Soccer Business

Soccer can be interesting for social scientific research from a variety of perspectives. One approach to this sport is historiographic: it focuses on the social significance and salience of soccer through successive time periods. The June 1995 issue of Replika devoted a thematic section to this perspective. Another possibility is to study soccer as a phenomenon of global consumer culture. The present selection of articles partly draws on this approach and explores the economic environment for transforming soccer into a spectacle sport in Hungary. The first two articles in the section, written by Ferenc Dénes and Sándor Horváth, respectively, was originally written for a recent conference on refashioning the economic management of soccer. The section conlcudes with three interviews — two with soccer coaches and experts, Tibor Nyilasi and György Mezei, and one with a possible sponsor for the sport, József Bayer — all of which reflect on the issues raised by the opening articles.