Globalised football: Nations and migration, the city and the dream (review)

Globalised Football is a sports academic book suitable for scholarly readers and not for the everyday sports enthusiast. This is not a bad thing. In fact, the academic-style prose and the supporting data provide the reader with conviction about the believability of its contents. There are many reasons to like the book, particularly in its broad treatment of globalization issues. Yet, you are left with a feeling that there are some other issues upon which the book could also have focused its attention.

Tiesler and Coelho, editors of the book, focus largely on the globalization theme of center-periphery relations associated with football (soccer in America). The 225-page, 13-chapter book attempts to touch on what the editors identify as “five major aspects of globalization processes . . . international migration, the global flow of capital, the syncretistic nature of tradition and modernity in contemporary culture, new experiences of time and space, and the revolution in information technologies.”

The goal of the book is quite admirable and its broad geographical coverage assures at least one chapter on five continents—Europe, Asia, North America, South America and Africa. This is unusual because few books that claim global coverage actually ensure the coverage of five continents in the way that this book does.

There are two chapters that focus on Africa, a region rarely covered in academic writing on sports. More surprising, one of these chapters is on Mozambique, which is rarely mentioned in sports writing. Nino Domingos, who authors the chapter on Mozambique, provides an exhilarating notation on “Creolizations” of the game in Mozambique. Domingos identifies languages that locals develop inside the game and points out how this demonstration of individual interactions within the game is important to both practitioners and fans. This is an important contribution that shows that the spread of the game worldwide was neither pure nor was it standardized. Instead, it was always intertwined with a local flavor.

A key aspect of the book is its treatment of recognizable globalization issues such as football labor migration and transnational identity in the selling of the game. Migration has been widely discussed in other texts such as Giulianotti (2004), Simmons (1997) and Arbena (1989). There is hardly anything new on this issue in this book. The same thing can be said of transnational identity as presented by Miguel Moniz in chapter 2. Perhaps Moniz’ work can claim a tenuous uniqueness because it focuses on the Lusophone community in the northeast region of the United States.

More impressively, the book wades into other aspects of globalization that are rarely discussed. These include resistance aspects such as dependency concepts, the creeping of politico-separatist voices into football stadia, and spectator fight back against increasing corporatization of the game. It is in this area that the book produces very compelling reading.

Of particular insight is Barrie Wharton’s piece on Spain’s La Liga and how club presidents use their positions to incite political calls for separatism that threaten the Spanish state. Wharton’s work is historically thorough and provides several compelling examples of this political phenomenon.

Two other chapters focus on a new fan phenomenon in England that denotes the struggle between fans and the new corporatization of the game. It is indeed an important development in the game as companies go from strength to strength while the game’s real fans struggle to keep a foothold in the game they love. It is a conundrum—the game needs the money but the money increasingly alienates the fans. Where is the middle ground? This book does not provide the answer and neither is it necessary for it to do so. What is important is that the book recognizes this as an area of resistance to the globalization train.

One would have liked at least one chapter on the increasing role of big media in exacerbating the gap between center and periphery as part of globalization. This is especially important as football club support...