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Fútbology

FSF Summer Series: The Age of Football

Age_of_Football_UK_coverWith Euros 2020 postponed until 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Football Scholars Forum organized a five-part summer series with academic, journalist, and broadcaster David Goldblatt on his new book, The Age of Football: The Global Game in the Twenty-first Century [UK edition here / US edition here].

 

A longtime FSF member, Goldblatt is the award-winning author of several football books, including the highly acclaimed The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football, which FSF discussed here and here.

 

A record-setting 56 participants from five continents registered for the series. Each Tuesday 90-minute Zoom session focused on a different chapter (or chapters) in the 551-page book. Discussants opened each intellectual pick up game with a number of comments and questions. Given the book’s length and depth, this approach broke the conversation down into more digestible chunks and made it easier for individuals to contribute on topics of particular interest or expertise.

 

As the convenor of the series, I served as the first discussant on June 9 in the session on Africa. Danyel Reiche and Alex Galarza collaborated the following week on the Middle East and South America; then on June 23 Lindsay Krasnoff led on the 119-page chapter on Europe (read her comments here); on June 30 Andrew Guest was the discussant for the chapters on East Asia and North America/Central America/Caribbean; finally, on July 14, Simon Rofe and Matthew Pauly spearheaded the fifth and final session devoted to FIFA, Russia, and the 2018 World Cup.

 

Screenshot of conference call“It’s the hardest book I’ve ever written,” Goldblatt revealed. “A combination of Brexit and COVID kind of ate its public reception alive. That was quite hard to process,” he said. “This [series] has been a fabulous corrective to that. It means a lot to have you read it, to know that it held your attention, entertained you and maybe enlightened you along the way.”

 

David Goldblatt’s extraordinary endurance, encyclopedic mind, grace and humor, com bined with the vital and sustained contributions of discussants and dozens of participants, made this series a truly extraordinary experience.

 

Listen to the audio recordings of each session below (personal/educational use only).

The Age of Football, Part 1

The Age of Football, Part 2

The Age of Football, Part 3

The Age of Football, Part 4

The Age of Football, Part 5

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Fútbology

Beyond Master Narratives: Local Sources and Global Perspectives on Sport, Apartheid, and Liberation

Alegi speaking at Penn StateMy article “Beyond Master Narratives: Local Sources and Global Perspectives on Sport, Apartheid, and Liberation” has just been published in The International Journal of the History of Sport (2020).

 

This article is a revised and peer-reviewed version of a 2019 keynote address I delivered at the “Global Histories: Sport and Apartheid South Africa” symposium at Penn State University.

 


 

Abstract

 

Drawing mainly on a set of oral and written primary sources situated in their proper historical and geographical context, this article explores how multiple forms of agency and memory shaped the history of sport, apartheid and liberation in South Africa. In doing so, it argues that a new revisionist history is needed in order to problematize the entrenched ‘master narrative’ of South African sport history, which privileges national redemption and patriotic heroism at the expense of more complex individual, local and global dynamics. The article concludes with suggestions for future research directions in order to assist a process of decolonizing sport history in South Africa.

 

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09523367.2020.1773434

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Fútbology Video

“Outside Write” Podcast Interview

Outside Write logoI was recently interviewed by Outside Write, the UK podcast about football (soccer) travel, history and culture.

 

In just 45 minutes we covered a lot of ground in the  history of football in Africa: the arrival and spread of the sport during the colonial era, and stories about race, class, politics, and international migration. We even had time to highlight some watershed World Cup moments.

 

Click here to listen. Enjoy!

 

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Fútbology

Football Scholars Forum 2019-20 Schedule

FSF_round_logoThe Football Scholars Forum, based in the History Department at Michigan State University, is set to celebrate its tenth anniversary!

 

Originally conceived as an online academic book club, FSF has evolved into a vibrant international soccer studies community. Professors, graduate students, journalists, fans, and practitioners take part in 90-minute sessions. A distinguishing feature of FSF is the participation of authors willing to engage with an audience of knowledgeable fútbologists. Out of these conversations have sprung new sources and ideas, scholarly collaborations, publications, conference papers, and grants.

 

The 2019-20 schedule features a terrific lineup of books and authors. The season opens on September 24 (3pm US ET) with Futbolera: A History of Women and Sports in Latin America by Brenda Elsey and Joshua Nadel. Futbolera is “beautifully written, meticulously researched, incredibly thoughtful,” writes author and historian Amy Bass. “A must read,” says Laurent Dubois of Duke University.

