Adam S Beissel

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Associate Professor at Miami University

In this follow-up collection to our recently edited book (Beissel et al., 2023), we focus on the events, issues, and controversies that occurred during and after the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup. The purpose of this collection is to critically examine the various social, political, economic, cultural, and environmental dimensions of the 2023 FIFA Wo...

When Australia and New Zealand won the bid to host the 2023 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) Women’s World Cup (FWWC), the bid committee promised that the tournament will catalyse women’s empowerment and gender equality across the two nations and into the broader region of Oceania. Driven by these promises, the Oceania Footb...

This chapter interrogates the unique ways in which FIFA 2.0 shaped, influenced, and set the stage for the 2023 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) Women’s World Cup (2023 FWWC) event bidding. In this chapter, we take up Allison and Tomlinson’s (2017) call to contextualise and interrogate the role of sporting international non-g...

In this chapter we critically explore the social media strategy of the successful Australia–New Zealand “As One 2023” joint bid for the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) Women’s World Cup 2023. We explore how the As One 2023 bid harnessed Twitter to communicate a hosting vision that appealed to multiple audiences while strate...

This chapter examines online news media coverage of the Australia–New Zealand joint bid to host the 2023 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) Women’s World Cup (2023 FWWC). Following neoliberal feminist theory and a postfeminist framework, the discourses of women’s empowerment produced in Australia and New Zealand’s popular onli...

Hosting rights for the 2023 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) Women’s World Cup (2023 FWWC) were awarded to Australia and New Zealand. The joint bid – known as Australia New Zealand As One 2023 (As One 2023) – was the first bid selected to host a major women’s football tournament following FIFA’s landmark reform package known...

This chapter examines how legacy emerged as a prominent theme throughout the competitive bid process for the 2023 Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) Women’s World Cup (FWWC). The bid process for this event –the most recent FIFA Women’s World Cup award – required all potential (co-)hosts to submit preliminary legacy proposals a...

This chapter uses the extraordinary context of Aotearoa New Zealand hosting the Women’s Cricket, Rugby, and Football World Cups in 2022 and 2023 to consider the potential prospects and challenges involved in attempting to leverage women’s international sport events to improve societal and sporting opportunities for women and girls. More specificall...

The FIFA Women’s World CupTM 2023 (FWWC23) bidding process was the first major women’s football tournament awarded following FIFA’s landmark reform package known as FIFA 2.0: The Vision for the Future. This paper interrogates the conjunctural politics of the FWWC23 competitive bid process, exploring the unique ways in which FIFA shapes, influences,...

In this chapter, I bring together my various research findings and observations to concisely discuss the conjunctural politics of the FMWC26 in order to contextualize the event within the broader historical and cultural conjuncture. The politics of each sport mega-event is, to note, conjunctural in that it will be “affected by different political c...

This chapter explores the economic and social impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on European professional football. We explore how European football’s ruling elite employed the principles and practices of disaster capitalism to exploit the pandemic for economic and political gain and disrupt the already fragile and contradictory networks that comprise...

In October 2016, Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) announced a landmark reform package that ushered in a new era of global football governance known as FIFA 2.0. Despite decades of profitability for its most visible event - the Men’s World Cup (MWC) - FIFA’s leadership had come under intense scrutiny following a corruption an...

A common trend among hosts of women’s international sporting events is to tout the opportunity to positively impact girls and women’s sporting and physical activity practices. Yet, many scholars have shown that such ‘trickle down’ effects from the event to society are seldom realised. Nonetheless, organisers continue in their attempts to ‘leverage’...

This chapter provides an overview of the key issues and expressions of the generative relationship linking the global and the local within contemporary sport culture by critically and empirically engaging sport as the nexus of global-local events, bodies, spaces, and practices. Following a brief introduction to the complex phenomenon of globalizati...

The purpose of this study is to examine online news media coverage of the successful Australia-New Zealand joint bid to host the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup (FWWC). Following neoliberal feminist theory and a postfeminist framework, we explore the meanings and discourses of women’s empowerment produced in, and disseminated by, Australia and New Zeal...

