Studying Football

Football is the most widely played, watched and studied sport in the world. It’s hard to develop a full understanding of the significance of sport in global society without understanding the significance of football. Studying Football is the first book designed specifically to guide and support the study of football on degree-level courses, across the full range of social-scientific perspectives.

Written by a team of leading international football experts, and considering themes of globalization, corporatization and prejudice and discrimination throughout, it introduces key topics in football studies, including:

• media and celebrity
• identity, fandom and consumption
• gender
• violence
• racism
• corruption

Every chapter includes up-to-date case study material, a ‘Research in Action’ section and features to aid student understanding and bring theory to life. Studying Football introduces all the key themes and facets of the social-scientific study of football, and is therefore an essential text for students on football studies courses and useful reading for any undergraduates studying the sociology of sport more generally.

Ellis Cashmore is the author of Making Sense of Sports, Celebrity Culture (both Routledge) and Beckham (Polity). He is visiting professor of sociology at Aston University, UK and tweets @elliscashmore

Kevin Dixon is the author of Consuming Football in Late Modern Life (Ashgate), "A woman's place recurring: Structuration, football fandom and sub-cultural subservience" (in Sport in Society) and co-editor of The Impact of the London 2012 Olympic & Paralympic Games: Diminishing Contrasts, Increasing Varieties (Palgrave). He is senior lecturer of sports studies at Teesside University, UK and tweets @KevinDixon20