 

On October 30 (3pm US ET), it’s time for Football and Colonialism: Body and Popular Culture in Urban Mozambique by Nuno Domingos. One reviewer of the book notes how “as Domingos effortlessly oscillates between colonial policy and indigenous response, he brings the city [of Maputo] alive, and at the heart of the text are the African players themselves.”

 

The following session is planned for December but is not centered around a book. Instead it focuses on the six-part documentary film This Is Football. Released on the Amazon Prime platform and boosted by endorsements from major companies, this series is likely to elicit a range of critiques from the experts. [Watch the trailer here.]

 

After the holiday break, FSF rekindles the excitement of the 2019 Women’s World Cup with a session on Caitlin Murray’s National Team: The Inside Story of the Women Who Changed Soccer. Sports Illustrated‘s Grant Wahl praises the book for “shedding new light on all the major tournaments while revealing fascinating details on [the USWNT’s] decades-long fight for better treatment from the men who run soccer.”

 

The last two sessions will grapple with David Goldblatt’s new 700-page book The Age of Football: The Global Game in the 21st Century. In all seriousness a British journalist called him “not merely the best football historian writing today, he is possibly the best there has ever been.” The dates for both the Murray and Goldblatt events are yet to be determined so stay tuned for updates.

 

A friendly reminder that all FSF events are free and open to the public. Anyone interested in participating should contact Dr. Alex Galarza (now at the University of Delaware) or me.

 

 

 

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Fútbology

Reading Soccer

FSF_round_logoFor almost a decade I’ve been involved with the Football Scholars Forum, an online book club that TV wordsmith Ray Hudson labeled “the soccer think tank.” An intellectual pick up game of sorts, an informal space to read, reflect, try new things, network, learn, and engage in thoughtful conversations with fútbologists around the world.

 

This fall, the group met three times. On September 25, Amy Bass, an historian and Emmy-award winning producer, joined us for a discussion of her new book, One Goal: A Coach, a Team, and the Game That Brought a Divided Town Together. This evocative ethnography of Somali immigrants playing for Lewiston (Maine) High School’s Blue Devils provides both a contemporary shapshot of a changing postindustrial northeastern town and a classic sports story, a-la Friday Night Lights. Written for a general audience, One Goal benefits greatly from Bass’s expertise as a scholar of sports and the politics of race in the United States. With xenophobia and intolerance rising nationally and internationally, this book restores some hope that soccer can play a meaningful role in building community.

 

Sebastian Abbot, a former correspondent for the AP in Pakistan, was our guest on October 17. His (first) book, The Away Game: The Epic Search for Soccer’s Next Superstars, chronicles the “largest talent search in sports history”—the Football Dreams/Aspire Academy organized and lavishly funded by Qatar, the 2022 World Cup host nation, as a “soft power” operation. While many books these days thinly analyze “global football,” The Away Game tangibly connects people in West Africa, the Persian Gulf and Europe in illuminating ways. Scouting, the book shows, is increasingly reliant on science and information technology (big data, AI, etc.), but the attributes that led to the success of Diawandou Diagne, one of Abbot’s subjects from Senegal, “were much harder to spot in a match or training session; his judgment, strength of character, self-discipline, and motivation. These attributes made him a great leader. They also helped him make smart decisions off the field that proved just as important as those on it.”

 

The third FSF convocation took place on December 13, when we welcomed our University of Michigan colleagues Stefan Szymanski and Silke-Maria Weineck, authors of It’s Football, Not Soccer (and Viceversa). Through text mining of print media, scrutiny of Reddit and similar Internet forums, as well as other sources, the book explores the historical usage of the terms “soccer” and “football” mainly in the United States and Britain. In doing so, it reveals a much more complicated story that commonly assumed. The authors conclude that in a world with American, Australian, Gaelic, and rugby football codes, “soccer is quite a good word; unlike football, it does not create ambiguity.” Whether “soccer” can overcome its recent association with Americanization remains to be seen. Will the 2026 World Cup be a tipping point?

 

The Football Scholars Forum resumes after the holiday break. The next sessions will feature Todd Cleveland’s Following the Ball: The Migration of African Soccer Players across the Portuguese Colonial Empire (in February) and Rachel Allison’s Kicking Center: Gender and the Selling of Women’s Professional Soccer (March/April).

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Fútbology

Russia 2018: A Fútbologist’s Lament



Prior to this year’s FIFA World Cup, which France won last night in Moscow by defeating Croatia 4-2 in the final, I had never experienced a World Cup without my Italy.

To make matters worse, my secondary teams, USA and South Africa, also did not qualify. What would it be like to follow the most popular global cultural event as a discerning neutral observer?

