Professional soccer in Japan

The globalization of football has begun to attract attention from academics from different disciplines, although initially it was British-based, and mainly English, sociologists who predominated. Studies have moved away from an almost exclusive focus on fan violence (Williams et al. 1984; Murphy et al. 1990; Giulianotti, Bonney and Hepworth 1994) to ethnicity and nationalism (Duke and Crolley 1996), labour migration (Bale and Maguire 1995), the World Cup (Tomlinson and Whannel 1986; Sugden and Tomlinson 1994; Sugden and Tomlinson 1998) and the impact of modernity (Giulianotti and Williams 1994). More recently MacClancy (1996), Armstrong and Giulianotti (1997) and Armstrong (1998) have produced volumes reflecting the interest of anthropologists and ethnographically inclined sociologists in football in different parts of the world.