Global Football: Introduction

Global Football: Introduction Kathryn McPherson and Stephen Brooke (bio) 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) [End Page 217] of all classes were playing the modern game, often choosing football over other sports like cricket and rugby which had also been codified, standardized, and thus modernized.1 In his path-breaking study From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports, Allen Guttman argued that modern sport was defined by seven characteristics: secularization, equality (on the field, if not always in getting access to the field), specialization, rationalization, bureaucratization, quantification, and record-keeping.2 Following Guttman’s framework, we can see that, over the course of the nineteenth century, a range of sports “modernized.” “Traditional” sports like rugby, baseball, boxing, and horseracing all codified their rules and standardized the size of the field of play and formed organizations to oversee leagues and results, while “newly created” sports like baseball, badminton, and basketball followed suit. Football was not alone in making the transition to a modern game, but it was certainly the first to modernize and the first to “go global.” By 1900, football had been taken up throughout continental Europe, in Latin America, and in newly colonized parts of Africa. The game was often introduced by British sailors, railroad workers, merchants, imperial civil servants, or educators as they waited in port for their ship to sail or tried to convince young boys to attend the local mission school.3 Other times, football moved across national boundaries when men who had visited or been educated in Britain took the new game home with them.4 Once introduced, football quickly became swept up in processes of commercialization, the growth of consumer culture, and intensification of nationalism. Football had a presence on the front...

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