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Global Football: Introduction

CRITICAL analyses of sport have proliferated in recent decades, forging a vibrant new interdisciplinary field called sport studies. Scholars coming from diverse disciplinary backgrounds – ranging from political economy of sport to film studies – have demonstrated the impact of sports, games, and physical cultures on the societies that host them. An older genre of sport studies that tracked developments internal to particular sports, leagues, or institutions has been joined by studies that interrogate how sport reflects wider social and cultural beliefs and how those social and cultural forces define what constitutes sport. Historians have had a strong presence in sport studies. Even a cursory glance at the academic journals devoted to sport history suggests the dynamic state of the field: International Journal of Sport History, the Journal of Sport History, Sport History Review, Sport in History, and Sporting Traditions. A genealogy of Canada’s contribution to this list reflects the transformation of sport history. Sport History Review was founded in 1970 as Canadian Journal of Sport History. Originally dedicated to tracing Canadian athletic traditions and accomplishments, the journal now publishes articles pertaining to sport across the globe, assessing physical cultures, sporting practices, and athletic events ranging from the “big four” of professional sports to recent innovations like Ultimate Frisbee and to the way sport is related to cultural forms such as film and social formations such as national identity. No sport has attracted as much historical attention as modern football, the game North Americans know as soccer. In early nineteenth-century Britain, traditional forms of folk football gave way to the modern game in which the ball was moved by feet, not hands. It was played on a standard sized field and was organized by local associations (the short form of “Assoc.” is believed to be the origin of the term “soccer”) which codified the rules of play. Historians quickly recognized the social forces at work in these developments. Traditional folk football – played over the course of days through town streets and on village squares with players joining and leaving the game as they took breaks for pints of beer at the local pub – no longer suited the new industrial order of enclosure, regulated public spaces, and disciplined work routines. It is true that modern football was designed by and for middle-class and elite men who as “amateurs” could use the game to express their self-discipline, hard work, and respect for rules. But, by the end of the nineteenth century, British men (and some women)