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McDougall: Contested Fields
Few cultural activities speak more powerfully to international histories of the modern world than football. In the late nineteenth century, this cheap and simple sport emerged as a major legacy of Britain’s formal and informal empires and spread quickly across Europe, South America, and Africa. Today, football (known to many as soccer) is arguably the world’s most popular pastime, an activity played and watched by millions of people around the globe. Contested Fields introduces readers to key aspects of the global game, synthesizing research on football’s transnational role in reflecting and shaping political, socio-economic, and cultural developments over the past 150 years. Each chapter uses case studies and cutting-edge scholarship to analyze an important element of football’s international migration, money, competition, gender, race, space, spectatorship, and confrontation.
- GenresSports
256 pages, Hardcover
Published February 28, 2020
About the author
Alan Mcdougall
15 books3 followersDr. McDougall is professor of history at University of Guelph.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 31, 2021
I have a real soft spot for histories that integrate existing knowledge and develop new ways of making sense of and extending fields of study, especially in historical studies where that discipline is, to a large degree, dominated by methodological nationalism, where the nation-state (noting the differences between the two) has become the defacto frame of understanding. In my field of sports history this restrictive view is enhanced further by code-based framing – for instance, those students of American football who know next to nothing about its close cousins, rugby union and rugby league, or the scholars of hockey who can tell us next to nothing about lacrosse, even when it is played by the same people in the same communities. This problem is profound in studies of the football codes, where there at least 8 different versions of the game as well as an array of team size and non-contact variations of many of those codes.
In football studies this problem of nation and code specificity is exacerbated by the global dominance of one of those codes and its, not unwarranted, self-promotion as the ‘global game’. One of the refreshing trends in the last 20 or so years has been the emergence of international and cross-code comparative discussions, starting with the now defunct Australian-based Football Studies Group and now in the UK-based Football History Conference. While methodological nationalism remains potent, code-specificity is weakening. This useful and engaging broad sweep across football history takes as its focus the limitations of a national focus to develop a thematically organised global discussion the histories of the association version football, soccer. It also needs to be understood as targeting not a specialist audience, but as part of a series of books engaging the discipline more broadly – making it an integrative, introductory text – and all the more welcome for that.
Fittingly for a thematic, integrative global history McDougall starts his discussion by focusing on migrations – of players and the game – before moving on to explore commercial and financialised aspects of the game, and the emergence of international structured competitive play. That is to say, he uses the opening three chapters to set up the structures of global football. From here he moves on the explore questions of social stratification with chapters exploring gender and race. Here, as in many other places, he exposes gaps and deficiencies in scholarship, often unintentionally. That is to say, the gender chapter includes an engaging and welcome discussion of masculinity, looking at ways football sustains the power hierarchies of gender. While there is a solid, small but growing, research base to delve into this question, the chapter on race however does not mention whiteness or the ways football’s reproduction of whiteness-associated hierarchies sustains racialized power. In this, he is also entirely consistent with the research base in that that work tends to be grounded in the liberal discourses of inclusion, rather than discourses of racialized transformation (and I stress, this is a weakness in the field, not in McDougall’s scholarship). Finally, he shifts focus to explore sites and aspects of engagements with football through discussions of its spaces, mainly but not exclusively stadia, spectatorship and its articulation to wider modes of social confrontation and conflict.
The synthesis is powerful, and McDougall has done well to reach out to global perspectives. It may be that as a Canadian author (and fan) his engagement with the game is not hamstrung by the blinkers imposed western European self-perception as football’s heart (including British mythification of its ‘homeland’ status) or Central & South American blinkers derived from the game’s cultural as well as social hegemony. There is compelling engagement with the small and growing body of work on football in Africa and across Asia, although the global history emphasis means that this is limited to a small number of places with international profiles (although not exclusively – American Samoa and Palestine get a (brief) look in). He is also good at rupturing the gendered presumptions of the game’s hierarchies noting the significant differences emerging from an emphasis on women’s and men’s football.
As powerful as the analysis is (and I am resisting the quibbles of emphasis or accuracy) I am frustrated by the production decisions taken about referencing. It is always a tricky issue, especially in a case such as this where the discussion is overwhelmingly grounded in existing literature. The approach taken it that some (but not all) quotations merit a chapter endnote, and that each chapter also has a select bibliography. This, however, means that there are quite a few claims and statements that seem to be unsourced (although as a scholar in the field I recognise the accuracy of many of them). More frustratingly there is a risk that this may undermine the goal of enhancing engagement with the field more widely in the discipline. For instance, there is a supportive comment in the conclusion about an oral history project in women’s football, which in its reference to Manchester City Ladies I presume is the long running work by Gary James, but no citation or bibliographic entry. This sources issue is enhanced by code-specificity and the surprising omission of both global histories and comparative studies by Tony Collins. I’m sure there are more, but these are two sets of work that seem to be directly associated with points made.
