Welcome to World Cup: The Syllabus! This is a very exciting project that has been created by the Global Sport Lab at the University of Washington, in conjunction with an amazing editorial team composed of some of the world’s pre-eminent scholars of global football. 

You may be wondering how to engage with this syllabus, and where to start. Well, the answer is truly: start wherever you are most interested! We have designed the syllabus to cover a broad range of topics related to the World Cup, and global football in general, so there really is no bad place to start, and no wrong way to engage with this syllabus. 

However, if you’d like more in-depth guidance to engaging with the syllabus, our suggestion would be to start from the beginning, with our section about migration, and then to follow the syllabus sequentially through the subject areas until you get to our final section about technology. 

Each section begins with a short introduction written by two members of our brilliant editorial team. These introductions explain the importance of the subject area to a critical study of the World Cup, a brief rundown of important developments in the subject area, and a short analysis of why certain works have been chosen for the subject area. Following the introduction, there is a list of between 3-5 discussion questions that you can use to guide your reading and exploration of the subject area. They’re useful questions both to bear in mind as you read the works that are included in each subject area, and to spark further discussion and debate between yourself and others who may have also engaged with the syllabus. 

The works in each subject area have been suggested by our editorial team, and include a mix of works that we have the rights to embed and display on this site, and links to works that we do not currently have the rights to display. Some works may have a paywall attached, but we have endeavored to include works in each section that are publicly and freely available. 

We intend for the syllabus to be an iterative project, and so we will continue to update the works that are embedded and freely available as we gain the rights to further pieces of work. 

See you on the other side, and we hope you enjoy this journey through the world of global football!