New Books In World Affairs

The history of globalization is found in more than international political organizations and multinational corporations, free-trade agreements and foreign direct investments, satellite communications and special export zones. When looking at the forces that have driven globalization over the last decades, we must also look to football and especially the World Cup. Indeed, there is no greater proof of globalization than the fact that a large part of the world’s population cheered or groaned at exactly the same moment, as Mario Gotze scored to put Germany ahead of Argentina in this year’s final. Globalization is an important theme in the volume of essays on the history of football’s premiere tournament, The FIFA World Cup 1930-2010: Politics, Commerce, Spectacle and Identities (Wallstein, 2014). Coming out of a 2013 conference held at FIFA headquarters in Zurich, the volume boasts an impressive squad of football scholars, coming from universities and research institutes in nine different countries. After openi