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Gaming the World: How Sports Are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture
Professional sports today have truly become a global force, a common language that anyone, regardless of their nationality, can understand. Yet sports also remain distinctly local, with regional teams and the fiercely loyal local fans that follow them. This book examines the twenty-first-century phenomenon of global sports, in which professional teams and their players have become agents of globalization while at the same time fostering deep-seated and antagonistic local allegiances and spawning new forms of cultural conflict and prejudice.
Andrei Markovits and Lars Rensmann take readers into the exciting global sports scene, showing how soccer, football, baseball, basketball, and hockey have given rise to a collective identity among millions of predominantly male fans in the United States, Europe, and around the rest of the world. They trace how these global--and globalizing--sports emerged from local pastimes in America, Britain, and Canada over the course of the twentieth century, and how regionalism continues to exert its divisive influence in new and potentially explosive ways. Markovits and Rensmann explore the complex interplay between the global and the local in sports today, demonstrating how sports have opened new avenues for dialogue and shared interest internationally even as they reinforce old antagonisms and create new ones.
"Gaming the World" reveals the pervasive influence of sports on our daily lives, making all of us citizens of an increasingly cosmopolitan world while affirming our local, regional, and national identities.
Andrei Markovits and Lars Rensmann take readers into the exciting global sports scene, showing how soccer, football, baseball, basketball, and hockey have given rise to a collective identity among millions of predominantly male fans in the United States, Europe, and around the rest of the world. They trace how these global--and globalizing--sports emerged from local pastimes in America, Britain, and Canada over the course of the twentieth century, and how regionalism continues to exert its divisive influence in new and potentially explosive ways. Markovits and Rensmann explore the complex interplay between the global and the local in sports today, demonstrating how sports have opened new avenues for dialogue and shared interest internationally even as they reinforce old antagonisms and create new ones.
"Gaming the World" reveals the pervasive influence of sports on our daily lives, making all of us citizens of an increasingly cosmopolitan world while affirming our local, regional, and national identities.
- GenresSports
360 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2010
9 people are currently reading
43 people want to read
About the author
Andrei S. Markovits
33 books5 followersAndrei S. Markovits is Professor of Politics in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan. He is the author of numerous books, including The German Left: Red, Green and Beyond and The German Predicament: Memory and Power in the New Europe.
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December 27, 2023
THE EDUCATION OF AMERICAN WOMEN FOOTBALLERS
Introduction
Andrei S. Markovits'Gaming the World: How Sports Are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture (2013) argues that American soccer has evolved differently from European football because of different sports spaces. This review examines how a fundamental element of broader society, its educational system, influenced and shaped sports differently in the United States than in Europe. I argue that the impact of education in America was transformational in shaping women's soccer because of a unique Federal Law, Title IX. In contrast, the impact of its educational system in Europe was orthogonal, where society viewed education as entirely separate from sports.
The Early Years
The traditional route for young U.S. girls to play professional soccer starts with a private youth academy system called Pay-to-Play. In Europe, girls train at club-subsidized academies instead of private Pay-to-Play academies. These academies provide youth football players, free of charge, with everything they need, including paying for their education. In America, only children of parents who can afford academy training receive training [1]. America's education relationship is markedly different because sports are part of the curriculum in U.S. high schools. Consequently, a child from lower-income parents could get a break regarding trying to become a professional soccer player when she reaches high school age. At that age, she could attend a high school with a soccer program and enter the pipeline for sports fame and fortune that way.
The Under-23 National Teams
In the United States, the relationship between education and soccer is off and on. It was off at the youth academy stage and on during high school. The relationship is off again as the U.S. Soccer girls move up the pipeline to professional football through the Under-23 system, youth teams operating under U.S. Soccer's auspices and run parallel to public school soccer systems to prepare elite soccer players for the U.S. National Team's senior squad. [2].Europe's Under-21 teams are similar in structure to the American system regarding the education/sports equation. The main difference between the two systems is structural and organizational. Europe's Under-21 teams are less ad hoc than the American's. They are regularly scheduled, regulated, monitored, standardized, and coordinated, occurring more frequently than their American counterparts. [3].
The College Years
Europeans' separation of education from sports is such that few professional football players attend college. Conversely, while the American intelligentsia feels the same disdain for sports as their European counterparts, sports and education have long been symbiotic in the U.S. because high school and university campuses were traditional training grounds for becoming professional players. Still, U.S. women's soccer could not take advantage of that training due to male negative attitudes and because men's football, basketball, hockey, and baseball had already occupied that space. The U.S. government, however, considerably radically this gender bias in sports by passing a federal law known as Title IX.
