Bücher von Andrei S. Markovits

Different Evolutionary Models - Past, Present, and Future - Certain to Collide at Women's World Cup 2023With this new edition of his feted 2019 volume, Dr. Andrei Markovits - author of many books and academic papers on world fútbol, published in multiple languages - trains his canny, socio-historical eye on the contrasting cultural forces shaping women's soccer in 2023.¿A head start. Where North American women, starting in the 1970s, enjoyed newly rendered systems and cultural spaces left empty by traditionally male-centered team sports, their European sisters were forced to contest what has arguably been the most male-dominated space in European public life.Changing dynamics. These nuanced, divergent evolutions help explain the dominance of the 4-time World Cup champion United States. However, hard-won access to the European player-development apparatus, mainly at the club level, has tipped the balance of power.Crucial support. Markovits also identifies the one cohort vital to the sport's commercial success, on either side of the Atlantic: women themselves, who have rarely (if ever) supported any team game at the professional level in numbers that would allow women's soccer to compete equitably with team sports played exclusively and watched largely by men.No book better explains this fascinating state of play or better preps the global soccer community for a World Cup sure to remake the sport's balance of power.

Andrei S. Markovits legt mit diesem Buch die bewegte Autobiografie eines jüdischen Intellektuellen in der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts vor, geprägt von vielfältigen Orten, Sprachen und Emigrationen. Er analysiert vor allem die Strapazen der doppelten Emigration: aus Rumänien, wo er geboren wurde, nach Wien, wo er zur Schule ging, und von Wien nach New York, wo er an der Columbia University studierte.In Harvard wurde er schließlich zum Sozialwissenschaftler und zu dem Intellektuellen und Professor für Politik und andere Fächer, dessen Leben nicht nur die USA und Europa verbindet, sondern der in den USA lehrend auch in Deutschland über die Jahrzehnte immer wieder in Debatten eingriff und für seinen treffend analysierenden Blick geschätzt wird. Sein Verhältnis zu Deutschland ist, ausgehend von Fragen jüdischer Identität nach der Shoah, eine komplexe emotionale Beziehung, die bis heute anhält.Für Markovits wurde es gerade die Wurzellosigkeit, die ihm Trost, Beistand und Inspiration für sein Lebenswerk spendet. Auf seiner Suche nach einer Heimat begegnen wir seiner Auseinandersetzung mit den wichtigen politischen, gesellschaftlichen und kulturellen Entwicklungen von fünf Jahrzehnten auf zwei Kontinenten. Ihn prägen aber auch seine musikalischen Interessen von Klassik bis Rock, seine Vorliebe für Mannschaftssportarten wie Fußball, Baseball, Basketball und American Football und nicht zuletzt seine Leidenschaft für Hunde und deren Rettung.Markovits nimmt uns mit auf eine Reise durch die Höhen und Tiefen Europas und Amerikas nach 1945. Indem er die kulturellen Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede beider Kontinente beleuchtet, zeigt er, warum Amerika ihn, als Europäer, so faszinierte und ihm eine Heimat bieten konnte, die es in Europa so nicht gab. Auch wenn die Hässlichkeit des Rassismus und eine wachsende ökonomische Ungleichheit die Alltagserfahrungen auch dort immer wieder beeinträchtigen, so war Amerika für ihn doch tatsächlich die weithin ausstrahlende ,city upon the hill', die sich durch akademische Exzellenz, intellektuelle Offenheit, kulturelle Vielfalt und religiöse Toleranz auszeichnet.Aus dem Amerikanischen übersetzt von Robert Zwarg, mit einem Vorwort von Michael Ignatieff und einem Vorwort zur deutschen Ausgabe von Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht.

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. Andrei Markovits and Lars Rensmann take readers into the exciting global sports scene, showing how soccer, football, baseball, basketball, and hockey have given rise to a collective identity among millions of predominantly male 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. Gaming the World reveals the pervasive influence of sports on our daily lives, making all of us citizens of an increasingly cosmopolitan world while affirming our local, regional, and national identities.

No survey can capture the breadth and depth of the anti-Americanism that has swept Europe in recent years. From ultraconservative Bavarian grandmothers to thirty-year-old socialist activists in Greece, from globalization opponents to corporate executives--Europeans are joining in an ever louder chorus of disdain for America. For the first time, anti-Americanism has become a European lingua franca. In this sweeping and provocative look at the history of European aversion to America, Andrei Markovits argues that understanding the ubiquity of anti-Americanism since September 11, 2001, requires an appreciation of such sentiments among European elites going back at least to July 4, 1776. While George W. Bush's policies have catapulted anti-Americanism into overdrive, particularly in Western Europe, Markovits argues that this loathing has long been driven not by what America does, but by what it is. Focusing on seven Western European countries big and small, he shows how antipathies toward things American embrace aspects of everyday life--such as sports, language, work, education, media, health, and law--that remain far from the purview of the Bush administration's policies. Aggravating Europeans' antipathies toward America is their alleged helplessness in the face of an Americanization that they view as inexorably befalling them. More troubling, Markovits argues, is that this anti-Americanism has cultivated a new strain of anti-Semitism. Above all, he shows that while Europeans are far apart in terms of their everyday lives and shared experiences, their not being American provides them with a powerful common identity--one that elites have already begun to harness in their quest to construct a unified Europe to rival America.

Soccer is the world's favorite pastime, a passion for billions around the globe. In the United States, however, the sport is a distant also-ran behind football, baseball, basketball, and hockey. Why is America an exception? And why, despite America's leading role in popular culture, does most of the world ignore American sports in return? Offside is the first book to explain these peculiarities, taking us on a thoughtful and engaging tour of America's sports culture and connecting it with other fundamental American exceptionalisms. In so doing, it offers a comparative analysis of sports cultures in the industrial societies of North America and Europe. The authors argue that when sports culture developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nativism and nationalism were shaping a distinctly American self-image that clashed with the non-American sport of soccer. Baseball and football crowded out the game. Then poor leadership, among other factors, prevented soccer from competing with basketball and hockey as they grew. By the 1920s, the United States was contentedly isolated from what was fast becoming an international obsession. The book compares soccer's American history to that of the major sports that did catch on. It covers recent developments, including the hoopla surrounding the 1994 soccer World Cup in America, the creation of yet another professional soccer league, and American women's global preeminence in the sport. It concludes by considering the impact of soccer's growing popularity as a recreation, and what the future of sports culture in the country might say about U.S. exceptionalism in general.