RERIS Studies in International Sport Relations – serie

Football and Fascism. The Politics of Popular Culture in Portugal tells the hidden history of football and discusses its political, social and cultural foundations, during the longest running authoritarian regime in Europe. Theoretically grounded on Bourdieu’s field theory, and using a multi-scalar methodology, this award-winning research explores the political tensions between the nationalization of sports envisaged by the Portuguese “New State” and the integration of national football in a globalized urban popular culture. Mobilizing unexplored archival sources, and a wide array of primary materials, this groundbreaking work offers new insight on the administrative structures of the corporativist state, the making of an authoritarian cultural program, and the relation between state institutions and civil society. Besides broadening the scope of existing transnational histories of football, this study also puts into question the conventional geographies and political chronologies adopted in sports history. For his oustanding research, Rahul Kumar won the 2015 “Mário Soares Award - EDP Foundation” for best work in Portuguese history by researchers under 35 and received an honourable mention, also in 2015, in the “CES Award for Young Portuguese speaking Social Scientists”, attributed by the Centre for Social Studies of Coimbra University.

In 1974, the Brazilian sports official João Havelange was elected FIFA’s president in a two-round election, defeating the incumbent Stanley Rous. The story told by Havelange himself describes a private odyssey in which the protagonist crisscrosses two thirds of the world canvassing for votes and challenging the institutional status quo. For many scholars, Havelange’s triumph changed FIFA’s (International Federation of Football Association) identity, gradually turning it into a global and immensely wealthy institution. Conversely, the election can be analyzed as a historical event. It can be thought of as a political window by means of which the international dynamic of a specific moment in the Cold War can be perceived. In this regard, this book seeks to understand which actors were involved in the election, how the networks were shaped, and which political agents were directly engaged in the campaign.