Football, Corruption and Lies: Revisiting 'Badfellas', the book FIFA tried to ban

John Sugden · Alan Tomlinson

Des. 2017 · Taylor & Francis

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World football is in crisis. The corruption scandal engulfing FIFA is arguably the biggest story in the history of modern sport and a watershed for sport governance. More than a decade ago, John Sugden and Alan Tomlinson laid the foundations for subsequent investigations with the publication of Badfellas, a groundbreaking work of critical sport sociology that exposed the systematic corruption at the heart of world football. It was a book that FIFA and Sepp Blatter tried to ban.

Now re-issued to combine the original contents of Badfellas with new chapters covering the current crisis, this book points to the ways in which FIFA’s new administration can learn from the Blatter story. The prequel traces the course of Sugden and Tomlinson’s game-changing investigation into FIFA, while the sequel updates the FIFA story from 2002 onwards and provides a chronology of crises and scandals within the FIFA narrative.

Demonstrating the vital importance of critical investigative methods in sport studies, Football, Corruption and Lies: Revisiting Badfellas, the book FIFA tried to ban is essential reading for anybody looking to understand Blatter’s rise and fall.

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John Sugden is Professor of the Sociology of Sport at the University of Brighton, UK. He is well known for his work on the sociology of boxing; sport and peace building in divided societies; his studies - with Alan Tomlinson - of the world governing body for football, FIFA; and for his investigative research into football’s underground economy. Currently, John is a leading member of the Sport and Leisure Cultures subject group and Director of the University of Brighton’s flagship worldwide community relations project, Football4peace.

Alan Tomlinson is Professor of Leisure Studies, School of Humanities, at the University of Brighton, UK. He is a renowned scholar and researcher on the social history and sociology of sport, leisure and popular culture. Alan has researched the history and politics of FIFA since the mid-1980s, and is a pioneer of the critical social scientific study of sport. He is the author of numerous books on sport, leisure and consumption, including Consumption, Identity and Style and FIFA: The Men, the Myths and the Money as well as being a long-term contributor to the soccer periodical When Saturday Comes.