Face to Face: Enduring Rivalries in World Soccer

by Kausik Bandyopadhyay (Editor)

Overview

While rivalry is embedded in any sporting event or performance, soccer, the world’s most popular mass spectator sport, has been an emblem of such rivalries since its inception as an organized sport. Some of these rivalries grow to become long-term and perennial by their nature, extent, impact and legacy, from the local to the global level. They represent identities based on widely diverse affiliations of human life—locality, region, nation, continent, community, class, culture, religion, ethnicity, and so on. Yet, at times, such rivalries transcend barriers of space and time, where soccer-clubs, -nations, -personalities, -organizations, -styles and -fans float and compete with intriguing identities.

The present volume brings into focus some of the most fascinating and enduring rivalries in the world of soccer. It attempts to encapsulate, analyse and reconstruct those rivalries—between nations, between clubs, between personalities, between styles of play, between fandoms, and between organizations—in a historical perspective in relation to diverse identities, competing ideologies, contestations of power, psychologies of attachment, bonds of loyalty, notions of enmity, articulations of violence, and affinities of fan culture—some of the core manifestations of sporting rivalry.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Soccer & Society.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780367747015
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	03/31/2021
Series:	Sport in the Global Society - Contemporary Perspectives
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.88(w) x 9.69(h) x (d)

About the Author

Kausik Bandyopadhyay is Professor of History at West Bengal State University, Kolkata, India. Formerly a Fellow of the International Olympic Museum, Lausanne (2010) and of the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, Kolkata (2006–2009 and 2013–2015), he is also Deputy Executive Editor of Soccer & Society (Routledge).

Table of Contents

Introduction: rivalries in world'soccer

Kausik Bandyopadhyay

1. Up’Ards, Down’Ards and derbies: figurational reflections on intense enmity in pre-modern English football

Graham Curry

2. The ‘talk o’ the toon’? An examination of the Heart of Midlothian and Hibernian football rivalry in Edinburgh, Scotland

John Kelly and Alan Bairner

3. The ‘Auld Enemy’? Exploring the England vs. Scotland rivalry from the perspective of soccer fans

Stuart Whigham and Tom Gibbons

4. ‘They’re just not my team’: the issue of player allegiances within Irish football, 2007–2012

Conor Murray and David Hassan

5. Laudrup or Ibrahimović: who is the best Scandinavian soccer player of all time?

Søren Frank

6. Atlético versus Real: Madrid’s soccer feud, urban space and stadia

Vicente Rodriguez Ortega

7. Searching for identity through football: the Nicosia derby

Christos Kassimeris and Charis Xinari

8. Derby of a ‘difficult’ history: the Poland-Russia match at Euro 2012

Martin J. Kozon

9. Superclásicos and rivalry antecedents: exploring soccer club rivalries in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico

Charles Parrish and B. David Tyler

10. USA vs. Mexico: history, geopolitics and economics of one of the world’s oldest rivalries in soccer

Steven Apostolov

11. The genesis of team rivalry in the New World: sparks to fan animosity in Major League Soccer

Joe Cobbs and B. David Tyler

12. AFC Leopards and Gor Mahia: footballing rivalry and shared political underdog status in Kenya

W.W.S. Njororai

13. Frenemies: understanding the interconnectedness of rival fan identities in Harare, Zimbabwe

Manase Kudzai Chiweshe

14. See no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil? The press, violence and hooliganism at the ‘Battle of Zimbabwe’

Lyton Ncube and Allen Munoriyarwa

15. PRC v. Hong Kong: politics and identity from the Cold War years to the twenty-first century

Chun Wing Lee

16. Australian soccer rivalries: diasporas, violence and the Balkan connection

Binoy Kampmark