‘Connected to Something’: Soccer and the Transnational Passions,Memories and Communities of Sydney's Italian Migrants

This paper explores the importance soccer can play in the lives, identities and memories of migrants by drawing on 32 oral history interviews conducted with Italians who settled in Sydney in the 1950s and 1960s. Sport can provide an illuminating lens for analysing the experience of migrants, because not only are sports sites of individual, regional, national and transnational identities, they can also facilitate social inclusion or, conversely, become sites of exclusion. Soccer in Australia is often celebrated as a multicultural game. At the same time, the expressions of the complex histories of migration, colonialism, exploitation and racial and ethnic discrimination that have shaped the game have often been silenced. The interviews show that soccer has been a key site of negotiation, agency and at times resistance for first and second generation migrants. We also argue that, while it is the de-ethnicisation of soccer that has understandably dominated media, political and academic debate, the concern of these migrants in recent years has been mostly with the loss of memory and with the removal of an important history made of shared relationships and bonding experiences.     

Human versus virtual robotics soccer: A technical analysis

Abstract

Soccer is a team sport in which the performances of all team members are important for the outcome of a match. Even though the analysis of game events can be used to measure the team's performance, their perception, especially during the match, is extremely difficult, even for the involved agents. Soccer has been used as a simulation environment in many studies, mainly in the area of robotics. The RoboCup is an international robotics competition with an ambitious goal: in 2050 a robotics team will be capable of defeating the human world champion at the time. In this context, we compared technical similarities between human and robotics soccer. Based on an off-line automatic event detection tool, game statistics for the finals of both human and robotics soccer tournaments were collected and compared using the Wilcoxon test. The results show that the most frequent event in both forms of soccer is successful passes. Analysing the two types of passes considered (successful and missed), we conclude that there are significant differences between the two forms (W = 2, P=0.000354), with human soccer presenting a higher percentage of successful passes (77.89% vs. 66.97%). Of restart events (W=0, P=0.00048965), the most frequent one, in both forms, is the throw-in (human 59.91%, robotics 66.4%), and the least frequent is the corner (human 13.7%, robotics 14.09%). Regarding the frequency of shots, in the robotics environment “shots” were the most predominant type (43.27%), whereas in human soccer “shots on target” predominated (71.25%; W=64, P=0.000085641). Finally, the number of faults is minor in robotics soccer.     

The changing of the sponsorship market

Since the time of state socialism, Hungarian sport has been totally financed by the state. Therefore, Hungarian soccer and sponsorship market is a relatively new and unexplored subject of research in the field of sports sponsorship, as most studies so far have focused on the major European soccer leagues. The main objective of this paper, focusing on the Hungarian soccer sponsorship market, was to evaluate the range of soccer sponsorship objectives and the range of evaluation tools that sponsors use to measure the effectiveness of their sponsorships. A combined approach of qualitative and quantitative research methods served as the methodological foundation of this study. In the quantitative phase, representatives of the sponsor companies (n=103) were asked to rate the importance of the sponsorship objectives and the importance of the evaluation techniques used to measure the effectiveness of their sponsorships. The results of this study have implications for the sports sponsorship industry, the Hungarian soccer club sponsors, and the sport properties too. According to the research results, many of the Hungarian sponsor companies have failed to assess the effectiveness of sponsorship in meeting their objectives. The research can be used to bridge the gap between the theory and practice of soccer sponsorship in Hungary.     

Transnational connectivity,cultural interaction and selective adaptation: English Corinthians and amateur football in the Netherlands,c.1906–39

ABSTRACT

The Corinthians were synonymous with gentlemanly amateurism in English association football. They visited the Netherlands in 1906, 1922, 1923, 1924 and 1933, bringing not just a particular way of playing the game but their own socially-exclusive version of amateurism. This had significant appeal in the Netherlands, where soccer had been taken up in the late nineteenth century by middle-class young men for whom English sport signified modernity. In 1906 the Corinthians supplied a convenient model for those seeking to raise standards and improve the quality of the national team. Later, in the 1920s, as soccer became more popular and its social base widened, the tourists were welcomed by socially conservative elements associated with pre-1900 clubs who were anxious to maintain their status and influence despite being outnumbered by the newer volksclubs. Corinthian-style amateurism had many adherents in the Netherlands and the tours prompted the formation of the Swallows (1907) and the Netherlands Corinthians (1922). These clubs, however, were not simply imitators but adapted the original English model for their own purposes.     

