Book Description

"American sports agnostics might raise an eyebrow at the idea that soccer represents a staging ground for progressive cultural, social, and political possibility within the United States. It is just another game, after all, in a society where mass-audience spectator sport largely avoids any political stance in other than a generic, corporate-friendly patriotism. But John Sloop picks up on the work of Laurent Dubois and others to see in American soccer-a sport that has achieved immense participation and popularity even as it struggles to establish major league status-a game that permits surprisingly diverse modes of thinking about national identity because of its marginality. As a rhetorician who engages with both critical theory and culture, John Sloop seeks to read soccer as the game intersects with gender, race, sexuality, class, and the logic of neoliberal values. The result of this engagement is a sense of both enormous possibility, and real constraint. If American soccer offers more possibility because of its marginality, looking at how these cultural, social, and political possibilities are closed off or constrained can provide valuable insights into American culture and values. In Soccer's Neoliberal Pitch, Sloop analyzes a host of soccer-adjacent case studies: the equal pay dispute between the US women's national team and the US Soccer Federation, the significance of hooligan literature, the introduction of English soccer to American TV audiences, the strange invisibility of the Mexican soccer league despite its consistent high TV ratings, and the reading of US national teams as "underdogs" despite the nation's quasi-imperial dominance of the Western hemisphere. While there is a growing bookshelf of titles on soccer and a growing number on American soccer, Soccer's Neoliberal Pitch is the first and only book-length analysis of soccer through a rhetorical lens. This book is a model for critical cultural work with sports, with appeal to not only sports studies, but cultural studies, communication, and even gender studies classrooms. It is, independent of its bona fides, an engaging and enjoyable read for the soccer fan and the soccer-curious"--