Response to Research Paper Outline

Topic: I am writing my research paper on the presence of racism in international soccer.

Most Useful Item: The studies of job discrimination in my research (from Soccernomics by Kuper and Szymanski) appear the most useful. The discrepancies between job discrimination on the field and behind the scenes were the most interesting. This showed that in a efficient job market, like the market in professional soccer players, where you can easily view the better performances of certain players, racism is driven out by competitive forces. However, in an inefficient job market, like the market for soccer managers, where managers are chosen more for public relations purposes than actual competence at their jobs, racism can sustain itself. This was a very important insight into racism in the sports industry.

Opinion: While racism is still very prevalent in soccer today, I say that this a problem of our culture, not of the game. Critics say that competition and the high emotions of goals can bring out negative parts of society, but they cannot bring out those parts if they are not there. Soccer stadiums have been a place for fans to release their negative energies, but I propose that soccer can become a medium for change. Soccer is great place to bring change to racist behavior because it is always on the international stage, it is the world's game, and it provides hundreds of successful role models in the players themselves.

Presentation to Audience: Presenting this information to a general audience will not be a problem will not really be a problem. While I am talking about soccer, I am more writing about the media, job market, and enthusiasm surrounding soccer, not the intricacies of the game itself.

Whoa!: The most intriguing moments in my research were instances when I saw how soccer was a large symbol for some people. As the world's game, soccer also has the capacity to convey the world's dilemmas. I found this most in these following quotes from Foer's How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization:

       "Iranians crave international soccer because the game links them to the advanced, capitalist, un-Islamic West. When they broadcast games from the World Cup, they can't avoid seeing the placards on the side of the pitch that advertise PlayStation, Doritos, and Nike, a way of life that Iranians are forbidden to join." (Foer 230)

Soccer, as a global sport, became the symbol of globalization.There was also an instance of female oppression when women first showed resistance by breaking into a stadium to watch a soccer game.
   
      "Matches between cross-town rivals always make for the most combustible dates on the schedule. These rivalries generate the game's horror stories: jobs denied because of allegiance to the foe; fans murdered for wearing the wrong jersey in the wrong neighborhood. Nobody, it seems, hates like a neighbor. But the Celtics-Rangers rivalry represents something more than the enmity of proximity. It is an unfinished fight over the Protestant Reformation." (Foer 36)

The Celtics were founded as an Irish Catholic club while the Rangers were formed as a Protestant opposition. The clubs' managements continue to build up these identities because they made money off of the hatred.

       "Emboldened by 100,000 people chanting in unison, safety in numbers, fans seized the opportunity to scream things that could never be said, even furtively, on the street or in the cafe. This is a common enough phenomenon. There's a long history of resistance movements igniting in the soccer stadium. In the Red Star Revolution, Draza, Krle, and the other Belgrade soccer hooligans helped topple Slobodon Milosevic. Celebrations for Romania's 1990 World Cup qualification carried into the Bucharest squares, culminating in a firing squad that trained its rifles on the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife. The movement that toppled the Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner had the same sportive ground zero... to let the Catalan people channel their political energies into a harmless pastime. If Barca let Catalonia blow off steam, it turned out to be a tidy arrangement for all involved. Franco never faced any serious opposition from the Catalans." (Foer 204)

The passion in soccer can help arise the passion of rebellion. But in Spain's case, dictator Franco let FC Barcelona remain as the last Catalonian stronghold. He let the Catalans release their energies to the sport, so that they did not release their energies upon his regime.

Moreover it is just the surprising examples of how soccer can become so involved in so many lives. There was a story of how two men broke out of prison to see the game between their club and their rival, and then they turned themselves in after watching their team win. While studying racism, I found these amazing incidents of soccer as a globalizing and powerful force. By seeing how soccer is a global force, it shows how soccer can be a global model of how racism has developed.