Books in the Critical Research in Football series

Working within the context of Zagreb, Croatia, this book offers an in-depth ethnography detailing fans' interactions with the police, club management, state authorities and other fan groups, and examining themes ranging from politics, socialization, masculinity, sexuality and violence to fan authenticity.

Football is ubiquitous and a permanent fixture of modern life. More than a sport, it frequently manifests in broader popular culture. This book examines the significance of football for, and in, popular culture across a wide range of forms, including music, film and social media.

This book presents a series of fascinating case studies that show how the lives and bodies of clubs, players and fans around the world are enmeshed with politics.

This book takes a close look at discrimination in football in order to illuminate our understanding of the interaction between sport and wider society, politics and culture, particularly in terms of the (re)production of identity.

This is the first book to look closely at the concept of 'risk' in elite and professional football from a social scientific perspective. Drawing on the wider sociological, criminological and management literature on risk, it shows how football helps us to understand global risk more generally in present-day society.The book explores how attitudes to risk have shaped the modern football business, and identifies those risks that pose a threat to the sustainability of football in the future. It draws upon the work of theorists including Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Michel Foucault, as well as digital media sources and policy documents, and covers a range of topics, cases and themes including political, environmental and terrorism risks, technologies, the governance of fans and risk resistance.In the context of the social, globalized and commercialized realm of football, as well as a global pandemic that has had a profound influence on attitudes to risk, the book argues that modern societies' preoccupation with risk has transformed the ways in which modern football is played on the pitch, organized off the pitch, covered in the media and attended by fans.Including an extended case study of the 2026 World Cup, to be held in the USA, Mexico and Canada, this is a thought-provoking read for any student, researcher or policy-maker with an interest in football, sport, events, sociology, criminology or risk management.

This is the first book in English to closely examine the life of Diego Maradona from socio-cultural perspectives, exploring how his status as an icon, a popular sporting hero, and a political figurehead has been culturally constructed, reproduced, and manipulated.The volume looks at representations of Maradona across a wide variety of media, including literature, cinema, popular music, printed and online press, and radio, and in different countries around the world, to cast new light on topics such as the instrumentality of sporting heroes and the links among sport, nationalism, and ideology. It shows how the life of Maradona - from his origins in the barrio through to his rise to god-like status in Naples and as a postcolonial symbol of courage and resistance against imperial powers across the global south, alongside scandal and his fall from grace - powerfully illustrates themes such as the dynamics of gender, justice, and affect that underpin the study of sport, culture, and society.This is essential reading for anybody with an interest in football, sport studies, media studies, cultural studies, or sociology.