Title IX
Title IX is known for its impact on expanding opportunities for women and girls in a boys- and men-dominated space. In 1972, just over 300,000 women and girls played college and high school sports in the United States. By 2012, the number of girls participating in high school sports had risen tenfold to more than 3 million. One of these sports, women's soccer, exploded exponentially to become the favored team sport among college women [4].
Before Title IX women's soccer was a self-organizing, inexplicable, strange wildflower in a strange land that would take nearly a decade before it burst out in full bloom in 1991. That year, the women's team won the first-ever FIFA Women's World Cup in China. That victory put American soccer on notice when the legendary Anson Dorrance team took advantage of Title IX to single-handedly put North Carolina and U.S. women's soccer on the world map. However, while Dorrance and his mainly North Carolina team found international fame by beating China abroad, the Americans found neither fortune nor fame back home. When the team returned to the States, Gold in hand, adored by hundreds of thousands foreigners, most Americans still regarded soccer, men's and women's, as an import, dubious as the metric system, quiche, and socialism. [5].
However, after the women played the World Cup in China, the Europeans saw the women's game differently than the Americans. They became aware of women's football's popularity and commercial potential. Subsequently, teams such as Germany, France, England, and Spain, formed alliances with the women by integrating their footfall with the men's for mutual benefit. The European Federations facilitated this male-female sports integration through the science of advanced sports management, a business/entertainment method that the football federations had already applied successfully to the men's clubs [9].
With its quantum leap in power and presence, the NWSL started to control national team selection, as evidenced by the increased number of players affiliated with the Clubs. Whether they made the final 2023 roster primarily depended on their performance on those fields, as in Europe, and not their colleges'. However, this new criteria for selecting National team players appears to have little effect on the profile of the 2023 squad compared to the one in 2019. For example, although the average age of last year's U.S. Senior Squad declined by 7.0%, the number of players who attended college or a private prep school remained unchanged. [10].
However, one statistics that came up puzzled me. The number of black ballers increased from .09 % in 2019 to 42% in 2023. At first, I thought that this increase in minority players indicated the decline in the importance of college to reach the National Team. However, looking at the more finite numbers regarding where this group attended college through a less stereotypical lens, I found that the percent of black players who attended prestigious soccer colleges was actually higher (2023 = 46% vs. 2019 = 43%) than the highly educated white players on the 2019 team.
For example, Naomi Girma, perhaps the most gifted player on the 2023 team, went to Stanford, where she studied Symbolic Systems. Girma is the daughter of Ethiopian professionals who emigrated to Silicon Valley. Alana Cook went to a ritzy boarding school before she graduated from Stanford with the same major as Naomi. Other 2023 black players include M.A. Vignola, who is biracial and whose adoptive parents are white. Vignola played soccer at a Catholic prep school and graduated from the University of Virginia. Mia Fishel, whose family on her mother's side is from Bermuda, played forward and studied psychology at UCLA before signing with Mexican club Tigres UANL instead of the Orlando Pride, who drafted her first.
Midge Purce prepped at an East Coast private Catholic school and went to Harvard before playing for for Gotham FC, where she won the 2023 NWSL MVP. Purce is the only Harvard graduate to ever play for the National Team, and when the Biden White House asked her to introduce the First Lady at a ceremony honoring the team, she said:
The most visible player of Purce's 2023 unique cohort is Sophia Smith, who is biracial and went to Stanford. Her journey to the top, as was the case of all the players discussed, was entirely within the Title IX model. Her parents raised her in a middle-class suburb near Denver, Colorado. Her white soccer mom shuttled her back and forth to attend white Pay-to-Play academies, including Real Colorado, where its Jamaican coach, Lorne Donaldson, recognized that Smith was a prodigy. Donaldson also coached Mallory Swanson who would be a starting forward in 2023 with Smith had she not suffered a season-ending injury. Swanson, ne Pugh, who is also biracial, successfully studied calculus at UCLA.
