OVERTURE
A television commercial in which the burden of meaning is carried by a shot of a large silver and black map of the world on which the land is full of tiny holes of slightly varying diameters as though it had been stuck with pins only there are beams of brilliant light shining up [...]

Here are two beliefs which seem to be widespread among intelligent soccer fans online.
1. That football is too much in the pocket of business interests whose treatment of the game as a commodity weakens its ties to local communities and takes it away from its traditional fans.
2. That racism and regional prejudice have [...]

This week's Run of Play at Pitch Invasion feature looks at the problem of communication in the globalized world of contemporary football, and asks how, with such a wide range of languages in use at any given moment, players, managers, fans and the media are ever able to understand one another.
When an average club contains [...]

We're going to plan ahead, take it slow, and above all, respect the situation. The Dutch police have made it easier for us by forcing the postponement of the Ajax - PSV match, but we still have three consecutive games that would individually suffice to flutter the needle on a seismograph. You're going [...]

Arsenal, Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool are the most popular teams in Africa, at least according to the latest issue of the Economist, which also contains the rather striking information that Africa has outpaced Asia to become the Premier League's largest fan base. The anonymous writer of this suspiciously cocktail-napkin-sized piece has no time to [...]

Dani Rodrik has a good follow-up post on globalization and football. Among other worthwhile links, he points to a paper in the August Journal of Finance (you have to pay to read it, but can see the abstract for free) which appears to show that national team losses lead to declining stock markets. (Economists: is [...]

A number of prominent economics and policy blogs have started an interesting discussion today on the effects of globalization in football. The political economist Dani Rodrik looks at the influx of African players into European leagues and considers the implications for national teams and for the quality of domestic play in Africa:
[I]t is likely that [...]