Black Soccer

Soccer—or football as it is known in most of the world—has a particular political significance throughout the African diaspora. In seemingly disparate places, at critical moments in the global growth of the sport, Black players, coaches, and executives have used the game as a platform for potent critiques of racism, colonialism, and the international system. Black Soccer is a groundbreaking account of how footballers have challenged the racist architecture of the sport and transformed it into a site of Black political expression. Jermaine Scott examines the international development of soccer alongside Black political movements, highlighting the role Black athletes played in resisting what he calls the coloniality of football: the institutions, practices, and discourses that subordinate Blackness and privilege whiteness. Ranging across the United States, Brazil, England, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, he explores the labor politics of Black soccer teams in Harlem, the decolonial vision of FIFA shared by African soccer executives, Howard University’s fight against the NCAA, the aesthetic and labor politics of Afro-Brazilian footballers, and the refusal of Black Dutch footballers to be marginalized under a narrative of multiculturalism. This book shows that Black soccer cannot be reduced to Black people playing the game: It is a diasporic space and practice that offers Black communities alternative forms of identification within, against, and beyond the nation-state.