Gaming the world [electronic resource] : how sports are reshaping global politics and culture / Andrei S. Markovits & Lars Rensmann.

Professional sports today have truly become a global force, a common language that anyone, regardless of their nationality, can understand. Yet sports also remain distinctly local, with regional teams and the fiercely loyal local fans that follow them. This book examines the twenty-first-century phenomenon of global sports, in which professional teams and their players have become agents of globalization while at the same time fostering deep-seated and antagonistic local allegiances and spawning new forms of cultural conflict and prejudice. Andrei Markovits and Lars Rensmann take readers into.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Going global : sports, politics, and identities -- The emergence of global arenas : mapping the globalization of sports cultures between cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and localism -- The transatlantic transfer of sports and their cultures : institutionalization and diffusion -- A silent "feminization" of global sports cultures? women as soccer players in Europe and America -- A counter-cosmopolitan backlash? the politics of exclusion, racism, and violence in European and American sports cultures -- The limits of globalization : local identity and college sports' uniquely American symbiosis of academics and athletics.

Professional sports today have truly become a global force, a common language that anyone, regardless of their nationality, can understand. Yet sports also remain distinctly local, with regional teams and the fiercely loyal local fans that follow them. This book examines the twenty-first-century phenomenon of global sports, in which professional teams and their players have become agents of globalization while at the same time fostering deep-seated and antagonistic local allegiances and spawning new forms of cultural conflict and prejudice. Andrei Markovits and Lars Rensmann take readers into.