This edited volume considers the U.S.-Mexico soccer rivalry, which occurs against a complex geo-political, social, and economic backdrop. Multidisciplinary contributions explore how a long and complicated history between these countries has produced a unique rivalry—one in which loyalties split friends and family; fan turnout in many regions of the U.S. favors Mexico; and games are imbued with both national pride and politics. The themes of nationhood, geography, citizenship, acculturation, identity, globalization, narrative and mythology reverberate throughout this book, especially with regard to how they shape place, identity, and culture.

This book focuses on the football stadium as a political space and examines how stadiums can be viewed as the objects and catalysts of political change. Rather than acting as functional constructions designed merely to host football games, stadiums stand out in the urban landscape as landmarks that serve as gathering points for large communities. The manifestation of the political in football stadiums can be heard in the discontent voiced by supporter activism; in the use of stadiums for national and local identity politics; in attempts to instrumentalize emotions by both totalitarian and democratic regimes; among fan groups in political uprisings, and in the surveillance of fans through e-tickets and seat allocation. This edited collection brings together a variety of case studies from a wide range of different contexts. Contributors stem from political science, sociology, history, anthropology, human geography and urbanism. As such, the book redefines and broadens what we understand as the political dimension of the football stadium.

From the FIFA World Cup to pick-up games at your local park, soccer is the closest thing in our world to a universal entertainment. Many writers use this global popularity to describe the game’s winners and losers, but what happens when we use social science to explore how soccer intersects with culture, society, and the self? This book provides a thinking fan’s guide to the world’s most popular game, proposing a way of engaging soccer that sparks intellectual curiosity and employs critical consciousness. Using stories and data, along with ideas from sociology, psychology, and across the social sciences, it provides readers with new ways of understanding fanaticism, peak performance, talent development, and more. Drawing on concepts ranging from cognitive bias to globalization, it illuminates meanings of the game for players and fans while investigating impacts on our lives and communities. While it considers soccer cultures across the globe, the book also analyzes what makes U.S. soccer culture special, including its embrace of the women’s game. As a scholar, former minor league player and coach, and fan, Andrew Guest offers a distinctive perspective on soccer in society. Whatever name you call it, and whatever your interest in it, Soccer in Mind will enrich your own view of the one truly global game.

LA Sports brings together sixteen essays covering various aspects of the development and changing nature of sport in one of America’s most fascinating and famous cities. The writers cover a range of topics, including the history of car racing and ice skating, the development of sport venues, the power of the Mexican fan base in American soccer leagues, the intersecting life stories of Jackie and Mack Robinson, the importance of the Showtime Lakers, the origins of Muscle Beach and surfing, sport in Hollywood films, and more.

While rivalries are a key aspect of the sports world, they are not well understood. It is essential to study how rivalries influence fan behavior in order to predict and identify their effect on social interaction, consumer behavior, and the entertainment industry. Understanding Rivalry and Its Influence on Sports Fans is an essential reference source that discusses what causes and influences rivalry, as well as how it impacts sport fans. Featuring research on topics such as bracketed morality, competitive sports, and social identity, this book is ideally designed for academics, students, and researchers studying the rivalry phenomenon across such disciplines as psychology, sociology, political science, sport and entertainment, consumer behavior, and marketing.

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.

While rivalry is embedded in any sporting event or performance, soccer, the world’s most popular mass spectator sport, has been an emblem of such rivalries since its inception as an organized sport. Some of these rivalries grow to become long-term and perennial by their nature, extent, impact and legacy, from the local to the global level. They represent identities based on widely diverse affiliations of human life—locality, region, nation, continent, community, class, culture, religion, ethnicity, and so on. Yet, at times, such rivalries transcend barriers of space and time, where soccer-clubs, -nations, -personalities, -organizations, -styles and -fans float and compete with intriguing identities. The present volume brings into focus some of the most fascinating and enduring rivalries in the world of soccer. It attempts to encapsulate, analyse and reconstruct those rivalries—between nations, between clubs, between personalities, between styles of play, between fandoms, and between organizations—in a historical perspective in relation to diverse identities, competing ideologies, contestations of power, psychologies of attachment, bonds of loyalty, notions of enmity, articulations of violence, and affinities of fan culture—some of the core manifestations of sporting rivalry. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Soccer & Society.