This thesis endeavours to develop a more nuanced understanding of contemporary football culture. As such my research adopts a consumer-oriented cultural studies approach to analyse the ways in which modern ‘consumer’ fans negotiate their position within football culture and the power operating upon them as they do so. Drawing on data from unique ethnographic research I argue that modern fans engage in processes of complex discursive negotiation, constructing their identities at the juncture of the hegemonic discourses that surround football culture: capitalism and tradition, but also their individual understanding of how they are expected to enact fandom. I argue that modern fans are able to negotiate the discourses of capitalism and tradition operating upon them to enact their own power and identity within football culture. As such, this thesis seeks to advance debates about collective identity formation and the scope of representation within contemporary football culture. In doing so, my research contributes to football scholarship’s long tradition of making perceptive social commentaries, drawing on football culture to contribute to wider debates concerning capitalism and collective identity formation.

The first phase of this research project focused on developing an understanding of the performance environment in football, that is, the array of factors impacting individual and team performance in competitive situations. Study one was a qualitative investigation of the performance environment of the England youth football teams. National coaches, sport scientists, and players were interviewed regarding the factors that influenced performance at international tournaments. The main positives included: player understanding, strong team cohesion, managed free-time activities, and a detailed knowledge of opposition. The main negatives included: over coaching, player boredom, limited player free-time, player anxiety, and physical fatigue. Overall, results revealed 158 raw data themes, from which eight dimensions were abstracted to describe the performance environment.

This thesis presents advances in modelling and inference for match outcomes in the association football English Premier League. We firstly extend earlier models by introducing a behavioural aspect which can be used to investigate how teams react to the state of play in a match. We show that the model, in its simplest form, outperforms existing models and is able to select a portfolio of pro table bets against a bookmaker. Secondly, we introduce a dynamic component to the model by allowing team ability parameters to vary stochastically in time. We employ particle filtering methods to cope with a mixture of static and dynamic parameters and find that the updating of posterior distributions is particularly fast, a necessary attribute should we wish to update parameter estimates while matches are in-play. Furthermore, it is shown that the methods are able to recover model parameters based on simulated league data. Finally, we propose an extension to the model so that we are able to investigate how a team modifies its behaviour based on their league situation. We consider league positions that are closely attainable and suggest that since teams modify their behaviour based on their current league position, outcomes of different matches are not necessarily independent.

Professional football is a business worth billions of pounds a year. Player recruitment is a key aspect of the business with expenditures directly related to it (in the form of transfer fees and wages) accounting for the majority of clubs’ budgets. The purpose of this study is to propose methods to assist player evaluation based on statistical modelling that could be used to support recruitment decisions. In this thesis we argue that if such methods are to serve as the basis of player valuation, they need to have predictive utility, since it is players’ future performance that clubs benefit from and thus should be paying for. We present examples of how simplistic approaches to quantifying a footballer’s skill lack such predictive character. The original contribution of this thesis is a framework for evaluating footballers’ worth to a team in terms of their expected contribution to its results. The framework attempts to address one of the key difficulties in modelling the game of football, i.e. its free-flowing nature, by discretising it into a series of events. The evolution of the game from one event to another is described using a Markov chain model in which each game is described by a specific transition matrix with elements depending on the skills of the players involved in this game. Based on this matrix it is possible to calculate game outcome related metrics such as expected goals difference between the two teams at the end of the game. It enables us to establish a link between a specific skill of a given player and the game outcome. The skill estimates come from separate, location specific, models, e.g. the shooting skill for each player is estimated in a model of converting shots to goals given the shot location. We demonstrate how recognising the involvement of random chance in individual performance, together with accounting for the environment in which the evaluated performance occurred, gives our statistical model a predictive advantage when compared to naive methods which simply extrapolate past performance. This predictive advantage is shown to be present when passing and shooting skills are evaluated in isolation, as well as when measures of passing and shooting skills are combined in the proposed comprehensive metric of player’s expected contribution to the success of a team.

