Football in Asia

This book is the first comprehensive study on history, culture, and business of football in Asia. Football has been a symbol of the modern invention, a catalyst of local, national and regional identities, all time favourite among kids and youths, and even a harbinger for cultural globalization and consumerism in Asia. The economic growth and the current proliferation of football culture in Asia make it imperative to examine the complex relationship between the globalization of football and the local appropriation. The essays in the book deal with various topics on football in Asia from history of football in Asia, football and local, national and regional identities, to commercialization of football cultures, global mobility and athletes' migration, and then new Asianism and football. This book argues that football in Asia contributes to reconfiguring both national and regional identities among football fans in the active interconnection with the global flows of football and cultural globalization without homogenizing Asian identities into a cosmopolitan one. This is the textbook to presents football's implication and influence on Asian populace and social changes while using football as a lens assessing the modern development and current diversification of Asia. This book was published as a special issue of Soccer and Society.

Younghan Cho is Associate Professor of Korean Studies at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (Seoul, South Korea). He is co-editor of many special issues including Glocalization of Sports in Asia, Modern Sports in Asia: Cultural Perspectives, Colonial Modernity and Beyond , and American Pop Culture.

1. Introduction: football in Asia 2. The slow contagion of Scottish example: association football in nineteenthcentury colonial Singapore 3. From shamateurism to pioneer of Asia's professional football: the introduction of professional football in Hong Kong 4. The politics of Indonesian and Turkish soccer: a comparative analysis 5. 'Hamlet without the Prince': understanding Singapore-Malaysian relations through football 6. The otherness of self: football, fandom and fragmented (sub) nationalism in Bengal 7. 'Hope for the win and hope for the defeat': constructions of South Korean identity and the 2010 FIFAWorld Cup 8. South Asia and South-East Asia: new paths of African footballer migration 9. Twenty years of development of the J-League: analysing the business parameters of professional football in Japan 10. Latin America, football and the Japanese diaspora 11. 'A' is for Australia: New Football's billionaires, consumers and the 'Asian Century'. How the A-League defines the new Australia 12. Australia, Asia and the new football opportunity