From the age of six until my freshman year of high school i was into the game of soccer and played for my town along with a local club. One of my many accomplishments during this time was being chosen to try out for the Olympic Development Program. This relates to the reading because i went up against players from the northeast in tryouts for a position on this team.
http://www.usyouthsoccer.org/
Stages of the global: Media sport, racialization and the last temptation of Zinedine Zidane
The institution of the media is an enormously powerful force in shaping knowledge and understanding of increasingly dynamic, complex societies. This is not to argue, of course, that the media are all-powerful, creating new ideologies and values out of thin air.
Reaction: This statement is so true because from an early age one can learn their alphabet, numbers along with other vital things which are important to human development. Media also shapes our understanding of what is going on around the world and helps us to broaden our knowledge.
Without media I don’t think that sports would be as big as it is today. Media helps people to follow teams from all over the world in real time. However, if you missed the game you will get all the important highlights that shaped the final outcome. Media brings people who share a certain commonality together.
A Short not on ‘race’
The meanings of ‘race’ generated through such processes both draw on and re-draw those located at their points of origin, and are diffused through global commodification into new zones of cultural interpretation.
In the case of Zidane you can see that race causes you to do things that you will end up regretting for the rest of you life. His actions showed that you have to be strong willed and put your pride away in cases like he was in.
Global boys: Exploring experiences of acculturation amongst migrant youth footballers in Premier League academies
The rule of recruiting youths from abroad has been around for centuries. European countries realized that they needed new talent back in the late nineteen hundreds so they started looking at countries they once occupied. These academic schools are very rigorous for these youths but it is molding them into players the club will hopefully use.
Players are not the only people who migrate to these school also coaches and future majors.
Acculturation as an experiential facet of globalization
‘acculturating strategies’ through which migrants make decisions as to what extent they wish to maintain their indigenous cultural heritage and/or embrace their culture of settlement. These strategies include: assimilation, in which the migrant actively interacts with the host culture whilst showing little or no desire for indigenous cultural maintenance; separation, where indigenous cultural norms are maintained with no desire to embrace the host culture; marginalization, when neither cultural maintenance nor interaction with the host culture are desired; and integration, when both the maintenance of one’s cultural behaviors and involvement in the host society are sought (Berry, 1997).
Acculturation is the movement from a norm that you know to the adaption of new customs and traditions.
The four things that these individuals might encounter in the new environment are transformation, relativization, accommodation and hybridization.
This TIFO relates to the readings that we did. It shows how difficult it can be to be a coach in Europe. Coaches are faced with a lot of pressure from the avid fans along with having to produce for the clubs.
http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/news/football-levski-coach-petev-keen-stay-despite-fan-132838628–sow.html
TIFO
This video shows how dedicated the fans are to these European clubs. Also we see from the video that traditions and songs are vital to the game of soccer. This video can give someone who has never been to a match the opportunity to visualize and feel certain emotions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iLL57puZPM
TIFO
What im looking at today for my TIFO are the sponsors for the Italian soccer team. I was also looking at the roster to see if they have non-Italian players playing for them now and if so how many.
http://www.figc.it/eng/sponsor.shtml?3215
TIFO
This article shows the longest rivalries in the game of soccer in Europe. These rivalries create and bring back nostalgia memories to fans that attend each year. Some of these rivalries started when these clubs were created making these games mean more.
http://listverse.com/2010/08/18/top-10-soccer-club-rivalries-of-all-time/
U.S. Ambivalence Toward the World Cup and American Nationalism
Given the preeminent role that mass media plays in both the formation of national communities and dissemination of international sporting events, it is not surprising that this well- developed body of literature on sport and national identity has often taken texts created by the media as a primary source of data.
Reaction: Mass media is very important to nationalism because everyone watches television or reads the newspaper so it is easy to build nationalism.
