Picturing the Beautiful Game


Book Description

The world's most popular sport, soccer, has long been celebrated as “the beautiful game” for its artistry and aesthetic appeal. Picturing the Beautiful Game: A History of Soccer in Visual Culture and Art is the first collection to examine the rich visual culture of soccer, including the fine arts, design, and mass media. Covering a range of topics related to the game's imagery, this volume investigates the ways soccer has been promoted, commemorated, and contested in visual terms. Throughout various mediums and formats-including illustrated newspapers, modern posters, and contemporary artworks-soccer has come to represent issues relating to identity, politics, and globalization. As the contributors to this collection suggest, these representations of the game reflect society and soccer's place in our collective imagination. Perspectives from a range of fields including art history, sociology, sport history, and media studies enrich the volume, affording a multifaceted visual history of the beautiful game.




Picturing the Beautiful Game


Book Description

The world's most popular sport, soccer, has long been celebrated as “the beautiful game” for its artistry and aesthetic appeal. Picturing the Beautiful Game: A History of Soccer in Visual Culture and Art is the first collection to examine the rich visual culture of soccer, including the fine arts, design, and mass media. Covering a range of topics related to the game's imagery, this volume investigates the ways soccer has been promoted, commemorated, and contested in visual terms. Throughout various mediums and formats-including illustrated newspapers, modern posters, and contemporary artworks-soccer has come to represent issues relating to identity, politics, and globalization. As the contributors to this collection suggest, these representations of the game reflect society and soccer's place in our collective imagination. Perspectives from a range of fields including art history, sociology, sport history, and media studies enrich the volume, affording a multifaceted visual history of the beautiful game.




Picturing the Beautiful Game


Book Description

From the Oval to the Crystal Palace : the FA Cup Final and its depiction in the Victorian illustrated press / Alexander Leese -- The footballer as the figure of the new man in Italian and Russian avant-garde, 1910s-1930s / Przemysław Strożek -- Imagining reality : critical responses to the commercialization of the beautiful game / Ray Physick.




Picturing the Workers' Olympics and the Spartakiads


Book Description

This volume focuses on the modernist and avant-garde engagement with workers’ sport events that were organised or were planned to be organised in the cities of Central Europe and the USSR in the period of 1920–1932: Frankfurt am Main – Vienna – Moscow – Prague – Budapest – Berlin. During the 1920s and 1930s, two organisations of workers’ sport operated: the Lucerne Sport International/Socialist Workers’ Sport International and the Red Sport International, which held the socialist Workers’ Olympics and the communist Spartakiads, respectively. These events were not aimed at cultivating national victories and individual athletic records, but at mobilising workers for the class struggle and at creating new culture for the working class. This book examines the visual propaganda of the Workers’ Olympics and the Spartakiads expressed through paintings, sculptures, prints, illustrations, posters, postcards, photomontages, photographs, films, theatre and architectural projects. It emphasises the significance of workers’ sport for the artistic and social changes within a utopian project of a new culture, as visualised by the modernist and avant-garde artists, including Varvara Stepanova, Gustav Klucis, and Otto Nagel. This volume is of great use to students and scholars of the history of sport, art history and cultural history in interwar Europe and the Soviet Union.




The Beautiful Game


Book Description




Brazil


Book Description

In anticipation of the 2014 FIFA World Cup, this celebration of Brazil's football obsession captures every angle of the game, the players, and the fans of the most beautiful game on earth. Having photographed football in Brazil for two decades, no one understands the country's passion for the sport better than Christopher Pillitz. From Brazil's sun-kissed beaches to its densely populated favelas, Pillitz reveals the sport as Brazil's religion. His bold and brightly colored photographs show players of every age and walk of life. They take readers from enormous stadiums and prison yards to the tops of tall buildings and a deep-sea oil platform; across countless streets, alleys, and highways; even inside a local seminary where longrobed monks display incredible agility playing in their cassocks. While he captures stylish kicks, athletic headers, swaying dribbles and passes, and the samba and capoeira behind the incredible moves, Pillitz also shows us the wild excitement of the colorful, eccentric fans, and, of course, he reveals the gentle side of the beautiful game--the many women footballers and fans who enjoy the sport as much as their male counterparts. Timed to coincide with Brazil's hosting of the 2014 FIFA World Cup, this absorbing and thrilling collection will help new and seasoned fans understand what football truly represents to the country's people and its culture.




