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Gaming the World: How Sports are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture is a 2010 book written by Andrei Markovits, a professor of political science and Germanic studies at the University of Michigan, and Lars Rensmann, a DAAD professor at the University of Michigan. The book discusses the global and localized impact that professional sports, and soccer in particular, have had on both politics and culture.

Synopsis
Professional sports today have truly become a global force, a common language that anyone, regardless of their nationality, can understand. Yet sports also remain distinctly local, with regional teams and the fiercely loyal local fans that follow them. This book examines the twenty-first-century phenomenon of global sports, in which professional teams and their players have become agents of globalization while at the same time fostering deep-seated and antagonistic local allegiances and spawning new forms of cultural conflict and prejudice. The few sports that millions -- perhaps even billions -- follow around the globe today all began as innocuous play and harmless games in the 19th century. All of them involve teams and all of them use some kind of ball-like contraption if one accepts a hockey puck to fit that category. (Indeed, in hockey's first cousin, the game of "bandy" played prolifically in Sweden and Russia, the skaters actually use a ball.) They emerged as languages in the course of the latter part of the 19th century that came to influence the public life of mainly men for well over 100 years. Association football -- appropriately termed "soccer" in the abbreviation-prone discourse of British student slang of the 1860s -- became the first and foremost global language in that era mainly by dint of what has been called Britain's informal empire, meaning its economic rather than its political might. Partly due to its being the "simplest game" as one of its progenitors at Cambridge University came to call it in the late 1840s and early 1850s, soccer proliferated widely and successfully in most of Europe and Latin America, though it did not penetrate the sports spaces of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Caribbean; nor those of India, Pakistan and China. Above all, the game remained marginal in the United States by dint of the country's developing its own brand of modernity which sported four important team sports in baseball, the American version of football which was largely derived from soccer's first cousin, the game of rugby, basketball and ice hockey. These parallel worlds had much in common -- such as the exclusion of women; the featuring of workers and middle class men as its major participants ans players and spectators; their professionalization -- but they also featured many differences. Above all, they constituted worlds all their own, parted by oceans and seemingly incompatible cultures. Much of this began to change in the wake of what we term the second globalization which basically commenced a thawing of these "frozen" spaces and encrusted cultures. Starting in the 1970s and continuing today, these sports languages came to be spoken and understood by hitherto excluded groups such as women. But they also came to penetrate each others' formerly excluded spaces: Thus, soccer arrived in the United States with a force virtually unimaginable before the late 1970s; and American sports entered the cultural spaces of Europe and other countries in which they were largely unknown before. Andrei Markovits and Lars Rensmann take readers into the exciting global sports scene, showing how soccer, football, baseball, basketball, and hockey have created new collective identities among millions of new fans in the United States, Europe, and around the rest of the world. They trace how these global--and globalizing--sports emerged from local pastimes in America, Britain, and Canada over the course of the twentieth century, and how regionalism continues to exert its divisive influence in new and potentially explosive ways. Markovits and Rensmann explore the complex interplay between the global and the local in sports today, demonstrating how sports have opened new avenues for dialogue and shared interest internationally even as they reinforce old antagonisms and create new ones.

Intellectual Background
Andrei Markovits has worked on comparative sports cultures for many years. Pursuant to his bi-continental and trans-Atlantic existence, Markovits has been deeply influenced by comparing and contrasting the United States with Europe in much of his academic work. In this context, his studies at Columbia University introduced him to the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville, Werner Sombart, Max Weber, Seymour Martin Lipset, Ira Katznelson and Jerome Karabel. In particular, Markovits, a student of European labor and social democracy, was always interested why similar political configurations remained embryonic and marginal in the political history of the United States. His life-long interest in sports led him to compare America's sports culture with that of Europe which in turn led Markovits to write his article The Other American Exceptionalism: Why is There No Soccer in the United States? (published in 1992) which, of course, is a variation of Werner Sombart's famous book Why is There No Socialism in the United States of America published in 1906. This article was translated into 10 languages and led to Markovits to write other pieces on this topic. This body of work culminated in his book Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism co-authored with Steven L. Hellerman and published by Princeton University Press in 2001. Gaming the World: How Sports are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture, co-authored with Lars Rensmann and published by Princeton University Press in 2010, represents a continuation of Markovits's engagement with this topic.

Reception
Gaming the World has received positive reviews from Brandi Chastain, Olympic gold and silver medalist and Women's World Cup Champion, Peter J. Katzenstein, a professor of International Studies at Cornell University, Modris Eksteins, a professor of history at the University of Toronto, Jeff Weintraub, a social and political theorist and visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, and Brian Bethune, a senior writer for Macleans.