Early on, the six-goal draw between Spain-Portugal, most memorable because of Cristiano Ronaldo’s hat-trick, and Mexico’s stunning 1-0 upset of Germany jolted me into pretending I was engaged in the tournament. Fox’s insipid coverage in the U.S. did little to heighten my enthusiasm. Nothing changed when I landed in Italy for the remainder of the group stage.

Italians were detached from the World Cup. Media coverage and everyday conversations were more in tune with the Serie A transfer market as well as Scuderia Ferrari’s surging fortunes in Formula 1. From the Umbrian hills to the Lazio coast, tourists and foreigners were usually the only ones I saw glued to the prime-time matches on TVs set up in piazzas and cafés.

The emotional outbursts of a group of vacationing Swedes at an eatery near our house during their rollercoaster match against Germany anticipated by thirty seconds the iPad livestream at our dinner table. That’s how we knew that the 10-man Germans had somehow won before Toni Kroos actually curled that wonderful 95th-minute free kick into the top corner [watch it here].

Senegal—the strongest African team together with Nigeria—came closest to getting me involved on a deeper level. In the build up to Senegal-Colombia, a match the West Africans needed at least to draw to qualify for the knockout stage, I was quoted in a New York Times front-page story about Senegal Coach Aliou Cissé—the lowest paid coach in the World Cup [click here for full article]. I watched that crucial game with two Senegalese street vendors at a beach establishment. When the Video Assistant Referee (the infamous VAR!) reversed a penalty that the referee had initially awarded Senegal, one of the lads calmly turned to me and said in nearly perfect Italian: “That’s no problem because God is on our side.” I did not have the courage to ask him if he still felt that way after Colombia’s late goal eliminated Senegal.

As it turned out, none of the five African teams made it to the second round—a disheartening outcome that I analyzed with Assumpta Oturu, host of KPFK’s “Spotlight Africa” program. We also discussed what changes may help African nations produce better results at future World Cups [listen here (27:08-34:42)].

The single-elimination round of 16 coincided with my return to Fox TV-land. Matches were shown in the late morning and early afternoon, but that was hardly a problem since teaching my global soccer online course absolutely required keeping a close tab on the competition. (Hard life, I know.)

By this time, the only thing mitigating my growing disinterest in Russia 2018 was the presence of so many players of African and Caribbean origin in the France, Belgium, and England squads. Arguably the most acutely insightful writing on World Cup soccer, race, immigration, and national identities appeared on the Africa Is A Country website [here and here] and in an Al Jazeera piece by David Goldblatt [here].

The day before the final I returned to the intersection of sports, culture, and politics in a Voice of America story. On Sunday, as the curtain fell on French celebrations at the Luzhniki Stadium, I headed to my campus office for a live interview with China Global Television Network (see video above) to wrap up my first, and hopefully last, World Cup as a neutral observer.

Categories
Fútbology

Review Essay: African Futebol and Portugal

[Note: This review essay is cross-posted from idrottsforum.org.]

In an extraordinary stroke of good luck, I recently had the opportunity to read Football and Colonialism by Nuno Domingos and Following The Ball by Todd Cleveland. These well-researched scholarly histories of Africans in Portugal’s soccer empire beautifully complement each other.

Book CoverFootball and Colonialism reconstructs the culture of the game in Lourenço Marques (Maputo today). A carefully edited English translation of a previously published Portuguese edition, it tethers sport to urban development and everyday life in a racially segregated city. Government records and press sources provide the bulk of the primary evidence, with oral interviews enriching the chronologically organized narrative. The book’s main objective is to demonstrate that football performances and bodily practices—from techniques and tactics to language use and fan culture—came to form an integral part of the larger colonial history of Mozambique.

Football and Colonialism opens by situating itself in a growing literature on sport and leisure in African history and then outlines the book’s main themes, methodology, and structure. Chapter 2 examines the rise of organized football in the white residential areas of Lourenço Marques, where it aimed to strengthen physical education programs and reinforce white minority rule. Chapter 3 widens its ethnographic lens to incorporate black neighborhoods on the periphery of the expanding city. By the 1940s, the chapter shows, local African men had transformed football into a popular spectacle that shaped, and was shaped by, new forms of sociability and identitarianism. Chapter 4 explores a vernacular football culture defined by trickster dribblers (malabaristas), vigorous tackles (beketela), and hard-core (“diseased”) fans. Moves such as psêtu (making fun of an opponent after dribbling past him) andpyonyo (repeatedly dribbling around the same defender) captured the importance of “malice” in navigating between the Scylla of colonial racism and the Charybdis of material poverty (pp. 116, 119). Chapter 5 opens a parenthesis on the occult world of the vovô (religious specialist)—a feature of the African game that blends “traditional” agrarian beliefs and practices with “modern” urban ways and worldviews.