After reading this chapter, the student will be able to do the following: • Develop an understanding of the sport industry as a corporeal economy operating in 21st-century America • Describe how sport and physical culture changed with the emergence of industrial capitalism and the transformation to late capitalism • Explain the relevance of Marx’s...

Creating engaging course material that blends the theoretical and the practical elements of a topic is a challenge that many disciplines face. Specifically for sport management, much of the practical learning comes outside of the classroom in the form of field trips, internships, or facility tours. Other areas of practice may come in the form of ca...

As the sport industry has become ever more global, the importance of having competent, well-trained professionals who understand the cross-national, and inter-cultural aspects of sport and management will become increasingly crucial. As such, sport management educators need to develop curricula and provide experiences that will prepare students for...

Neoliberalism on American college campuses has undoubtedly shaped the way administrators, faculty, staff, and students experience contemporary education. This manuscript utilizes extensive archival research at Towson University to examine the inception of neoliberalism influenced leadership by the President, his staff, faculty, and students in the...

In this article we critically explore the social media strategy of the successful Australia-New Zealand 'As One' joint bid for the FIFA Women's World Cup 2023™. We explore how the As One bid harnessed Twitter to communicate a hosting vision that appealed to multiple audiences while strategically, and successfully, resonating with contemporary FIFA...

On June 13th, 2018, the hosting rights of the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup were awarded to a joint bid of the US, Mexico, and Canada. The North American effort, known as the United Bid, received extensive public support and behind-the-scenes lobbying from an unlikely source: US President Donald Trump. In this chapter, we examine the conjunctural polit...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to reframe analyses of stadium and arena subsidization policies from perspectives centered upon economic and financial issues toward a perspective focused on broader issues of urban governance and the public purposes of sports facilities. Such assessments would provide a better understanding of whether such use...

Rationale/Purpose: In June 2018 FIFA awarded the 2026 Men’s Football World Cup tournament to a transnational bid comprising the United States, Canada and Mexico. We explore this moment of historical conjuncture to understand the interplay of football, SME processes, geopolitical symbolism, and legacy craft. Design/Methodology/Approach: Drawing on a...

In the U.S. territory of American Samoa, gridiron football has emerged as an important driver of a stock-flow relationship in which the stock of overseas-resident migrant athletic laborers sustains the flow of remittances to their extended family in their homeland. Within this article, I consider the significance of gridiron football within America...

This project will specifically focus on the symbiotic relationship between the intercollegiate athletics program and corporatization of educational functions and leadership at Towson University as emblematic of the influence that neoliberal corporate capitalism has had on institutions of higher education and its stakeholders. We offer a genealogy o...

Given the highly competitive recruitment of elite student-athlete prospects, and the immense pressure to have winning intercollegiate athletics programs, the global recruitment and impact of prospective international student-athletes (ISA’s) has increased drastically in recent years. ISA’s have been a major factor in several intercollegiate sport t...

The Pittsburgh Steelers serve as a critical space for the celebration of masculinity and working-class identity in the context of (post-)industrial America. Within this article, the authors chronicle the transformation of a city, a region, and a group of people, at once steeped in the hard life of steel production and factory work, now increasingly...

If automobility and its attendant location within the field of the NASCAR enterprise reveals anything about the nation’s political and economic trajectory over the past decade-plus, it is that the “domestic” infrastructure of an increasingly interconnected global economy—mined by Exxon-Mobil in the Gulf of Mexico, overlain with miles of criss-cross...

The history of petroleum overdependence (as a resource fueling broader systems of capital accumulation) and widespread anxieties over its global scarcity foregrounds both concerns for the state of twenty-first century American empire and the geopolitical militarism it necessitates. The “Global War on Terror” espoused by George W. Bush and his acoly...

This article profiles the ascent of stockcar racing from parochial pastime of the late industrial American South into an internationally-distributed corporate sport conglomerate. We explicate the role NASCAR (the sport's governing body), its spectacles, and its consumer-spectators played in reproducing the political, economic, and cultural conditio...

This paper expands upon existing sports sponsorship 'match-up' research by offering an interview-driven, empirically-grounded, 'thick' description of the decision-making processes of sports organisations in developing athlete-sponsor-team relationships. By focusing on a particular NASCAR (The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) organisa...