Another Smith teammate who would also be in this select group were it not for an injury is Catarina Macario, the daughter of emigrant Brazilian professionals. Macario graduated from Stanford before joining the French powerhouse Club, Lyon Olympique. Trinity Rodman, the biracial daughter of NBA iconoclast Dennis Rodman, could also be a part of this group. Following the traditional path to professional football, Trinity attended college for a semester before the university shut down its soccer program because of COVID-19. A front four in a 3-3-4 formation of Rodman, Smith, Macario, and Swanson could beat any women's national team any time, any day with their unique American style of play. That style, which had characterized the Americans up to the 2023 World for decades, included physical strength, speed, endurance, and relentless transition play. However, what the Europeans admired the most about the Americans was their mental game, which was to win, even if it meant taking no prisoners
Introduction
Andrei S. Markovits'Gaming the World: How Sports Are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture (2013) argues that American soccer has evolved differently from European football because of different sports spaces. This review examines how a fundamental element of broader society, its educational system, influenced and shaped sports differently in the United States than in Europe. I argue that the impact of education in America was transformational in shaping women's soccer because of a unique Federal Law, Title IX. In contrast, the impact of its educational system in Europe was orthogonal, where society viewed education as entirely separate from sports.
The Early Years
The traditional route for young U.S. girls to play professional soccer starts with a private youth academy system called Pay-to-Play. In Europe, girls train at club-subsidized academies instead of private Pay-to-Play academies. These academies provide youth football players, free of charge, with everything they need, including paying for their education. In America, only children of parents who can afford academy training receive training [1]. America's education relationship is markedly different because sports are part of the curriculum in U.S. high schools. Consequently, a child from lower-income parents could get a break regarding trying to become a professional soccer player when she reaches high school age. At that age, she could attend a high school with a soccer program and enter the pipeline for sports fame and fortune that way.
The Under-23 National Teams
In the United States, the relationship between education and soccer is off and on. It was off at the youth academy stage and on during high school. The relationship is off again as the U.S. Soccer girls move up the pipeline to professional football through the Under-23 system, youth teams operating under U.S. Soccer's auspices and run parallel to public school soccer systems to prepare elite soccer players for the U.S. National Team's senior squad. [2].Europe's Under-21 teams are similar in structure to the American system regarding the education/sports equation. The main difference between the two systems is structural and organizational. Europe's Under-21 teams are less ad hoc than the American's. They are regularly scheduled, regulated, monitored, standardized, and coordinated, occurring more frequently than their American counterparts. [3].
The College Years
Europeans' separation of education from sports is such that few professional football players attend college. Conversely, while the American intelligentsia feels the same disdain for sports as their European counterparts, sports and education have long been symbiotic in the U.S. because high school and university campuses were traditional training grounds for becoming professional players. Still, U.S. women's soccer could not take advantage of that training due to male negative attitudes and because men's football, basketball, hockey, and baseball had already occupied that space. The U.S. government, however, considerably radically this gender bias in sports by passing a federal law known as Title IX.
Title IX
Title IX is known for its impact on expanding opportunities for women and girls in a boys- and men-dominated space. In 1972, just over 300,000 women and girls played college and high school sports in the United States. By 2012, the number of girls participating in high school sports had risen tenfold to more than 3 million. One of these sports, women's soccer, exploded exponentially to become the favored team sport among college women [4].
Before Title IX women's soccer was a self-organizing, inexplicable, strange wildflower in a strange land that would take nearly a decade before it burst out in full bloom in 1991. That year, the women's team won the first-ever FIFA Women's World Cup in China. That victory put American soccer on notice when the legendary Anson Dorrance team took advantage of Title IX to single-handedly put North Carolina and U.S. women's soccer on the world map. However, while Dorrance and his mainly North Carolina team found international fame by beating China abroad, the Americans found neither fortune nor fame back home. When the team returned to the States, Gold in hand, adored by hundreds of thousands foreigners, most Americans still regarded soccer, men's and women's, as an import, dubious as the metric system, quiche, and socialism. [5].
However, after the women played the World Cup in China, the Europeans saw the women's game differently than the Americans. They became aware of women's football's popularity and commercial potential. Subsequently, teams such as Germany, France, England, and Spain, formed alliances with the women by integrating their footfall with the men's for mutual benefit. The European Federations facilitated this male-female sports integration through the science of advanced sports management, a business/entertainment method that the football federations had already applied successfully to the men's clubs [9].
With its quantum leap in power and presence, the NWSL started to control national team selection, as evidenced by the increased number of players affiliated with the Clubs. Whether they made the final 2023 roster primarily depended on their performance on those fields, as in Europe, and not their colleges'. However, this new criteria for selecting National team players appears to have little effect on the profile of the 2023 squad compared to the one in 2019. For example, although the average age of last year's U.S. Senior Squad declined by 7.0%, the number of players who attended college or a private prep school remained unchanged. [10].