Women's 2011 Football World Cup: The impact of perceived images of women's soccer and the World Cup 2011 on interest in attending matches

The popularity of women's soccer has increased in Germany since the inauguration of the sport in 1970 by the German Football Association. The purpose of this study is to analyze the current image of women's soccer in general and the pre-event image of the World Cup 2011 in particular, as well as the key drivers and indicators that trigger interest in attending women's soccer matches. The study sample consists of sport-interested individuals who were questioned concerning their attitudes and actions related to the attendance at women's soccer matches at different leisure facilities and sport events in Germany in 2009 (n = 1284). Additive image indexes were created in order to evaluate the respective images of women's soccer and the Women's World Cup. Regression analyses were applied to test the key drivers for interest in attending matches. The results suggest that age is important in determining the perceived image of women's soccer and the Women's World Cup and gender influences the perception of the pre-event image of the Women's World Cup. Moreover, various image indicators influence future behavior which applies as well to age. No differences were found regarding an effect of gender on future behavior. Regarding women's soccer it can be said that the more interesting, exciting and cheerful it is perceived to be, the higher the interest in attending matches. These attributes can be used in marketing communications to foster game attendance.     

Differences in game reading between selected and non-selected youth soccer players

Applying an established theory of cognitive development―Skill Theory―the current study compares the game-reading skills of youth players selected for a soccer school of a professional soccer club (n = 49) and their non-selected peers (n = 38). Participants described the actions taking place in videos of soccer game plays, and their verbalisations were coded using Skill Theory. Compared to the non-selected players, the selected players generally demonstrated higher levels of complexity in their game-reading, and structured the information of game elements―primarily the player, teammate and field―at higher complexity levels. These results demonstrate how Skill Theory can be used to assess, and distinguish game-reading of youth players with different expertise, a skill important for soccer, but also for other sports.     

Sport injuries as the main cause of sport career termination among Finnish top-level athletes

Abstract

Injuries are common among athletes, and are sometimes so severe that they affect an athlete's career in sport. As studies on sport career termination are few, we conducted a study to investigate the role of injuries as a reason for ending a sport career. The study group consisted of 574 male and female top-level cross-country skiers, swimmers, long-distance runners and soccer players who responded to a retrospective postal questionnaire in 2006. Twenty-seven athletes (4.9%, 27/548) reported ending their sport career because of injury. A follow-up interview was conducted by telephone in 2007 (n=20 volunteered to be interviewed) to confirm sport career termination and the reasons for this. Fifteen of the interviewed athletes terminated and five continued their sport on the same level as earlier. Female athletes (12/15) terminated their sport career more frequently than male athletes (3/15). Athletes who reported terminating their sport career because of injury were on average two and a half years older (24.1 years vs. 21.6 years, P=0.006) than athletes who continued the sport. All the swimmers (n=5) who were interviewed terminated their career because of a shoulder injury. All the soccer players who ended their career (n=4) were female and had a severe knee injury, such as anterior cruciate ligament injury. Most of the athletes who terminated their sport career (70.4%, 19/27) reported that the injury caused them mild or moderate permanent disability. We found that sports injuries play a significant role in terminating a career in sport, and in some sports events injuries may commonly be the main reason for sport career termination. Injury prevention and adequate treatment and rehabilitation of injuries are thus essential to avoid the long-term consequences of severe sport injuries.     

Ethnicity as an Exercise in Sport: European Immigrants,Soccer Fandom,and the Making of Canadian Multiculturalism, 1945–1979

Abstract

Ethnic sport offers an important and understudied lens into how newcomers – a key population on the social peripheries – negotiate their entry into host societies. Canada was among the top countries to receive European migrants after the Second World War. Soccer participation and fandom were a gateway in their resettlement and an axis for community formation, identity expression, economic advancement, and personal pleasure. This paper explores what four decades of ethnic soccer on the peripheries of post-war Toronto reveals about the local organization of immigrant life and the European newcomer’s mediated entry into English Canada. It demonstrates that Toronto soccer fans were sufficient in number and electoral voice to transform the urban politics of leisure and organization of social diversity, even as their leisure activities were still heavily contained by host institutions. Paradoxically, soccer’s straightjacketed role in Toronto as an ethnic social adhesive and platform for identity expression rendered it largely irrelevant to the general, more settled population, while its capacity to articulate ethnic differences made it a force and symbol of English Canada’s re-imagination as a multicultural society in the 1970s.     

