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Gaming the World: How Sports are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture by Andrei Markovits and Lars Rensmann is an excellent follow up to Markovits' previous volume on sports, Offside. Offside was focused on the development and formation of modern sports-soccer,rugby and cricket-in 19th century England and their expansion across the globe in the first period of globalization. This is contrasted with the developments in the U.S. which developed its own unique sports environment revolving around baseball, football, basketball and hockey.
Gaming the World continues the analysis of sports in the second period of globalization starting in the 1970's in a comparative manner. Specifically, the world plays soccer and the U.S. does not. But this work is much more then 'why is there no soccer in America', Markovits and Rensmann show how sports can illuminate both the positive and negative reactions to globalization.
Sports can alter excepted and unchallenged prejudices by an athlete, seen as an unknown other, excelling on the playing field. Thus, exposing the hollowness of those previous held views. Making it possible to expand acceptance by a community. It can also work in the opposite way by intensifying attachment to a unique local identity coalescing around 'my team'. The local becomes a refuge from the forces of globalization.
Gaming the World shows that sports do matter. Their impact is felt beyond the narrowly defined space between the lines.

Great read! I use this book in my sports and politics class.

Sports are the object of such a rabid obsession in modern society that intense discussion of them rarely needs exceed wins and losses. Indeed, as Vince Lombardi's favorite saying went: "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing."

Andrei S. Markovits and Lars Rensmann don't reject the wisdom of that famous mission statement in "Gaming the World," but they push the boundaries of sports talk far beyond the information found in a box score.

Never before has the world been as globalized as it is now in the 21st Century, and never before have sports like soccer, American football, baseball, basketball, and ice hockey been as popular as they are now throughout the West and throughout the world. Markovits and Rensmann examine these conditions through a fusion of ideas about sports and about globalization.

They consider, for instance, how forces of globalization were able to turn to soccer from a game played by English schoolboys into a ubiquitous global language, and how "other footballs" like rugby and American football survived, flourished, and carved popularities of their own. Conversely, they examine sports as an agent of globalization and modernization -- how figures like Jackie Robinson were able to help dismantle oppressive forces in society by first deconstructing them on the playing field.

Markovits and Rensmann's appraisals, though, remain candidly honest. While the cosmopolitan soccer clubs of Europe have helped ease racial tensions, the authors aren't afraid to face the harsh reality that European soccer remains an occasional bastion of racism and violence. Likewise, they confront the fact that, while women's sports have enjoyed a massive growth in popularity (especially in the U.S.), they still attract a disproportionately small share of our attention.

Throughout, the authors convey a deft understanding and respect of the forces driving sports culture, sports industry, and sports fandom. It's also quite clear that they posses a firm comprehension of the work of their contemporaries and predecessors in the academic study of sports. If they are great sports scholars, though, Markovits and Rensmann are also great sports fans, and they communicate their ideas so naturally that sports fans should find the conclusions of "Gaming the World" quite intuitive, as if they knew them all along.

For students of sports, "Gamin the World" is an essential component of any collection, and for sports fans it's an eye-opening guide to approaching a familiar interest in an entirely new way. "Gaming the World" is such a compelling exploration of a global phenomenon that even those apathetic toward sports, after reading it, might find themselves tuning into a sporting event (like this summer's ongoing World Cup) just to see what all the fuss is about.

What a read! I read this book from cover to cover during my first sit down and immediately went put it on my reading list for a closer, much more detailed read. Just like Markovits's (with Hellerman) first book on sports, Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism. which thoughtfully explains why soccer is not among a major player in American hegemonic sport culture, Gaming the World hand holds the reader through an amazingly well theorized and well researched explanation as to how sports have globalized during the past 100 years, and why certain exceptionalisms still exist. For me, however, I am once again amazed with exacting detail that Markovits and Rensmann put into their research. Indeed, I had no idea that the Fab 5's (my alma mater's much maligned basketball team from the 1990s) love for baggy shorts permeated throughout and forever changed the world of soccer, or that Seven Nation Army (a song by one of my favorite bands, The White Stripes), has traveled across the Atlantic Ocean twice to become the official song of ESPN's coverage of the Premier League. These tidbits, of which there must be hundreds, make reading this book an absolute joy. Nothing like being able to impress sports fans at events and bars throughout the country with details like these.

For me, however, I was once again dazzled by the scholarly analysis that I have come to expect from both Markovits and Rensmann. This book truly shines in a number of arenas (I will summarize my favorites, as explaining everything would be the subject of a journal length review): Chapter 4, and its analysis of women's role in sport, particularly how women in the United States and Europe took different---albeit, reasonably similar---risks in carving a position for themselves in the soccer world. It goes on to detail how the United States has become a woman's soccer power house (also detailed in Offside), but really provides an interesting explanation of how women broke down every barrier that FIFA and national associations placed on women's soccer leagues, as they grew from infancy to extreme popularity between the 1960s and the 1990s. Chapter five moves us away from this story of soccer as an agent of increasing gender equality, to the stands of European soccer stadiums, where we begin to understand the increasingly rampant levels of right wing extremism---even neo-nazism---exhibited by fans of many teams. The authors compare this to the relatively benign levels of racism and anti-semitism exhibited in American stadiums (read: almost none), and try to explain this divergent outcome. As a student of extremist parties in Europe I find this trend an alarming one, and found Markovits and Rensmann extremely fair in their explanation of this phenomena. I look forward to further work in this area, and am glad that Markovits and Rensmann dedicated an entire chapter to this dangerous trend.

Gaming the World is a dazzling book, explaining the ways in which globalization has effected the sport culture in Europe and the United States, and how the sports have used their immense institutional strengths to resist these changes. I would recommend this book, with much enthusiasm, to sports fans AND academics alike.