That said, this remains a welcome and valuable contribution to the field, especially as an introductory text for students but also as a way to encourage scholars in other sub-disciplines to look to sport in general or football specifically as part of their social, cultural, political or other forms of work. It deserves to be widely read.
In football studies this problem of nation and code specificity is exacerbated by the global dominance of one of those codes and its, not unwarranted, self-promotion as the ‘global game’. One of the refreshing trends in the last 20 or so years has been the emergence of international and cross-code comparative discussions, starting with the now defunct Australian-based Football Studies Group and now in the UK-based Football History Conference. While methodological nationalism remains potent, code-specificity is weakening. This useful and engaging broad sweep across football history takes as its focus the limitations of a national focus to develop a thematically organised global discussion the histories of the association version football, soccer. It also needs to be understood as targeting not a specialist audience, but as part of a series of books engaging the discipline more broadly – making it an integrative, introductory text – and all the more welcome for that.
Fittingly for a thematic, integrative global history McDougall starts his discussion by focusing on migrations – of players and the game – before moving on to explore commercial and financialised aspects of the game, and the emergence of international structured competitive play. That is to say, he uses the opening three chapters to set up the structures of global football. From here he moves on the explore questions of social stratification with chapters exploring gender and race. Here, as in many other places, he exposes gaps and deficiencies in scholarship, often unintentionally. That is to say, the gender chapter includes an engaging and welcome discussion of masculinity, looking at ways football sustains the power hierarchies of gender. While there is a solid, small but growing, research base to delve into this question, the chapter on race however does not mention whiteness or the ways football’s reproduction of whiteness-associated hierarchies sustains racialized power. In this, he is also entirely consistent with the research base in that that work tends to be grounded in the liberal discourses of inclusion, rather than discourses of racialized transformation (and I stress, this is a weakness in the field, not in McDougall’s scholarship). Finally, he shifts focus to explore sites and aspects of engagements with football through discussions of its spaces, mainly but not exclusively stadia, spectatorship and its articulation to wider modes of social confrontation and conflict.
The synthesis is powerful, and McDougall has done well to reach out to global perspectives. It may be that as a Canadian author (and fan) his engagement with the game is not hamstrung by the blinkers imposed western European self-perception as football’s heart (including British mythification of its ‘homeland’ status) or Central & South American blinkers derived from the game’s cultural as well as social hegemony. There is compelling engagement with the small and growing body of work on football in Africa and across Asia, although the global history emphasis means that this is limited to a small number of places with international profiles (although not exclusively – American Samoa and Palestine get a (brief) look in). He is also good at rupturing the gendered presumptions of the game’s hierarchies noting the significant differences emerging from an emphasis on women’s and men’s football.
As powerful as the analysis is (and I am resisting the quibbles of emphasis or accuracy) I am frustrated by the production decisions taken about referencing. It is always a tricky issue, especially in a case such as this where the discussion is overwhelmingly grounded in existing literature. The approach taken it that some (but not all) quotations merit a chapter endnote, and that each chapter also has a select bibliography. This, however, means that there are quite a few claims and statements that seem to be unsourced (although as a scholar in the field I recognise the accuracy of many of them). More frustratingly there is a risk that this may undermine the goal of enhancing engagement with the field more widely in the discipline. For instance, there is a supportive comment in the conclusion about an oral history project in women’s football, which in its reference to Manchester City Ladies I presume is the long running work by Gary James, but no citation or bibliographic entry. This sources issue is enhanced by code-specificity and the surprising omission of both global histories and comparative studies by Tony Collins. I’m sure there are more, but these are two sets of work that seem to be directly associated with points made.
That said, this remains a welcome and valuable contribution to the field, especially as an introductory text for students but also as a way to encourage scholars in other sub-disciplines to look to sport in general or football specifically as part of their social, cultural, political or other forms of work. It deserves to be widely read.
July 23, 2021
Hmm. I read it for my college history class about soccer but it was interesting. Rambled a lot but I did in fact read it.
Read
March 9, 2024This was for class I sorta read it but mostly didn’t but if you’re interested in soccer and politics it is really quite fascinating
January 29, 2025
Read for class! Really enjoyed how many case studies/examples he included.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews