Word: soccer
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...margins of European football in his chapter on the "Black Carpathians." Here, he tracks the story of Edward Anyamkyegh, a Nigerian starlet playing at Karpaty Lviv, a Ukrainian team with a fiercely nationalist tradition. In the Soviet era, the Ukraine was recognized as the cradle of the Union's soccer talent, regularly supplying a majority of the national team's players. But despite its tradition of representing Ukrainian pride (particularly against Russian teams during the Soviet era), the accepted wisdom in independent Ukraine is that soccer success requires buying the best talent available - and given the fact that far wealthier...
...Although a growing elite of international stars have played outside their national borders for much of the postwar period, the globalizing of soccer's labor market really began in earnest during the 1990s. Today's English champions, the London club Arsenal, are managed by a Frenchman, and only two English players feature in their typical starting lineup. When the same club won the championship 15 years ago, a solitary Swede was the only foreigner aboard...
...cosmopolitan impulse in European soccer hails originally from the quest for talent: Differing idioms in how the game is played, organized and coached across the continents over the past century has created a reality where today's winning formula requires blending of a variety of these traditions. But at a business level, also, the clubs are beginning to reflect the impact of globalization. A quarter century ago, the best-capitalized clubs, who could buy the contracts of the best players from lesser clubs and offer them more lucrative deals, were those who could fill the biggest stadiums week...
...rebellious and republican Catalans (Barcelona), but that encoded history which enflames the home crowd's passions means nothing to consumers who might buy either team's shirt at a mall in San Diego or a sports store in Bangkok. The challenge of redefining the terms of identity with a soccer team - an inherently tribal phenomenon in most of the soccer playing world - remains one of the key challenges facing soccer as a business in the era of globalization...
...Jacques sees the increasingly diverse national teams as a powerful symbol of soccer's liberal and progressive potential, but he envisages growing competition between club and nation as the organizing principle of the game. Just as corporations today stain against national boundaries and their attendant responsibilities as they drive towards a supranational existence that transcends national borders in pursuit of markets, skills, cheaper inputs and tax relief, so are the top tier of soccer teams increasingly straining against the nation state (or more specifically, the national football federation). For fans, there's no question that representing one's country...