ABSTRACT
Sport spaces have become increasingly lucrative commodities in a time of the expansion of global spaces. The media and local and global governing bodies have driven such trends, with, in many cases, severely dislocating effects on the cultural product in question. This has not been a seamless and uncontested process, but one of struggle among those who seek to overwhelm sport for largely corporate and/or personal gain and between them and those others who want to protect sport as a popular domain of civil society. For the most part, for the final quarter of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first, it is the latter who have lost out, and nowhere has this been more pronounced than in the world of association football. Based around ongoing archive research and investigative fieldwork carried out in and around world football's corridors of power, this chapter offers an account and interpretative theorisation and framework for understanding some of the key features of these power struggles.