A generational divide within the class-based production of girls in American youth soccer

By building upon earlier research on social class and soccer, the following study specifically provides insight into American, adolescent girls’ experiences with youth soccer (Swanson, ‘Complicating the “Soccer Mom”’; Swanson, ‘Soccer Fields’; Andrews, ‘Contextualizing Suburban Soccer’; and Zwick and Andrews, ‘The Suburban Soccer Field’). Driven by Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts regarding social class reproduction, I engaged in ethnographic-style conversations regarding recreational youth soccer with girls ages 11–14 and their Baby-Boom-Generation mothers in order to further understand how the American, middle-class habitus may be contributing to a particular gender-based path in youth sport (Bourdieu, Distinction). Additionally, Grossberg’s and Giroux’s literature on youth and politics of culture informed my understanding of the discrepancies between parents’ views and their children’s views on youth soccer experiences (Grossberg, ‘Cultural Studies’; Giroux, Stealing Innocence). In this paper, I recognize American involvement in youth soccer as a class-based form of childrearing as I describe parents’ expectations of girls in youth soccer. The participants’ thoughts on race, social class, gender, and today’s youth as related to their soccer experiences are provided.     

Temporal pattern analysis and its applicability in sport: an explanation and exemplar data

Quantitative analysis of sports performance has been shown to produce information that coaches can use within the coaching process to enhance performance. Traditional methods for quantifying sport performances are limited in their capacity to describe the complex interactions of events that occur within a performance over time. In this paper, we outline a new approach to the analysis of time-based event records and real-time behaviour records on sport performance known as T-pattern detection. The relevant elements of the T-pattern detection process are explained and exemplar data from the analysis of 13 soccer matches are presented to highlight the potential of this form of analysis. The results from soccer suggest that it is possible to identify new profiles for both individuals and teams based on the analysis of temporal behavioural patterns detected within the performances.     

2012年欧洲杯足球赛冠军球队中前场运动战进攻技战术分析

运用录像观察法、文献资料法、逻辑分析法、专家访谈法、结合运动训练理论和现行足球规则,对冠军球队的比赛阵型、进攻区域、以及主要进攻的途径、方式、效率等进行统计分析,从而从中找到冠军球队在足球比赛中进攻技战术的基本规律,旨为足球训练中的理论提供参考依据。     

Forthcoming events

Quantitative analysis of sports performance has been shown to produce information that coaches can use within the coaching process to enhance performance. Traditional methods for quantifying sport performances are limited in their capacity to describe the complex interactions of events that occur within a performance over time. In this paper, we outline a new approach to the analysis of time-based event records and real-time behaviour records on sport performance known as T-pattern detection. The relevant elements of the T-pattern detection process are explained and exemplar data from the analysis of 13 soccer matches are presented to highlight the potential of this form of analysis. The results from soccer suggest that it is possible to identify new profiles for both individuals and teams based on the analysis of temporal behavioural patterns detected within the performances.     

关于足球运动起源之新论

足球运动的起源一直有两大基本说法:古代的足球(足球游戏)起源于中国;现代足球运动则起源于英国。国际足联2004年正式确定:足球起源于中国,中国古代的蹴鞠就是世界上最早的足球运动。本文从足球运动两大诞生地中国与英国,在关于足球起源的诸条件、要素异同性方面的综合比较分析与研究,试图对“足球运动起源于中国”这一定论提供理论依据。     

Knowledge and perceptions of sport psychology within English soccer

The aim of the present study was to examine knowledge and perceptions of applied sport psychology within English soccer. National coaches (n?=?8), youth academy directors (n?=?21) and academy coaches (n?=?27) were surveyed using questionnaire and interview methods. Questionnaire results revealed a lack of knowledge of sport psychology that appeared to underpin some of the most significant barriers to entry for sport psychologists. These included lack of clarity concerning the services of a sport psychologist, problems fitting in and players' negative perceptions of sport psychology. Overall, however, lack of finance was the highest rated barrier. Six barrier dimensions emerged from the interview data: negative perceptions of psychology, lack of sport psychology knowledge, integrating with players and coaching staff, role and service clarity, practical constraints, and perceived value of sport psychology. These findings were broadly compatible with the survey data, with finance emerging as a major barrier and misconceptions of sport psychology being common. Our conclusions are discussed in relation to the practical implications of the study for both applied research and the provision of sport psychology services within English soccer.     