National Identity and Sport
Sports helps you to express yourself in a public place which makes you feel like your part a larger community when you see others who are routing for the same team. Media helps by to enhance this feeling by the language that they use along with the visual.
Question: How can sports provide a particular potent site for national groups to articulate the way they prefer to represent themselves and to be seen by relevant others?
National Sporting Styles
Nationality is often invoked through the allocation of sporting style. This comes with the playing style, tactics and skills that differentiate teams.
What binds the representation of teams and fans together is the tendency to present style as a characteristic of that nation more generally. In this sense, collective performance and shared understandings of sport become framed as indicative, or “indexical” (Blain & O’Donnell, 1998, p. 369), of broader behavioral and mental patterns thought to be rooted in national identity.
American Exceptionalism
the reason for soccer not being popular in the united states can be because of the other sports that crowded it out. Another is that soccer does not hold the same cultural significance as it does in many other parts of the world.
TIFO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iLL57puZPM
The reforms that were made to the soccer program did not benefit the small clubs. This caused the smaller clubs to reject ideas that would benefit the larger clubs when things were voted upon. This made the larger clubs form other confederations. The issues that the small clubs faced were that they could not acquire the best players because the larger clubs got them all. This also forced the small clubs to drop into leagues where they could compete and make money. Large clubs were able to build up a following by paying fans to go to away games. Acquiring the best athletes was a vital part to the clubs success but we also see that fan support was a major factor in the outcome of games. While the game was developing so was the officiating aspect. We see from the article that the referees were conscientious about where they were when making calls and how the call would be received by the fans and later the committee.
The protracted season also only highlighted the stark division between the wealthy and poor clubs. A rich minority capable of winning the title had emerged but the demands placed upon them had also become more exacting as supporters demanded stronger squads, which required more money to attract the best players. Many games had also become unattractive mismatches between the rich and poor, the real business of the season commencing only once the play-off positions had been decided. Unable to break into the league’s elite due to their financial limitations, the poorer teams were left with little to fight for other than survival (Martin 56). Continue reading
Who Really Invented Modern Football
Nominal record linkage indicates that this development was essentially driven by schoolteachers, clerks, bookkeepers and accountants using their social and cultural capital rather than the transference of public school culture through returning public schoolboys.
Reaction: This is interesting how a sport like soccer that was not played by all used by schools. What was the purpose if not a lot of people played it?
The counties of Lancashire and Yorkshire were, however, to maintain their fierce rivalry and, by the nineteenth century, this had translated onto the sporting field. Part of this rivalry will be examined in this article as we identify and discuss the contribution of the two counties in the north of England and their distinctive roles in the creation of modern professional association football.(1427)
Reaction: In class we talked about how soccer was a way of showing superiority well this stanza shows that you can be united but you will always have differences. Also we see that the creation of soccer was drawn from other sports like rugby and the rules and regulations were implemented as the years moved along. We start to see a discrepancy in who followed which rules the FA or the Sheffield’s. Along with not knowing what rules to follow both contradicted one another. To answer the question of who invented soccer I feel that it came together as the years went on. We see that rules were created and then changed by other individuals to make the game different than Rugby. Schools were also important in the spread of the game also.
Unequal Development:
In the eighteenth century was the first attempt to utilize race as a scientific concept. A French anatomist Cuvier started this in 1817 and he divided the races into three subspecies Caucasians, Mongolians and Ethiopians. All this make different races start being more superior to others. Cuvier states “ whites had gained dominion over the world and made the most rapid progress in science. ‘Yellows’ were less advanced, and blacks degraded”. So race was used as a taxon. To spread the ideology they used novels and people who were notable.
Early Social Science:
The ecological theory developed by Robert E. Park in Chicago maintained that migration brought distinctive people into contact; competition made them conscious of what distinguished them, and those in a superior status developed prejudice as a defensive reaction.
Reaction: Competition creates racial tension and this is why we see migrant people face difficulties when they migrate to a new country. How can science be the way Continue reading