Pour Le Sport


Book Description

This edited volume gathers together studies examining various aspects of physical culture in literature written in French from Europe and around the Francophone world. We define physical culture as the systematic care for and development of the physique, and interpret it to include not only sport in the modern sense, but also all the athletic activities that preceded it or relate to it, such as bodily forms of exercise, leisure, and artistic creation. Our essays pursue diverse interpretive approaches and focus on texts from a wide variety of periods (medieval to the present) and genres (short stories, novels, essays, poetry) in order to consider the fundamental-yet highly neglected-place of physical activities in literature and culture from the French-speaking world. Some of the questions the essays explore include: Does the genre sports literature exist in French, and if so, what are its characteristics? How do governments or other political entities mobilize sports literature? What role do narratives about sports-especially the creation of teams-play in the construction of national, regional and/or local identities? How is physical culture used in literary works for pedagogical or ideological purposes? To what extent do sports performances provide a metaphorical and figurative discourse for discussing literature and culture?




Routledge Handbook of Sport History


Book Description

The Routledge Handbook of Sport History is a new and innovative survey of the discipline of sport history. Global in scope, it examines the key contemporary issues in sports historiography, sheds light on previously ignored topics, and sets an intellectual agenda for the future development of the discipline. The book explores both traditional and non-traditional methodologies in sport history, and traces the interface between sport history and other fields of research, such as literature, material culture and the digital humanities. It considers the importance of key issues such as gender, race, sexuality and politics to our understanding of sport history, and focuses on innovative ways that the scholarship around these issues is challenging accepted discourses. This is the first handbook to include a full section on Indigenous sport history, a topic that has often been ignored in sport history surveys despite its powerful upstream influence on contemporary sport. The book also reflects carefully on the central importance of sport history journals in shaping the development of the discipline. This book is an essential reference for any student, researcher or scholar with an interest in sport history or the relationship between sport and society. It will also be fascinating reading for any historians looking for fresh perspectives on contemporary historiography or social and cultural history.




My Life and the Beautiful Game


Book Description

While kicking a ball through the dusty streets of his Brazilian hometown, young Edson Arantes do Nascimento was given the nickname Pelé so casually that no one remembers its meaning. Today, the name is famous worldwide as belonging to history's greatest soccer player. Here, in Pelé's own words, is his incredible life story: his five goals in the last two games of the 1958 World Cup at the tender age of 17, his glory years with his Brazilian club FC Santos, his role in four World Cup tournaments, his comeback as a member of the storied New York Cosmos, and his lifelong role as goodwill ambassador for the world's favorite sport. Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.




Squeezing Out the Dirt From the Beautiful Game


Book Description

Every year many wrong decisions are made by Referees during football matches; as a result, teams are knocked out of Champions Leagues by fake goals – penalties are awarded to players who dive in the penalty area; offside goals are allowed and legitimate goals are ruled out as offside goals. Many nations miss out on World Cup qualifications because of red cards that were issued to their players for fouls the players had not committed; and in leagues all around the world, teams are relegated because of refereeing errors while teams that may have been relegated, remain in higher divisions. Sadly, there have been death threats made on Referees after video replays showed that they made mistakes which cost teams and nations valuable points, qualifications and trophies. And these death threats are not only irresponsible but criminal. But If Referees are humans and not angels as FIFA wants us to believe; do they need help, and can video technology be the answer? Should video replays be approved to help Referees avoid these monumental errors or should the game continue as it is without video technology or video replays? This book is one of the most unique books you ever read; rather than using words or phrases as titles of chapters as it is in almost every book you and I have read; the titles of chapters of this book are actually sentences; yes, each chapter title, is a sentence – they are sentences made by fictional commentators in four of the more popular football or soccer leagues in the world. Each title sentence covers a specific Referee decision in football. Chapter one is titled with a sentence that covers the award of a penalty to a player who dives in the penalty box. Chapter two has a sentence title that exemplifies a commentator’s reaction when a fine goal is disallowed, and chapter three’s sentence title, deals with the issue of an unwarranted second yellow card to a player whilst the title of chapter four, is: a sentence that shows a commentator’s lamentation when a player is unjustly sent off; and finally chapter five carries in its title, a sentence of a commentator describing the worst decision he has ever seen in three decades of football commentary while calling for football authorities to consider the introduction of video replays to aid Referees.