From the FIFA World Cup to pick-up games at your local park, soccer is the closest thing in our world to a universal entertainment. Many writers use this global popularity to describe the game’s winners and losers, but what happens when we use social science to explore how soccer intersects with culture, society, and the self?
This book provides a thinking fan’s guide to the world’s most popular game, proposing a way of engaging soccer that sparks intellectual curiosity and employs critical consciousness. Using stories and data, along with ideas from sociology, psychology, and across the social sciences, it provides readers with new ways of understanding fanaticism, peak performance, talent development, and more. Drawing on concepts ranging from cognitive bias to globalization, it illuminates meanings of the game for players and fans while investigating impacts on our lives and communities. While it considers soccer cultures across the globe, the book also analyzes what makes U.S. soccer culture special, including its embrace of the women’s game.
As a scholar, former minor league player and coach, and fan, Andrew Guest offers a distinctive perspective on soccer in society. Whatever name you call it, and whatever your interest in it, Soccer in Mind will enrich your own view of the one truly global game.
Preface and Acknowledgments
1. Lenses: Psychology, Sociology, and the Ways Soccer Explains Us
2. Fans: Losing Your Mind and Finding Your Place
3. Cultures: Soccer is Familiar, Soccer is Strange
4. Players: Talent Development Versus Human Development
5. Performances: Mental Skills, People Skills, and the Psychology in Soccer
6. Impacts: Players, Games, and the Greater Good
7. Initiatives: Soccer for Development and Peace
8. Futures: Toward Thinking Fandom
Notes
Index
ANDREW M. GUEST is a professor of psychology and sociology at the University of Portland in Oregon, where he also serves as Director of the Core Curriculum. He has played, coached, researched, taught, and enjoyed soccer in locales ranging from Malawi to Michigan, and from Northern Ireland to northeast Seattle.
