New Book by the Soccer Mad Boffins all about the 1966 FIFA World Cup

2016 marks the 50th anniversary of the 1966 FIFA World Cup, hosted in England. Unlike previous literature, which has tended to focus activities on the field, this book brings an institutional level approach to organizing the 1966 FIFA World Cup and examines the management process in the buildup and execution of the event. 

This intriguing new volume looks at the first significant UK government intervention in football and how this created a significant legacy as the government started to take a real interest in leisure facilities and stadium safety as policy areas after this competition. Foundations of Managing Sporting Events will be of considerable interest to research academics working on aspects of post war British, Imperial, and World history including sport, social, business, economic, and political history.

 https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138645202

Networking the World Cup

The latest in a line of attempts to ‘measure’ the world cup in a quasi-academic fashion comes from The New York Times, where graphics editor Gregor Aisch has developed a series of network diagrams to show the ties between clubs and countries. In his latest diagram, Aisch aims to show how many clubs have two or more players at the world cup playing for different teams.  The logic seems to be that clubs with the widest diversity in terms of national team representation (i.e. Man Utd and Real Madrid) sit in the middle of the diagram, while clubs with less diversity sit towards the edge.  The diagram can also be used backwards, to show the clubs that contributed players to each national team.  The diagram is relatively intense, but some countries, such as Iran and Australia, qualified with fewer players at well networked clubs than most.

It would be tempting to say that this is a predictor of form based on Australia already being out of the tournament, and Iran having only one point so far - but Australia will

face much better networked Spain in tonight’s dead-rubber. Perhaps the explanatory power of network diagrams in football can only go so far, on the pitch at least?

What would your Brazilian nickname be?

To get into the Brazilian spirit, here is an entertaining website which allows you to generate Brazilian football names.  Just for fun, we 'Brazilled' a few famous management gurus:

Micheal Porter = Michea
Gary Hamel = Hamito
Peter Drucker = Druckinho
Stephen Linstead = Claudio Linsteito
Bill Cooke = Felix Cookardo
Jay Barney = Barnito
Michel Foucault = Foucaimo Pau
Peter Starbuck = Petisco






Try converting your own name here: http://www.minimalsworld.net/BrazilName/brazilian.shtml

Soccer Mad Boffins Comment on the FIFA 2014 World Cup in Brazil - Part 1

Football is never far from the headlines at the moment thanks to this year’s FIFA World Cup tournament in Brazil, and controversies surrounding the 2018 and 2022 competitions, to be hosted by Russia and Qatar respectively.

Academics in The York Management School, University of York, who have been conducting a pioneering management history research project of the 1966 FIFA World Cup believe that the game and its governing bodies could do well to heed the lessons of history.

Dr Kevin Tennent and Dr Alex Gillett, editors of the ‘Soccer Mad Boffins’ blog site, which will be launched this summer to coincide with the tournament in Brazil, identify that such controversies over the organisation of sports tournaments with international participation are not new for the sport.

According to Dr Tennent, “This is about cross-cultural management. How do cultural and language barriers effect the success – or otherwise – of tournaments like the FIFA World Cup?  We have seen innovations introduced as a result of such misunderstandings  -  the red and yellow card system was, for example, introduced as a consequence of problems of language and understanding during the 1966 FIFA World Cup when it was hosted in England.”

Dr Gillett adds: “We are told that we live in an increasingly globalised society, but as new ‘markets’ open up – or are opened – by industries including sport, the financial stakes as well as expectations, are raised.  This means that problems are closely scrutinised. Perhaps sport has never before been quite so under the microscope in terms of its accountability and transparency.  The question is, how will its governing bodies adapt?”

Dr Tennent and Dr Gillett’s year long study is supported by FIFA and the Centre International d’Etude du Sport in Switzerland through the João Havelange Scholarship scheme.  They are particularly interested in the organisation of the tournament in the years running up to 1966, the day to day management of the tournament itself, and the management of legacy after the tournament.