Michael Lower

I teach a class called "Soccer: Around the World with the Beautiful Game." In this class, we chart the sport’s unlikely rise to global prominence. How did a “kicking game” played in a few English public schools in the mid-nineteenth century go on to become the most popular organized pastime the world has ever known? Part of the answer is easy: kicking a ball around a field with friends is a lot of fun. But there has to be more to it than that – the passion football arouses, the delirious joy and the sickening violence it inspires, the allegiances and communities it builds and breaks, the fortunes it makes and unmakes – why have people all around the world come to care so much about this game? And what, in turn, does this obsessive concern tell us about how the relationship between sports and society, games and culture, has developed in the modern world?