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In October 2016, Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) announced a landmark reform package that ushered in a new era of global football governance known as FIFA 2.0. Despite decades of profitability for its most visible event - the Men's World Cup (MWC) - FIFA's leadership had come under intense scrutiny following a corruption and bribery scandal over the MWC selection process and hosting approaches. In this article, we use a critical investigative framework to examine the conjunctural politics of FIFA 2.0 through a critical analysis of official FIFA documents, published media reports, and official bid documents for the 2026 MWC - the first in the FIFA 2.0 era. By selecting the United 2026 bid, FIFA seemingly moved beyond market expansionism and urban redevelopment strategies, seeking instead to functionally and symbolically (re-)imagine the event's purpose as a principal agent for promoting global peace, unity, and international diplomacy. We offer a rich genealogy of FIFA's growing presence in global geopolitics – an approach we theorize as global peacemaking – and argue that FIFA's approach is a rationally and purposefully constructed organizational strategy aimed at exploiting the material and symbolic value(s) of global unity, peace, and international diplomacy as a means of capital accumulation, neoliberal marketization, and an intensification and consolidation of FIFA's global football empire. We discuss how FIFA's global peacemaking has accelerated the commercialization MWC and led to an increasingly interdependent and mutually constitutive relationship between the MWC and FIFA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The FIFA Women's World CupTM 2023 (FWWC23) bidding process was the first major women's football tournament awarded following FIFA's landmark reform package known as FIFA 2.0: The Vision for the Future. This paper interrogates the conjunctural politics of the FWWC23 competitive bid process, exploring the unique ways in which FIFA shapes, influences, and controls event bidding for the FIFA Women's World Cup. Based on an analysis of official documents, bid books, and news media coverage connected to the FWWC23 bid process, this paper presents how varying FIFA-based narratives and tactics shaped the winning Australia and New Zealand bid. Based on our analysis, four key points of discussion emerged in relation to the ways in which FIFA 2.0 shaped, and was shaped by, FWWC23 event bidding: the formation of bid "products"; the governance of the bid "process"; the politics of bid "positioning"; and the advancement of FIFA "priorities". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The FIFA Women's World CupTM 2023 (FWWC23) bidding process was the first major women's football tournament awarded following FIFA's landmark reform package known as FIFA 2.0: The Vision for the Future. This paper interrogates the conjunctural politics of the FWWC23 competitive bid process, exploring the unique ways in which FIFA shapes, influences, and controls event bidding for the FIFA Women's World Cup. Based on an analysis of official documents, bid books, and news media coverage connected to the FWWC23 bid process, this paper presents how varying FIFA-based narratives and tactics shaped the winning Australia and New Zealand bid. Based on our analysis, four key points of discussion emerged in relation to the ways in which FIFA 2.0 shaped, and was shaped by, FWWC23 event bidding: the formation of bid "products"; the governance of the bid "process"; the politics of bid "positioning"; and the advancement of FIFA "priorities". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the U.S. territory of American Samoa, gridiron football has emerged as an important driver of a stock-flow relationship in which the stock of overseas-resident migrant athletic laborers sustains the flow of remittances to their extended family in their homeland. Within this article, I consider the significance of gridiron football within American Samoa's MIRAB (Mi gration, R emittances, A id and B ureaucracy) economy, a model of Pacific Island microeconomies characterized by migration, remittances, foreign aid, and public bureaucracy. Based on a series of personal interviews with high school football players between the ages of 15 and 18 years on the Eastern football team squad, as well as more than a dozen coaches, parents, educator, and directors associated with the production of American Samoan High School football (n = 60), I critically examine the social, cultural, and economic determinants involved in the collective decision-making process of footballers to emigrate to the U.S. mainland. I find that family units in the American Samoa operate as, to rephrase Bertram and Watters, transnational corporations of football kin, working collectively to develop and train skilled football laborers toward the accumulation of various forms of economic and social remittances for the benefit of the individual and extended family unit. More broadly, gridiron football in American Samoa produces a stock-flow relationship whereby a stock of Samoan gridiron footballers migrates to U.S. colleges and universities to support the flow of remittances and aid that sustains the island's MIRAB economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article profiles the ascent of stockcar racing from parochial pastime of the late industrial American South into an internationally-distributed corporate sport conglomerate. We explicate the role NASCAR (the sport's governing body), its spectacles, and its consumer-spectators played in reproducing the political, economic, and cultural conditions by which it was made both "local" and "global." It also briefly illustrates the problematic nature of recent initiatives to sell historically localized NASCAR commodities to "nontraditional" national and international markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Pittsburgh Steelers serve as a critical space for the celebration of masculinity and working-class identity in the context of (post-)industrial America. Within this article, the authors chronicle the transformation of a city, a region, and a group of people, at once steeped in the hard life of steel production and factory work, now increasingly replaced by non-physical work and suburban lifestyle of the informational economy. As in the decades before, today's Steelers certainly operate as a symbolic reminder of the region's identity, framed around the hard work of factory life and industrial manufacturing. We investigate how the mediated celebrity identities of three contemporary Pittsburgh Steelers – Ben Roethlisberger, James ‘The Hitman’ Harrison, and Troy Polamalu (each in his own way) – are mobilized to frame cultural citizenship in post-industrial Pittsburgh. We conclude by suggesting that the violence propagated by their bodies on (and sometimes off) the football field symbolically articulates with the ‘hard men’ and working-class life of Pittsburgh's past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]