaments and top goal scorers. The book covers 20 countries including England, Brazil, Egypt, the United States, Cameroon, and Korea.

The world's most popular sport, soccer, has long been celebrated as “the beautiful game” for its artistry and aesthetic appeal. Picturing the Beautiful Game: A History of Soccer in Visual Culture and Art is the first collection to examine the rich visual culture of soccer, including the fine arts, design, and mass media. Covering a range of topics related to the game's imagery, this volume investigates the ways soccer has been promoted, commemorated, and contested in visual terms. Throughout various mediums and formats-including illustrated newspapers, modern posters, and contemporary artworks-soccer has come to represent issues relating to identity, politics, and globalization. As the contributors to this collection suggest, these representations of the game reflect society and soccer's place in our collective imagination. Perspectives from a range of fields including art history, sociology, sport history, and media studies enrich the volume, affording a multifaceted visual history of the beautiful game.

This volume provides an analysis of the history, origins, and development of football in Africa. It brings together an edited assemblage of essays that describe and analyse football in nine African countries, including Cameroon, DRC, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Uganda, from a social science perspective. The selection of these countries highlights the three major foreign languages and powers that have governed the continent; The English, the French, and Arabic, and provides a prism through which to analyze and compare how football developed in the various countries throughout Africa. This comparative methodology allow readers to identify similarities and differences in the progression of the game on the continent, and by focusing on football, an important relic of European colonialism in Africa, underscores the continued dependence on, and domination of Europeans on the Africans. In situating the genesis of the game, contributors examine and analyze the history, development, management, and mismanagement by bureaucrats at the political level as well as at various football federations throughout the continent.

These volumes offer a one-stop resource for researching the lives, customs, and cultures of Africa's nations and peoples. Unparalleled in its coverage of contemporary customs in all of Africa, this multivolume set is perfect for both high school and public library shelves. The three-volume encyclopedia will provide readers with an overview of contemporary customs and life in North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa through discussions of key concepts and topics that touch everyday life among the nations' peoples. While this encyclopedia places emphasis on the customs and cultural practices of each state, history, politics, and economics are also addressed. Because entries average 14,000 to 15,000 words each, contributors are able to expound more extensively on each country than in similar encyclopedic works with shorter entries. As a result, readers will gain a more complete understanding of what life is like in Africa's 54 nations and territories, and will be better able to draw cross-cultural comparisons based on their reading.