tailieunhanh - Football in France: A Cultural History

Why is it important to study French football? Isn’t France supposed not to be a sporting country? A few years ago interest in sport and in football as indicated in attendances at Division 1 (D1) matches, was about half that of England, Italy or Germany. French football clubs are consequently financially impoverished and its top players go abroad, under the freedom of contract offered by European legislation (essentially the Bosman ruling), to earn the kind of money their British, Italian and Spanish equivalents are paid – indeed the exodus is not confined to their internationals, but affects their second rank players too, now to be found sitting on. | Football in France Global Sport Cultures Eds Gary Armstrong Brunel University Richard Giulianotti University of Aberdeen and David Andrews The University of Maryland From the Olympics and the World Cup to extreme sports and kabaddi the social significance of sport at both global and local levels has become increasingly clear in recent years. The contested nature of identity is widely addressed in the social sciences but sport as a particularly revealing site of such contestation in both industrialising and post-industrial nations has been less fruitfully explored. Further sport and sporting corporations are increasingly powerful players in the world economy. Sport is now central to the social and technological development of mass media notably in telecommunications and digital television. It is also a crucial medium through which specific populations and political elites communicate and interact with each other on a global stage. Berg publishers are pleased to announce a new book series that will examine and evaluate the role of sport in the contemporary world. Truly global in scope the series seeks to adopt a grounded constructively critical stance towards prior work within sport studies and to answer such questions as How are sports experienced and practised at the everyday level within local settings How do specific cultures construct and negotiate forms of social stratification such as gender class ethnicity within sporting contexts What is the impact of mediation and corporate globalisation upon local sports cultures Determinedly interdisciplinary the series will nevertheless privilege anthropological historical and sociological approaches but will consider submissions from cultural studies economics geography human kinetics international relations law philosophy and political science. The series is particularly committed to research that draws upon primary source materials or ethnographic fieldwork. Previously published titles in the Series Gary Armstrong and