However, one statistics that came up puzzled me. The number of black ballers increased from .09 % in 2019 to 42% in 2023. At first, I thought that this increase in minority players indicated the decline in the importance of college to reach the National Team. However, looking at the more finite numbers regarding where this group attended college through a less stereotypical lens, I found that the percent of black players who attended prestigious soccer colleges was actually higher (2023 = 46% vs. 2019 = 43%) than the highly educated white players on the 2019 team.
For example, Naomi Girma, perhaps the most gifted player on the 2023 team, went to Stanford, where she studied Symbolic Systems. Girma is the daughter of Ethiopian professionals who emigrated to Silicon Valley. Alana Cook went to a ritzy boarding school before she graduated from Stanford with the same major as Naomi. Other 2023 black players include M.A. Vignola, who is biracial and whose adoptive parents are white. Vignola played soccer at a Catholic prep school and graduated from the University of Virginia. Mia Fishel, whose family on her mother's side is from Bermuda, played forward and studied psychology at UCLA before signing with Mexican club Tigres UANL instead of the Orlando Pride, who drafted her first.
Midge Purce prepped at an East Coast private Catholic school and went to Harvard before playing for for Gotham FC, where she won the 2023 NWSL MVP. Purce is the only Harvard graduate to ever play for the National Team, and when the Biden White House asked her to introduce the First Lady at a ceremony honoring the team, she said:
"You would never expect a flower to bloom without water, but women in sport who have been denied water, sunlight, and soil are somehow expected to blossom. Invest in women, then let's talk again when you see the return. [11].Purce was agitating for equal pay, a cause that the famous 1999 team began. She shared the podium with Megan Rapinoe, the iconic firebrand of the 2019 team.
The most visible player of Purce's 2023 unique cohort is Sophia Smith, who is biracial and went to Stanford. Her journey to the top, as was the case of all the players discussed, was entirely within the Title IX model. Her parents raised her in a middle-class suburb near Denver, Colorado. Her white soccer mom shuttled her back and forth to attend white Pay-to-Play academies, including Real Colorado, where its Jamaican coach, Lorne Donaldson, recognized that Smith was a prodigy. Donaldson also coached Mallory Swanson who would be a starting forward in 2023 with Smith had she not suffered a season-ending injury. Swanson, ne Pugh, who is also biracial, successfully studied calculus at UCLA.
Another Smith teammate who would also be in this select group were it not for an injury is Catarina Macario, the daughter of emigrant Brazilian professionals. Macario graduated from Stanford before joining the French powerhouse Club, Lyon Olympique. Trinity Rodman, the biracial daughter of NBA iconoclast Dennis Rodman, could also be a part of this group. Following the traditional path to professional football, Trinity attended college for a semester before the university shut down its soccer program because of COVID-19. A front four in a 3-3-4 formation of Rodman, Smith, Macario, and Swanson could beat any women's national team any time, any day with their unique American style of play. That style, which had characterized the Americans up to the 2023 World for decades, included physical strength, speed, endurance, and relentless transition play. However, what the Europeans admired the most about the Americans was their mental game, which was to win, even if it meant taking no prisoners
January 13, 2013
One of my favorite niche subjects is sports anthropology, particularly as it applies to modern society. I loved Markovits' previous book on the same (general) subject, Offside, which explored the difference between American and European attitudes towards hegemonic sports. Gaming The World updates a lot of the information from Offside and considers how modern sports encourage cosmopolitanism and a greater global inclusiveness. It's a fantastic look at what Europe and America have to learn from one another, drawing parallels between European club and American college teams, and explaining in greater detail how the differences between each area's sports culture have been and can continue to be used for mutual improvement. It also has a great chapter on the growing role of women in sports. In general, it was less dense than Offside, and only really lost my interest when it started spouting American college football statistics (snooze.) My only real argument with the text was the implication that being pro-Palestine is somehow anti-Semitic, which is rubbish. Apart from that, a compelling read.
June 12, 2017
Gaming the World is an excellent introduction to sports history and the history of globalization. Interesting and accessible, it covers the globe and the way sports are both a product and producer of globalization. The metaphor used to great success throughout the book is language. And although that metaphor make linguists frustrated, it can be applied in service of teaching the concept of global sports.
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February 6, 2020Read for SOC 347 - Globalization of Sport
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