How To Watch Football: 52 Rules for Understanding the Beautiful Game, On and Off the Pitch

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The book employs previous research, theoretical perspectives, and examples from reality to discuss tifo. In this sense, the book is a rich and fruitful resource. The recurrent theoretical concept used is Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities. The authors wanted the book to be useful for a broader audience, including students and scholars in the field of sport studies and the fans themselves, and I think that they succeeded with this. They help the reader see how tifo represents important knowledge about fan culture and the social values related to it, and they do so with nuance and reflexivity. I was perplexed because the book was of course promoted on the Tifo YouTube channel, which regularly goes into much greater depth about tactics in particular. As such, I wrongly assumed that the target audience would already have a relatively good understanding of the game. The reality is, however, that I highly recommend Tifo's YouTube video content (in particular their Tifo IRL breakdowns of games) to all football fans. This book, however, I can only recommend to someone completely new to the sport, and even then I would probably say that "Inverting the Pyramid" is a much better "if you could only read one football book" candidate. The writers produce excellent, in-depth football content on YouTube and on The Athletic. I thoroughly enjoy their videos with special praise for their great tactical breakdowns of teams, coaches and matches. In particular, the tactical analyses by JJ Bull "The Bullet" (one of the contributors to the book) have truly made me better able to watch and understand contemporary football matches. History is a recurrent theme in the tifos, which is reflected on in chapter four, ‘Memorializing, Commemorating, and Community Building’. In it, the authors discuss how tifo is one way to document and (re)produce history. The inspiration of history could come from wars, conflicts, and historical victories of the football teams’ countries or cities. This also creates a political, nationalistic, and historical monument. Therefore, the fans who create the tifos also state what history is worth for the (imagined) community.

City Psychos: From the Monte Carlo Mob to the Silver Cod Squad - Four Decades of Terrace Terror - Shaun Tordoff Covering the key concepts, tactics and philosophies that are shaping the sport today, How to Watch Football reveals surprising new perspectives on familiar elements of gameplay, while highlighting lesser-known aspects of the industry and its history.It's trying to cover a LOT of stuff but fails to properly explain any of them. The title makes no sense as well, since you'd expect more emphasis on the "watching" part, yet I'm being served a chapter on how a €100m transfer fee for a player with €5m per year salary isn't the same as €100m fee and €10m salary for a different player!? Full Book Name: How To Watch Football: 52 Rules for Understanding the Beautiful Game, On and Off the Pitch

Furthermore, the information delivered by the book is all over the place. From career summaries of football's greatest contributors, brief explanations of xG, various tactic principles, but bam, then its a short trip to winter breaks and why teams fly into Middle East for pre-season, then a chapter on climate change, then explaining the offside rule, followed by a bit on merchandise income... I read this in 45 minutes, but would likely learn more by watching first half of any football match. Gonna serve as a present for someone else, since that's the only way I can get rid of it. Chapter six discusses and analyses political dimensions and common social movements within the landscape of football fandom. Fans, mainly ultras and hooligans, sometimes express extreme political views. Countries with a turbulent political history and ongoing conflicts show this more often. Due to male political ideologies, some fans become excluded, for example, women. The authors then ask the important question, who does the famous “people’s game” include? The authors wanted the book to be useful for a broader audience, including students and scholars in the field of sport studies and the fans themselves, and I think that they succeeded with this. Kassing and Meân provide a rich and interesting insight into the phenomenon of tifo that has been missing in earlier discussions and studies. They intended the book to be interesting for students and scholars working in sports and for fans, which I think is possible since they give many examples and use readable language.Rivalry, described in chapter five, concerns how tifos are used to represent an identity for one’s own and other groups of fans. Nowadays, fan groups must confirm who they are and distance themselves from who they are not. One way of understanding this rivalry is by looking at the competition between groups in terms of who creates the most neat and creative tifos. Tifos sometimes express humiliation of other teams, groups, players, and historical events. However, they can also be very clever and display a bit of humour. While expressing themselves through tifos and distancing themselves from others, they are ‘doing’ their identity. According to the fans, this hopefully affects the rival fan groups’ ingroup identity negatively. The European Super League "launch" really damaged my love for football (Liverpool fan), and my relationship to my club is still irreparably damaged as a result, and I can't be bothered watching much football live anymore. Just highlights from Forest Green, Wrexham and Brighton on YouTube is fine for me. But Tifo Football and the Athletic means I still get to take part in the best sport in the world on a daily basis, and I'm thankful for that. In chapter three, Kassing and Meân describe the practical and symbolic representation of tifo. One of the most important values in tifo is that it should be authentic, produced by fans and financed through collection from other fans. Tifos communicate directly as a performance with an announcement and statement of attendance; they also communicate their fandom as a collective. Tifo can therefore be seen as both a material and a symbolic artefact for an imagined community, using Benedict Anderson’ concept. The authors claim that to understand the social rules and values of tifo, the symbolic and physical work needs to be understood and highlighted. PDF / EPUB File Name: How_To_Watch_Football_-_Tifo_The_Athletic.pdf, How_To_Watch_Football_-_Tifo_The_Athletic.epub The book contributes with relevant questions and aspects of the fan culture that need to be investigated, mainly from the fans’ own experiences. The Art of Tifo is an important contribution to the field, and I look forward to further discussion. I will surely use this book a lot in my own research about tifo in Sweden.