As a rapidly growing range of degree courses, scholarly articles and conference papers attest, the study of football as a serious discipline has over the last ten years mushroomed. Initially, much like the sport itself, the field was dominated by Europeans both in terms of analysis and object of study. In recent years however, the study of the only truly global sport has been illuminated by a proliferation of studies of, and analyses from, Latin America, long a heartland of the global game. Broadly, studies of football in the Americas have been historical, sociological or anthropological. In the first of these categories, studies on the development of the game from its arrival in the kitbags of British merchant seaman across the region have a proud tradition. The latter two categories have been well-served across a range of case studies, notably examination of fan behaviour and affiliation in terms of ethnicity, social class, and other variables. Miller and Crolley's edited volume certainly reflects these long-run approaches, but steps beyond that in laying out a comparative view of football in the Americas at the beginning of the 21st century.

Originating in a unique conference in London in 2003, the essays in this volume are organised in three sections, the first composed of two broad-brush chapters by Richard Giulianotti, on the historical globalisation of Latin American football, and by Alan Gilbert, on the comparative significance of geographic factors in the relative success of European and Latin American football clubs. Taken together, these two essays remind us, pace long-standing critiques of the assumed recent phenomenon of globalisation, that both Latin America's peripheral role in global political economy, and its unique path of urbanisation through the twentieth century, have critically formed and informed the regional development of football.

The second section moves on to focus, in a series of case studies of Argentine, Brazilian, Mexican and Peruvian football, on the questions of identity and self-identifying which have formed a significant part of the scholarly football literature in both global and Americas specific terms. Thus Sergio Leite Lopes illuminates the development of Brazilian national identity through a comparison of Brazilian reactions to the defeat of their national team in the World Cup Finals of 1950 and 1998. Where the infamous 1950 defeat to Uruguay in the Maracana was a clear moment of crisis for Brazilian national identity, highlighted in racialised public discourse around the reasons for the defeat, responses to the 1998 defeat to France underlined that national identity was now not at stake. Football's central role in reinforcing specific constructions of national identity, shaped by critical junctures in that country's political economy, is also dealt with in Pablo Alabarces's intriguing examination of the role of the Argentina's 2002 World Cup campaign in the reconstruction of an Argentine national identity shattered by the crisis of late 2001. Three further essays in this first section also deal with issues of identity, both at the micro, individual club and barrio level, and on the larger macro scale of the national. Not the least notable feature of these three essays is that they focus on Mexican and Peruvian football, long under-represented in an academic literature which has focused predominantly on the more footballistically successful Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. This breadth of geographical focus is welcome, asking fresh research questions of countries where football may be less internationally successful, but as is made clear in these contributions, is nonetheless highly significant as a cultural and socio-economic dynamic.

The third section of the book looks frankly at the business of football in the Americas. Amongst the rapidly developing scholarly canon of football, it is perhaps this area of research that has shown most growth in recent times, not least because the increased global marketisation and financial resources of football have drawn significant interest from scholars more usually to be found looking at other areas of economics and business. Over and above sociological and cultural examinations of the sport, analysis of football economics and finance is currently eliciting the most valuable questions, and sometimes answers, to our understanding of football as a global phenomenon. In an initial survey of the business of football in Latin America, Gideon Rachmann reminds us, rightly, that many of the economic problems that beset Latin American football, often understood in the European mind as being ‘typically’ Latin American, are in fact equally common elsewhere, not least in the supposedly more transparent and stable arena of European football. This point is given cogent support in Katherine Jones' analysis of the travails of the Women's United Soccer Association (WUSA) in the USA, where the potential for building a successful women's professional soccer league is perhaps greater than in any other country. Girls and young women overwhelmingly choose soccer as their participatory sport of choice, yet the attempts of WUSA to ‘package’ the game as a professionalised spectator sport backfired spectacularly in 2003, raising questions about the highly gendered nature of football marketing.

Further chapters on Brazil and Argentina highlight both the similarities between Latin American and European football business inadequacies and failings, and the country specific dynamics which contribute to those failings. Luiz de Martins Melo, in a chapter focused on the key financial underpinnings of Brazilian football, perhaps expresses the overall picture best in the title of his contribution: ‘Technical Success and Economic Failure’. From the early 1990s, neo-liberal economic policies in Latin America both challenged the traditional shape of the professional game in the region, and coincided with the region increasingly functioning as a purveyor of natural resources – footballers to the European market. The human dimension at the European end of the global football commodity chain is illuminated in Marcela Mora y Araujo's closing essay on Latin American imports to English football. Whilst in Latin America, the footballers' dream is to earn financial security in the highest paying leagues in the world, the high salaries derived from commodification of their technical prowess has not always signified a happy development in their lives. Although the market welcomes them, English professional football has often seemed either too ignorant or too unwilling to recognise Latin American players as people, not products. The failure amongst top-level English clubs to understand that even the highest paid athletes can suffer cultural dislocation has often had difficult consequences, as Mora y Araujo's remarks on the case of the Colombian Juan Pablo Angel makes clear.

In sum, this volume is a highly significant addition to the literature on football in the Americas. Well-framed by Rory Miller's introductory chapter, the disparate case studies brought together here provide a superb introduction to the sport in the region. Ranging from the grassroots to the elite, shedding light on countries which have rarely benefited from sustained serious analyses of their football as well as the more often examined countries of the continental south, denaturalising outsiders clichéd views of Latin American football in particular, and locating the peoples game within the core-periphery economic relationship, Miller and Crolley's volume certainly provides us with some answers, but more significantly, is highly suggestive of a range of directions for future research.