For a long time, in works reporting upon sport in Latin America, there have been frequent moans concerning the underdevelopment of the topic. I have voiced my own complaints in several papers, arguing for the possibilities and agendas, and insisting on the difficulties, the absences, the resistances of traditional disciplines in the social sciences (especially sociology, anthropology, history). In 1999 we started a working group on Deporte y Sociedad (Sports and Society) at CLACSO (The Latin American Council for Social Sciences) with the diagnosis of a potential field of research, a clandestine research that pushed its way onto the social science agenda. The Latin American social sciences seemed blind to the unavoidable presence of sports in every day life in the continent; academics couldn't acknowledge that some of the key debates of our culture and our sociality were happening around sports (and especially, football). Among some possibilities, sports allows us to discuss the new ways to configure identities, from local to national, and it allows (us) to debate the meanings of violence among youth in larger numbers and conducted in more spectacular ways than among urban ‘tribes’ which had, however, found favour among the academy. Finally, here is a stage for the concentration and growth of monopoly capital in mass communications, which have constructed multimedia emporiums and devastated markets with the help of sports television it is easier, for example, to appreciate the power of Televisa in Mexican football than in other aspects of social life.

Ten years on, the frame is radically different. As many Latin American readers already know, the studies of sport in the continent have abandoned clandestinity. And even though they remain (and will remain) condemned to the periphery of academic legitimacy (never will an analysis of Colombian supporters or the ‘heroism’ of Maradona or Romario win any grand disciplinary awards) research has grown in quantity, visibility, strength and rigour. Beyond the essay, sustained by contemporary categories and tools of sociology and anthropology research on sport and society no longer require the annoying introductions nor need they deny the old motto of the ‘modern opium of the people’ that the visions of the 1960s had affirmed. Today, research can move along the paths opened by Roberto Da Matta in Brazil and Eduardo Archetti in Argentina: sport as a privileged focus for studying our societies, their imaginaries, their wishes, their fantasies, their miseries. Or, as Roger Magazine states: ‘[soccer fandom] offers an opportunity to observe the everyday social dreams, projects, and divisions that are subsumed in Mexico's dominant collective imaginaries and overlooked in subtle ways by studies that begin and end with traditional sociological categories, such as class, civil society and state, derived from the colonizer's societies’ (p. 15).

The meticulous and at the same time creative ethnography of Magazine amongst the fans of the UNAM Pumas, the porra, is an excellent example of what these studies can produce – of the risks they must avoid, of the challenges they might face. Football culture, read through the fans, avoids the bad metaphor of the ‘reflection’; on the opposite, the actions of the fans are themselves ‘creative, engaging, concrete action constitutive of material world’ (p. 15). Therefore, the relations between football and contemporary politics and society organisation are not ruled by reproduction but by its transformation tensions: fans debate between a clientelism they detect and reject, and a paternalism from which they can't escape. The porra becomes a text where to analyse a subaltern reading of the clientelism, only beatable by the desire, the emotion and the passion of the fans, last remaining spaces of authenticity in a world colonised by mercantilisation – and by the world it refers to, both football and to society in general. There is a sort of neo-romanticism in which the members of the porra strengthen their distinction of young – because they understand, sharply, that the articulation of age is the most meaningful. But that meaning doesn't transform the porra in a sort of social and political Mexican vanguard; Magazine smartly displays the temptations and difficulties of this possibility: ‘It may be going too far to suggest that the porra members’ ideal vision represents a potential alternative future for Mexican society as a whole, in the sense of completely replacing clientelism, neoliberalism, and other possibilities at the national level' (p. 204). But, at the same time, the porra points out the desire, at least, of ‘a sort of antisystemic sociality that encourages and allows expression and enjoyment’ (ídem).

Magazine's analysis makes it possible to see another side of the topic that is important for fellow investigations all across the continent. Despite the particularity of the practices of violence of the porras, Magazine marks both a difference and a continuity. Latin American hinchadas are far from a simple mimic of British hooligans; on the contrary, their autonomy is specifically continental – Magazine remarks that the role model fan proceeds from Argentina, Brazil and Chile, especially through television, going to grotesque extremes such as the imitation of Argentinean songs that include the use of the Marcha Peronista (Peronist March), a song used in another time as purely political and local. But, at the same time, the Mexican government's reactions against this violence reproduce those of Thatcher's government in the 1980s, consisting on purely repressive, stigmatising and discriminative characteristics. This sign – I insist: with style and practical differences, with continuity regarding to repression – is another of the great merits of Magazine's book. It creates a new knowledge, adds knowledge, incorporates elements – empirically and interpretatively– essential to the development of a democratic debate on violence. On this point, the book joins works by Andrés Fábregas Puig in México, Carlos Pimenta and Henrique Toledo in Brazil, and José Garriga Zucal in Argentina. That there are so few mentioned is an indication of how much further research remains necessary.