Holding Midfield: Book Review: Studying Football by Ellis Cashmore and Kevin Dixon

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“Studying Football” is something of a misnomer, because the sport itself has very little to do with the book. Having a flick through the index, it’s surprising quite how few footballers are listed and very few of them are in there for anything they do out on the turf. The book instead focuses on the culture surrounding football, or more specifically it focuses on the work of academics on the culture surrounding football. Split into twelve sections – an introduction, violence, globalisation, fandom, racism, gender, identity, media, celebrity, consumption, transgression and corruption – the book looks to give a rundown on the academic thought in each topic. The majority of the chapters essentially give a synopsis of whatever theories have been put forward on the subject, giving enough detail to inform but never going far enough down the rabbit hole to lose sight of the overall points. It seems the intention for the book was to be an overview on the few decades since football has been deemed worthy a subject of academic thought rather than a book that has its own theories that it wants to prove. Appropriately, the language of the book never feels inaccessible. Jargon is kept […]

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