CFP - Special issue on FIFA World Cup and World Football

CALL FOR PAPERS

Association Football (football, or soccer to some) is globally the single most played sport and not surprisingly is therefore also the most popular sport in terms of global spectacle. Television audiences alone across the globe easily outstrip those in any other sport. Indeed, the combined media audiences for the last FIFA men’s World Cup and the women’s World Cup amounted to nearly 6 billion viewers, double the television audience for the 2022 summer Olympics. The world organization FIFA will hold the next men’s World Cup in North America in 2026. The event’s multiple venues will include Dallas and Houston, near to the home of Fast Capitalism, such that it seems an auspicious moment to offer a special issue of Fast Capitalism to mark the event. The special issue will be guest-edited by Paul Smith (Professor of Cultural Studies and Global Affairs at George Mason University). We are now soliciting contributions which take a broad cultural studies approach to world football, grounding analysis in the specific political, economic and social conditions in which football’s cultural meanings are produced, circulated, received, and contested. Analysis of the relationship between football as a cultural phenomenon and its political economic conditions might well involve consideration of football’s global, local and grassroots institutions; nationalism and fandom; global spectacle; environmental effects; race and gender issues; and many others topics—not least one of the consistent foci of Fast Capitalism’s publications, i.e. media and communication technologies. Please contact Paul Smith on psmith5@gmu.edu with proposals or inquiries. We would hope to have the special issue completed early in 2026.