Introduction and guidance
Session 1
Introduction and guidance
If you are a sports participant or fan and interested in how politics plays a role in one of sport’s biggest global events, the FIFA World Cups (men and women), then this thought-provoking course will be ideal for you. You will explore what makes the sport and the football World Cups political, with a focus on power relations, national identity and the stories behind how each tournament developed. Through a range of illustrative examples and video clips you will find out more about what lies behind symbolic matches, photographs, topical incidents and national rivalries. You may be surprised by some of the insights and by the end of the course have a deeper understanding of football, international relations and your own national identity.
This course will take approximately 10 hours to complete and is divided into 5 sessions. You can progress at your own pace. The sessions are:
- An introduction to sport, politics and political themes
- International politics and FIFA
- The World Cup and national identity
- Women and the World Cup
- Notable politically infused matches
After completing this course you should be able to:
- understand how sport and politics are connected
- describe how political themes have impacted both men’s and women’s World Cups
- discuss the concept of national identity and understand how it has influenced the World Cup
- identify how the women’s World Cup has developed and illustrations of the political challenges faced by some women.
Moving around the course
In the ‘Summary’ at the end of each session, you will find a link to the next session. If at any time you want to return to the start of the course, click on ‘Full course description’. From here you can navigate to any part of the course.
It’s also good practice, if you access a link from within a course page (including links to the quizzes), to open it in a new window or tab. That way you can easily return to where you’ve come from without having to use the back button on your browser.
You can now go to .Session 1 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)]