ABSTRACT
Soccer, world’s most popular mass spectator sport, gives birth to great achievers on the field of play all the time. While some of them become stars and heroes during their playing career, transforming themselves into national as well as global icons, very few come to be remembered as all-time greats, leaving an enduring legacy and thereby claiming to be legends by their own rights. While the rise and achievements of these soccer greats have drawn considerable attention from journalists and scholars across the world,1 their legacies across time and space have mostly been overlooked.2 While you have hundreds and thousands of popular biographies of footballers across the world,3 there is almost a vacuum in terms of academic studies on their legacies.4 This volume, on the eve of the 2014 World Cup to be played in Brazil, intends to reconstruct the significance of the legacies of such great men of world soccer particularly in a globalized world. It will attempt to show that these luminous personalities not only represent their national identity at the global stage, but also highlight the proven role of players or coaches in projecting a global image, cutting across affiliations of nation, region, class, community, religion, gender and so on. In other words, the true heroes, icons and legends of the world’s most popular sport have always floated at a transnational global space, transcending the limits of space, identity or culture of a nation. The iconic figures, who will play in the volume by dint of their legacies from a variety of perspectives, include Pele, Socrates and Zico (Brazil); Rattin, Menotti, De Stefano, Bilardo, Maradona and Messi (Argentina); Beckenbauer and Ballack (Germany); Zidane (France); Michels, Cryuff, Neeskens, Gullit-Basten-Rijkaard and Bergkamp (Holland); Best-Charlton to Best and Beckham (England); Stoitchkov (Bulgaria); Drogba (Ivory Coast); and Milla (Cameroon).
