The Cosmopolitan Game? Contemporary Football in The Light of Ulrich Beck’s Theory

In article author takes advantage of sociological theory of German thinker – Ulrich Beck – to analysis of contemporary football. He assumes that idea of cosmopolitanization developed by Beck instances interesting analytical tool to the scrutiny of that sport. The concept of cosmopolitanization emphasising on interpenetration of global flows and local environment appears as adequate to such examination. From one perspective some actors in global football field (eg. FIFA) put a lot of pressure on the rest actors (expelling national teams from countries with unstable political situations), but on the other hand football field constitutes a mixture of various influences, different kinds of “cosmopolitanization” (“coerced”, “latent”, “non-deformed”) and local dimensions of modernity. In the case of football fans it is justified to cover every day experiences with football by notion of “banal cosmopolitanization”. The author considers necessity to create the new units of analysis in exploration of contemporary football. Units from classical sociology, derived from world of first modernity need to be replaced (or enriched at least) by ones prepared in result of cosmopolitan turn in social sciences. Simultaneously, like other spectrums of social life (science, politics, identities and so on), football is found under influences of conditions of global manufactured uncertainty and risk. In article there are a few instances of risks connected to football.

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