Sport in East Germany is commonly associated with the systematic doping that helped to make the country an Olympic superpower. Football played little part in this controversial story. Yet, as a ...hugely popular activity that was deeply entwined in the social fabric, it exerted an influence that few institutions or pursuits could match. The People's Game examines the history of football from the interrelated perspectives of star players, fans, and ordinary citizens who played for fun. Using archival sources and interviews, it reveals football's fluid role in preserving and challenging communist hegemony. By repeatedly emphasising that GDR football was part of an international story, for example, through analysis of the 1974 World Cup finals, Alan McDougall shows how sport transcended the Iron Curtain. Through a study of the mass protests against the Stasi team, BFC, during the 1980s, he reveals football's role in foreshadowing the downfall of communism.
When France both hosted and won the World Cup in 1998, the face of its star player, Zinedine Zidane, the son of Algerian immigrants, was projected onto the Arc de Triomphe. During the 2006 World Cup ...finals, Zidane stunned the country by ending his spectacular career with an assault on an Italian player. InSoccer Empire, Laurent Dubois illuminates the connections between empire and sport by tracing the story of World Cup soccer, from the Cup's French origins in the 1930s to Africa and the Caribbean and back again. As he vividly recounts the lives of two of soccer's most electrifying players, Zidane and his outspoken teammate, Lilian Thuram, Dubois deepens our understanding of the legacies of empire that persist in Europe and brilliantly captures the power of soccer to change the nation and the world.
In this cross-cutting cultural history, Gregg Bocketti traces the origins of soccer in Brazil from its elitist, Eurocentric identity as "foot-ball" at the end of the nineteenth century to its ...subsequent mythologization as the specifically Brazilian "futebol,"o jogo bonito (the beautiful game). Bocketti examines the sport and its narratives, which usually depict soccer as having evolved from a white elite pastime to an integral part of Brazil's national identity known for its passion and creativity, and explains the ways that the popular history of the game has obscured many of the complexities and the continuities of the history of soccer and of Brazil.
Mining a rich trove of sources, including contemporary sports journalism, archives of Brazilian soccer clubs, and British ministry records, and looking in detail at soccer's effect on all parts of Brazilian society, Bocketti shows how important the sport is to an understanding of Brazilian nationalism and nation building in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
To assess peak speeds, usually assess players capacity to quickly accelerate and achieve/maintain a maximal speed in 30 m distance (Altmann et al., 2019). During these tests, players often start from ...stationary positions, reacting to a sound signal (Haff & Triplett, 2016). However, one may question these test procedures since peak speeds achieved during tests generally exceed peak speeds registered during matches (Buchheit et ak, 2021; Djaoui et al., 2017). Additionally, during matches, soccer players usually perform leading sprints (those where players achieved the sprint threshold > 25.2 km/h) while entering the high-speed running category 19.8-25.2 km/h in the previous 0.5 seconds than explosive sprints (those where players reached the sprint threshold without entering the high-speed running category in the previous 0.5 seconds) (di Salvo et al., 2009). This research aimed to characterize match peak speeds, during a 20-second time window (10 seconds immediately before and after the match peak speed), in soccer matches. Twenty elite soccer players were monitored with GNSS devices during six soccer matches from the Brazilian first division. For each player during each match, speeds were collected at 0.1-second intervals (10 Hz) from 10 seconds before and 10 seconds after the match peak speed. Speeds (mean ± SD) were calculated for speeds at each 0.1-second intervals and intra-individual speed differences were compared at every second of the 20 seconds window using paired mean differences. Effect sizes (ES) were established as trivial (<0.2), small (0.2<0.6), moderate (0.6<1.2), large (1.2<2.0), very large (2.0<4.0) and huge (>4.0) with 90% confidence intervals. Match peak speeds ranged from 29.11 km/h to 31.64 km/h. Speeds registered 10 seconds before and 10 seconds after the match peak speed ranged from 5.11 km/h to 9.21 km/h and 6.90 km/h to 7.65 km/h respectively (Figure 1). Speed increased (acceleration) moderately (ES: 0.68 0.64, 0.72) 4 seconds before the match peak speed and decreased (deceleration) moderately (ES: -0.73 -0.77, -0.69) 3 seconds after the maximal effort (Figure 2). Match peak speeds were achieved from leading starts, which questions the current sprint test procedures. After the match's peak speed, players decelerate quicker than they accelerate but without reaching a full stop. Nevertheless, preparing players for intense decelerations should not be disregarded. Field tests and training sessions should provide a stimulus similar to what is observed during competition.
Football has been largely exempt from the development of the regulatory state and has been left to govern itself. However, new media have raised the profile of the game and globalization has created ...new pressures as football clubs become pawns in the ambitions of states, consortia and wealthy individuals. Clubs offer an important sense of identity for fans, but the impersonality and distance of ownership can set up new tensions. In addition, corruption in the international governing body has been a significant problem and the sport's symbiotic relationship with gambling continues to be a concern.Wyn Grant examines the political economy of football and its uneasy relationship with the market. There are no off-the-shelf solutions for regulation, he argues, but the complexities of the game and its economic size demand more attention from government.
The human cost of the FIFA World Cup 2022 troubles human rights groups and football fans alike. However, measuring it is extremely difficult due to elusive, vague and misleading data sources on ...worker deaths, as Megan Price explains
The human cost of the FIFA World Cup 2022 troubles human rights groups and football fans alike. However, measuring it is extremely difficult due to elusive, vague and misleading data sources on worker deaths, as Megan Price explains
The goal of the present study is to conceptualize fan centricity and explore its consequences. The study focuses on German soccer teams and used in-depth interviews with 26 experts and inductive ...coding procedures to categorize the experts' opinions on defining the construct and on perceived consequences. Based on the results, fan centricity is defined as an organization's strategic and operational focus on the establishment and maintenance of relationships with fans in a reciprocal sense. Seven categories describe fan centricity: identification and segmentation of fans; fan involvement in decision-making; facilitation of extra-role behaviour; communication and mediation; optimization of fan experience; facilitation of fan influence on organizational and soccer-related changes; and adaptation of modus operandi. Two broad themes have been identified: process-related components as well as organizational and societal components. The construct has a variety of consequences (e.g. for the teams' operating models), as revealed by the interviews.
The article aims to analyze through the case of Soares Street, present in the Gazeta de Noticias newspaper, how the soccer practiced in the streets of the city of Rio de Janeiro, allows us to reflect ...on tensions that permeate it during 1910-1919. Soccer in the streets shows the symbolic disputes around soccer and the city itself, demonstrating how both are the construction of different social groups. Observar o esporte, assim como a capital da República, sendo resultado de diferentes percepçöes e vivencias e, nao apenas fruto das elites carioca. Os sentidos em torno do jogo estáo sendo disputados da mesma forma como o sentido em volta da própria capital da República. Essas percepçöes tornavam-se um empecilho para que as camadas populares pudessem também estabelecer à capital federal suas representaçöes. Em 1914, por exemplo, o Navarro Foot-ball club tinha seu ground localizado na rua Soares3, apesar de sua sede social ficar estabelecida na travessa Navarro, em Santa
While national soccer teams compete this June to win the World Cup, analysts will be crunching data behind the scenes to pursue an advantage. Luke Bornn, Dan Cervone and Javier Fernandez explore the ...evolution of soccer analytics
While national soccer teams compete this June to win the World Cup, analysts will be crunching data behind the scenes to pursue an advantage. Luke Bornn, Dan Cervone and Javier Fernandez explore the evolution of soccer analytics.
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