Gendered performances and identity construction among UK female soccer players and netballers: a comparative study

This paper examines the gendered performances and identity construction of UK female University soccer players and netballers (n?=?31). Focus group interviews explored their sporting experiences with reference to body perceptions, and perceptions of their sporting bodies outside sporting contexts. Three themes resulted from data analysis, these being; (1) UK culture, body performances and femininity, (2) sporting culture, body performances and femininity and (3) transiency of body satisfaction across sport and non-sport contexts. Findings suggest that sport may not always provide an opportunity to challenge and resist dominant discourses. In both netball and soccer, a range of surveillance and management practices were used that served to perpetuate the value of a ‘feminine’ and assumed heterosexual body, and legitimize their sport participation through an emphasis on a hyper-femininity. The influence of sport subcultures on gendered performances and identity construction, along with implications for marketing sports participation to women are discussed.     

Oscillations of centroid position and surface area of soccer teams in small-sided games

Abstract

There is a need for a collective variable that captures the dynamics of team sports like soccer at match level. The centroid positions and surface areas of two soccer teams potentially describe the coordinated flow of attacking and defending in small-sided soccer games at team level. The aim of the present study was to identify an overall game pattern by establishing whether the proposed variables were linearly related between teams over the course of the game. In addition, we tried to identify patterns in the build-up of goals. A positive linear relation and a negative linear relation were hypothesized for the centroid positions and surface areas respectively. Finally, we hypothesized that deviations from these patterns are present in the build-up of goals. Ten young male elite soccer players (mean age 17.3, s=0.7) played three small-sided soccer games (4-a-side) of 8 minutes as part of their regular training routine. An innovative player tracking system, local position measurement (LPM), was used for obtaining player positions at 45 Hz per player. Pearson correlation coefficients were calculated to investigate the proposed linear relation of the key variables. Correlation coefficients indicate a strong positive linear relation during a whole game for the centroid position in all three games, with the strongest relation for the forward-backward direction (r>0.94). For 10 out of 19 goals a crossing of the centroids in this direction can be seen. No negative linear relation was found for surface area (?0.01 < r<0.07). From this study, we concluded that over the course of a whole small-sided game, the forward-backward motion of the centroids is most strongly linearly related. Furthermore, goals show a specific pattern in the forward-backward motion of the centroid. Therefore, surface area and particularly centroid position may provide a sound basis for a collective variable that captures the dynamics of attacking and defending in soccer at team level. Future research should develop these ideas further.     

Asian Football: A Cesspool of Government Interference,Struggles for Power,Corruption, and Greed

Arab politics have been written into the DNA of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) starting with the expulsion of Israel in 1974. The expulsion like that of Taiwan the same year underscored the incestuous relationship between politics and sport that is among the most prevalent in the Middle East and North Africa despite self-serving denials by the high and mighty of regional and international sports. A failure by world soccer body FIFA in the cases of both Israel and Taiwan to follow through on threats to sanction the AFC for violating the charters of the world and Asian soccer body with the expulsions has shaped global soccer's attitude towards autocratic regimes. In the Middle East and North Africa, FIFA's and the AFC's refusal to insist on adherence by national associations to their principles, rules, and regulations amounted to effective support for autocratic rule in a soccer crazy region where rulers see the game as a key tool to retain power by exercising absolute control of public space and an institution that evokes deep-seated passions.     

足球越位规则的变革对战术发展的影响

足球规则的变革是推动足球运动积极发展的必要手段。笔者通过对越位规则变革的分析研究 ,探讨其对战术发展的促进和影响 ,以及如何理解和运用越位规则新精神 ,变革战术打法 ,丰富战术内容