This thesis considers the application of statistical exploratory methods and modelling techniques to sports data. Key to this investigation is the analysis of home advantage and the factors which drive it. The review of literature has shown that much conjecture has been made about the cause of home advantage, but little statistical investigation has been pursued into this area. Building on the model for association football goal counts discussed in Dixon and Coles (1997), reparameterisation to reflect time and team dependent home advantage was explored, alongside the effect of cards on home advantage. Covariate analysis was performed using parametric and semi-parametric models in an attempt to better interpret home advantage by analysing regularly hypothesised causal relationships. Over and under dispersion in goal counts may be the result of variation in team skill or the lack thereof. Censoring and threshold mixture models were explored to try and capture any over or under dispersion, with the aim of creating a more flexible model. As an aside, weighted likelihood based changepoint methods were also explored as a method of considering the reduction in information about the threshold position carried by observations far from the threshold position. Finally, a brief but insightful analysis of changes of performance in golf was carried out. The research contained within can be used to inform statistical models for sports results and impact betting strategies based upon such models.

My hypothesis is that the structure of football and football clubs in the former Soviet Union adapted and evolved with the rapidly changing political and economic environment of the 1980s and 1990s in the Soviet Union and its successor states. During the time of the Soviet Union, football clubs relied on patronage from the Soviet state, its institutions, state owned companies, as well as local institutions. When the Soviet Union collapsed, football clubs were expected to gain independence from the organizations, or state institutions, and go private. Some clubs were able to sustain their operations by selling their top players to clubs in Western Europe. By the mid-1990s, however, state patronage was replaced by new forms of patronage. The use of the term patronage in this dissertation refers to the political and financial support of football clubs by state institutions, private companies, or individuals (the latter two being only the case in the post- Soviet era). Football patrons use their money and political influence to ensure the financial stability of clubs. After the fall of the Soviet Union, oligarchs and private companies bought football clubs as playthings, for sponsorship, or to legitimize their business operations, and/or to gain political influence. State owned institutions that still owned football clubs rediscovered the political value of football in the post-Soviet world. The popularity of football with the masses meant that football could be used as a political vehicle; this is especially the case in the post- Soviet states where football is often used as a legitimization of business magnates that aim for political posts. The objective of this work is to outline the transition that football clubs underwent, after the death of Brezhnev, under the Gorbachev reforms, to the fall of communism, the Boris Yeltsin years, and finally to the state capitalism of Vladimir Putin.

Internationally, football is increasingly employed as a key development tool focussed on young men. ‘Sports-as-development’ initiatives have proliferated since the United Nation’s ‘Year of Sports’ in 2005 and the amateur football field offers a critique of such initiatives and points towards the need to situate them within specific historical, social, and sporting contexts. This thesis considers the implications for ‘sports-as-development’, suggesting that football provides avenues for both social mobility and also economic exploitation. Black River is a small town on the south coast of Jamaica. Each weekday evening on a farmer’s field a team of educated, middle-aged men with well-respected careers plays football against a team of younger men with limited formal education and few employment prospects. The thesis examines the embodiment and enactment of wealth and age among football players. It explores the background to these matches, and looks at how they shape and affect the players away from the field. Also, I investigate the ramifications of support for the English Premier League in relation to men’s experiences of migration. In particular, I am concerned with the questions: ‘why do these two groups play football against one another?’; and ‘what happens when they do?’. Data collection methods included informal interviewing, long-term engagement on the football field, and participation in the lives of research participants and observation of their social interactions in bars and on street corners. The thesis investigates the historical and social background to inequalities between older and younger competitors and the trajectories of these disparities across the town. Football in this context provides an informal apprenticeship and mediation of inter-generational conflict whilst situating players more broadly within global hierarchies of wealth and potential.

This thesis addresses relationships between art, aesthetics and men’s association football, and seeks to frame the latter as a source and locus of aesthetic variation and dissensus, in opposition to its typical presentation as a source of fleeting and purely physical pleasures. Its focus is the contemporary scene of global elite football, whose roots I argue can most effectively be traced back to the creation of the English Premier League and the UEFA Champions League in 1992. Through four chapters encompassing multiple case studies, I examine some of the aesthetic conceptions that are embedded within contemporary discourses around football, before analysing artworks and aesthetic practices that reproduce the game in various forms. Throughout the study, I am interested in bringing into focus the border-line between the cultural fields of art and football. I frame all of the objects, practices and artefacts that I analyse as sites of inter-section between these two rival sets of discursive formations, as well as offering theoretical and methodological reflections on the cultural dynamics that lead to these formations being considered as distinct fields in the first place. My principal research questions can be expressed as follows: what intellectual processes come into play when objects in the field of contemporary football approach the field of contemporary art and vice-versa, and what forces are active in each field that prevent this rapprochement from achieving total fulfilment?In order to approach these questions, my thesis is effectively divided into two halves. In the first half I use concepts derived from the study of art and visual cultures to bring to light some of the aesthetic debates that occur within football’s interpretative community. In chapter one I consider the manner in which aesthetics and sporting ethics become intertwined around the controversial issue of “diving”, while in chapter two I demonstrate the ways in which the animated highlight GIF holds in suspension notions of novelty, boredom and individual genius. In the second half of the thesis I analyse a number of artistic projects which address football – Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s film Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait, Maider López’s participatory performance Polder Cup and Craig Coulthard’s landscape intervention Forest Pitch, among others – by reading their aesthetic propositions against some of those that are rooted in the game itself. Addressing the functions that these works apply to the popular expressive content that already adheres to football can, I argue, be instructive in considering the cultural politics of contemporary art more generally. Finally, I conclude that contemporary football is a prominent site of complex aesthetic negotiations that warrants greater attention from the inter-discipline of visual studies.

