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This book provides a distinctive and original contribution to the historiography of sport, adding considerably to our understanding of the origins of soccer within the Manchester region. It is the first academic study of the development of association football in Manchester and is directly linked to the debates within sports history on football’s origins. Its regional focus informs the wider debate, contextualising the growth of the sport in the city and identifying communities that propagated and developed football. The period 1840–1919 saw Manchester’s association game develop from an inconsequential, occasionally outlawed activity, into a major business with a variety of popular football clubs and supporting industries. This study of Manchester football considers the sport’s emergence, development and establishment through to its position as the city’s leading team sport. What establishes a football culture and causes it to evolve is not simply the history of a few clubs, governing bodies, local leagues or promoting schools, but a conglomeration of all of these. The book is innovative in its approach to the origins of footballing in Manchester, where the sport has generally been assumed not to have existed until the creation of what became Manchester City and Manchester United.

This book considers the 1966 World Cup as a key ‘moment of modernity’ in England’s post-war history. The World Cup is examined within the complexity of the cultural, social and political change of the mid-1960s. Although addressing the importance of non-sport related connections, the book maintains a focus on football (soccer), discussing it as a ‘cultural form’ and presenting an original perspective on the aesthetic accomplishment in football tactics by the England team manager, Alf Ramsey. Chapters on the cup tradition and the World Cup and England as a World Cup host nation (with a case study focus on Liverpool as a host city) are followed by chapters on the relations in masculinity between Ramsey and his England team and Ramsey’s strategy for football play considered within the context of English modernism. England’s victory is a key theme in the book and, in this regard, later chapters consider the ways in which the victory has been remembered and commemorated. A chapter is also dedicated to critically discussing existing academic accounts that refer to the ideological construction of a ‘myth of 1966’. Via this critical discussion a fresh view of how English identity might be considered in relation to England’s victory is offered.

This book analyses the biggest, most spectacular and at times most controversial types of events, namely ‘mega-events’, and particularly recent Olympics and Expos. In this respect it builds on the sociological, historical and empirical account of mega-events originally presented in Roche’s influential study ‘Mega-Events and Modernity’ (2000). This new book addresses how mega-events have changed in recent times. It argues that contemporary mega-events reflect the major social changes which now influence our societies, particularly in the West, and which amount to a new ‘second phase’ of the modernization process. These are particularly visible in the media, urban and global locational aspects of mega-events. The book suggests that contemporary mega-events, both in their achievements and their vulnerabilities, reflect, in the media sphere, the rise of the internet; in the urban sphere, de-industrialisation and the growing ecological crisis; and in the global sphere, the relative decline of the West and the rise of China and other ‘emerging’ countries. It investigates the way in which contemporary mega-events reflect, but also mark and influence, social changes in each of these three contexts.

The purpose of this book is to critically enhance the appreciation of Diplomacy and Sport in global affairs from the perspective of practitioners and scholars. The book will make an important new contribution to at least two distinct fields: Diplomacy and Sport, as well as to those concerned with History, Politics, Sociology, and International Relations. The critical analysis the book provides explores the linkages across these fields, particularly in relation to Soft Power and Public Diplomacy, and is supported by a wide range of sources and methodologies. The book draws in a range of scholars across these different fields, and includes esteemed FIFA scholar Prof. Alan Tomlinson. Tomlinson addresses diplomacy within the world’s global game of Association Football, while other subjects include the rise of Mega Sport Events (MSE) as sites of diplomacy, new consideration of Chinese Ping-Pong Diplomacy prior to the 1970s, the importance of boycotts in sport – particularly in relation to newly explored dimensions of the boycotts of the 1980 and 1984 Olympic Games. The place of non-state actors is explored throughout, be they individual or institutions they perform a crucial role as conduits of the transactions of sport and diplomacy Based on twentieth and twenty-first century evidence, the book acknowledges the antecedents from the ancient Olympics to the contemporary era and in its conclusions offers avenues for further study based on the future Sport and Diplomacy relationship. The book has strong international basis because it covers a broad range of countries, their diplomatic relationship with sport and is written by a truly transnational cast of authors. The intense media scrutiny on the Olympic Games, FIFA World Cup, and other international sports will also contribute to the global interest in this volume.

Since their emergence in Italy in 1968, ultras have become the most dominant style of football fandom in the world. Since its inception, the ultras style has spread from Southern Europe across North Africa to Northern and Eastern Europe, South East Asia and North America. This book argues that ultras are an important site of enquiry into understanding contemporary society. They are a passionate, politically engaged collective that base their identity around a form of consumption (football) that links to modern notions of identity like masculinity and nationalism. The book seeks to make a clear theoretical shift in studies of football fandom. While it sits in the body of literature focused on political mobilisations, social movements and hooliganism, it emphasises more fundamental sociological questions about group formation, notably collective performances and emotional relationships. By focusing on the common form of expression through the performance of choreographies, chants and sustained support throughout the match, this book shows how members build an emotional attachment to their club that valorises the colours and symbols of that team, whilst mobilising members against opponents. It does this through recognising the importance of gender, politics and violence to the expression of ultras fandom, as well as how this is presented on social media and within the stadium through specular choreographies.