The game’s changing tactics and styles of play are the subject of chapter 6. This brilliant chapter explains how a range of British, Brazilian, Portuguese, and South African influences produced a cosmopolitan brand of Mozambican football inextricably linked to colonial racial hierarchies. As a result, by the late 1950s, the white “downtown” game’s modernity, speed, and efficiency stood in stark contrast to the African suburban game’s enduring preference for risk taking tactics and crowd-pleasing dribbling moves. Chapter 7 discusses the desegregation of the white league (AFLM) in the 1960s and describes how major Portuguese sides developed “feeder” clubs in Lourenço Marques to recruit exciting African talents, including Eusébio—the first African to win the European Player of the Year. A short concluding chapter underscores the contradiction of football in colonial Mozambique as a social practice that reinforced white minority rule while simultaneously creating a space in which the black majority could express aspirations for belonging, equality, and freedom.

Book CoverFollowing the Ball builds on these valuable insights to explore the experiences in Portugal of migrant footballers originally from Mozambique, Angola, Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Príncipe. Using archival and oral sources, the book argues that Africans abroad were not passive victims of colonial capitalist machinations, but instead found ways to negotiate a better life for themselves on and off the pitch. The first chapter succinctly describes Portuguese rule in Africa and outlines the development of football among white settlers. The next chapter draws on Domingos’s pioneering work to examine the segregated nature of the inter-war soccer in the colonies and then turns to the reforms of the 1950s that brought more mestiços (biracial) and, for the first time, darker-skinned Africans into the ranks of white clubs (much to the detriment of African leagues).

Chapter 3 shifts the narrative into high gear. Through deft use of evocative interviews, it brings out the connections between Africa and Europe. Meticulous attention is paid to both the “push” and “pull” factors that triggered the migration of white, mestiço, and African footballers to clubs in Lisbon and elsewhere in Portugal. Chapter 4 explores the countless difficulties faced by immigrant players. “We suffered a lot due to the weather and food,” Hilário recalled (p. 121) an example of how saudade (melancholy and longing for home) affected the young men. The much more competitive quality of football challenged them too, as did the prohibition on signing for clubs outside Portugal and the Salazar dictatorship’s repression.

Chapter 5 focuses on the 1960s and early 1970s and the ways in which African migrants coped with a number of sporting, social, and political obstacles. “The social bonds that African footballers cultivated and deepened,” Cleveland notes, “served to mitigate their saudades, while also lifting their spirits and helping them adjust to metropolitan life” (p. 154). In the context of rising popular protest in Portugal and of militant resistance in the colonies, this acutely insightful chapter brings into sharp relief the role of rebellious students and of Académica de Coimbra FC—“the epicenter of political radicalism” (p. 196). In 1969, for example, Mario Wilson and other Africans joined their Académica teammates in wearing black armbands in a Cup semifinal against Sporting Lisbon to show solidarity with student demonstrations against the regime. While the story ends with independence in 1975, the epilogue makes reference to Eder, a striker born in Guinea Bissau, whose game-winning goal for Portugal in the 2016 Euro final against France (in Paris in extra time) reminds us that “the myriad contributions made by these African players have, indeed, rendered Portugal a very rich nation” (p. 216).

* * *

Following the Ball and Football and Colonialism make important contributions to the fields of Sport Studies and African history. As legitimate academic studies in and of themselves, they convincingly demonstrate that the histories of Mozambican football and of African migrants in Portugal have value and deserve to be told in their own right.  Both books also put multiple African voices and perspectives center stage while delineating the local and international implications of Lusophone African football’s history. In doing so, Following the Ball and Football and Colonialism help to narrow the linguistic and geo-institutional barriers that tend to separate Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone scholarship on Africa.

As can be expected, both books have some shortcomings. For example, Domingos’s prose suffers from too many passive verbs and painfully long sentences, and chapters 2 and 3 could have been shorter. More substantively, Football and Colonialism is short on analysis of masculinities and femininities, generational relations, and inner workings of African clubs and leagues. Cleveland’s work, on the other hand, relies so heavily on biographical portraits that it sometimes seems to articulate a theory based on anecdotes. Following the Ball also tends to gloss over cases of less successful African migrants, and treads lightly on the role of fans, club owners, sports reporters, and sponsors in shaping the history of Africans in the Portuguese game.

Despite these limitations, Football and Colonialism and Following the Ball succeed in accomplishing their stated objectives. Individually and together, these impressive books greatly deepen our knowledge and understanding of football and society in Africa and Europe. I highly recommend them to specialists and general readers interested in sport, African Studies, and globalization.