The aim of this thesis was to examine how experts learn using the theory of deliberate practice. Expert and intermediate Gaelic football players practiced kicking, with their learning being assessed between a pre-test and retention test. A novel method to measure the tenets of deliberate practice during the activity, as opposed to retrospectively, was used throughout the thesis. Findings support previous research on the mechanisms and strategies engaged in by experts as they aim to improve performance and how they differ to lesser-skilled individuals. In line with the theory of deliberate practice, in Chapter 2 and 3 the experts rated practice higher for effort and lower for enjoyment, as well as practicing a more relevant skill in Chapter 2, when compared to intermediates. Moreover, they improved kicking accuracy between pre-test and retention test, whereas the intermediate group did not. In addition, the thesis identified differences between the cognitive mechanisms of experts and intermediates that underpin their respective performance. Expert groups engaged in greater cognitive processing during (Chapter 2 and 3) and between (Chapter 3) practice sessions when compared to intermediates. Chapter 4 examined the impact of applying these expert cognitive processes to the deliberate practice and performance of a youth intermediate group. A training group practiced kicking with an intervention designed to increase cognitive processing, whereas a control group practiced kicking without intervention. Findings support previous research by providing evidence of the outcome of such an intervention on deliberate practice. The training group demonstrated greater cognitive effort and less enjoyment during practice and greater improvements in accuracy after practice compared to the control group. Overall, findings in this thesis support the theory of deliberate practice and extend the research on the role of cognitive processing in effective skill acquisition.

Over the past two decades, the relationship between political extremism and football fans has been the subject of academic, political and policing debates throughout Europe. At football stadiums, in Italy in particular, it is common to witness manifestations of racist intolerance and ideological statements referring to regional, national and international issues. Concurrently, there has been a rise in conflict between Italian police forces and hardcore football fans. The fan-protagonists of such episodes are often groups known as the UltraS; the capital S is a neologism of this study to define neo-fascist oriented supporters. The nomenclature differentiates them from the wider hardcore football supporters who are instead referred in this research as ultrá. Despite their presence among the Italian curve (football terraces), the UltraS have been the subject of very limited methodical ethnographic study. The present study seeks to correct this lacuna and is the result of ethnographic research conducted from 2003 to 2006 and updated from 2007 to 2009. This thesis seeks to evaluate the UltraS phenomenon via an examination of two nationally renowned groups located in the Italian capital of Rome. The groups, the Boys of AS Roma and the Irriducibili of SS Lazio, enact their performances on the respective curve of the city’s Olympic Stadium. This research considers the UltraS gatherings as a form of ‘ideological communitas’. In doing so, analysis introduces and explains the four essential elements of the UltraS logic: the principle of non omologazione (non-conformism), the concept of the ‘true’ UltraS; the opposition of Tradition versus Modernity in the UltraS condition, and finally the attempt by them to live up to the ‘Warrior Spirit’. Analysis further identifies the ideological and anti-system based alliance between the UltraS of Lazio and Roma and other similar gatherings throughout Italy. This phenomenon, together with an increase ideologisation of the Italian curve, incidents such as the death at the hands of the police gun of the SS Lazio fan Gabriele Sandri in 2007 (and the concomitant violent UltraS reactions against a variety of institutions) and the appearance in 2008 of the UltraS Italia, may signify the beginning of an UltraS collective identity, and a concomitant emergent status of the UltraS as a social movement, which stands in opposition to the perceived repressive Italian State and its media allies.