Globalised Football

Book excerpt: When studying the social phenomena in and around football, five major aspects of globalisation processes become evident: international migration, the global flow of capital, the syncretistic nature of tradition and modernity in contemporary culture, new experiences of time and space and the revolution in information technologies. In an exploration of these themes the collection provides insight into academic studies of football in Portugal, Germany, England, Spain, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, China, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the USA. At examining football-related phenomena under the headings of nations and migration, myths and business, the city and the dream, it shows how modernised football itself is object and subject in processes of both neo-liberal globalisation and counter hegemonic globalisation. While the contributions highlight characteristics of particular local and national contexts, the volume focuses on global centre-periphery-relations and migration trajectories of football professionals by analysing recent developments in post-colonial Portuguese speaking areas: The high ranking of "Portuguese football" not only serves in national(ist) discourses or in order to emancipate the country from a marginal position, it also turns Portugal into a football-talent exporter, confronting it partly with the same ambiguous consequences as Brazil and the African countries, who "lose" their football talents to the European centre. The receiving countries, again, include Portugal. This book was previously published as a special issue of Soccer in Society