Thousands of fans packed out stadiums for the 1971 women’s World Cup, but it has been virtually erased from history.
- Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Leicester
Women’s football is winning hearts and minds in Britain. But there’s still a lot of work to do to overcome ingrained male prejudice.
The most prolific goal scorer in the history of top-flight English football, Greaves slid into alcoholism but fought his way back to become a household name on television.
Liverpool fan John Williams has banished the ghosts of 30 years. Liverpool are champions of the English Premier League and, as far as he is concerned, things are as they should be.
It can be difficult, emotional and expensive following a football team. A sports sociologist explains why it’s worth it.
There is still a place in a sport that remains connected to communities.
Every England fan in Moscow knows that that football is ‘coming home’, but can England really claim to be where the world’s most popular sport rests its head?
Ten months after guiding outsiders Leicester to the Premier League title – arguably the greatest shock in the history of the English game – the club’s manager has been unceremoniously sacked.
Why is England incapable of producing the same sort of intelligent and inspiring football coaches as its rivals?
From football to the space race and folklore to the forest, here's why you should back the little guy.
There is no point in trying to explain how it happened – we just need to enjoy it.
Why the loss of the pioneering great, Johan Cruyff, is being felt beyond the world of football.
Blatter’s re-election reflects the powerful rejoinder he’s made to the Eurocentric view of football. But he’ll be hard pressed to outlive the latest crisis.
Palestine is spearheading an international effort to get Israel booted out of FIFA – but the organisation just wants to stay out of politics.
Guaranteeing an honest, competent and financially stable Commonwealth Games host after the calamities of Delhi 2010 may not have been an altogether easy task for the games organising committee. Athletes…
No one can say the Germans did not deserve to win the 2014 World Cup: they remained unbeaten throughout, destroyed the hosts along the way, and then saw off those other historic guardians of South American…
Parlour game time. Who has been the best player at the 2014 World Cup finals? The usual suspects are all here: the now-stricken Neymar, the great Messi, even the non-stop German false number nine, Muller…
Two staple narratives of World Cups past and present have been crammed into just one week: the enduringly dire state of the England national football team, and a convenient (for FIFA) morality tale about…
I was at the Matisse exhibition at the Tate Modern this week (Yes, I know, top show-off metrosexual). I was with my mate JJ, who had travelled in from the artistic meta-centre of Norfolk to see these pictures…
As a fan and professional sociologist whose main research interest is football, I spend so much of my time immersed in the sport that I should be excited about the World Cup, I know I should. And in a…
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