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© Generalitat de Catalunya 2008

Ramon LLOPIS GOIG, University of Valencia

The development and diffusion of a significant number of sports has had a direct relationship with the boom and development of a formula for the political organization of modern-day society itself, that being, the nation-state. This simultaneous development permitted an assembly between nationalism and sport. And yet in the last decade this phenomenon has undergone a clear weakening.

This situation is not an exceptional one. Sociology has demonstrated that in recent decades, as a result of the globalisation phenomenon, as with increased global tension between the global and local level, society has produced a blossoming of new substantial, trans-statal and supra-national identities that have caused a retreat in the political loyalties of citizens toward the nation-state.

Globalisation has impelled a new identity dynamic that has weakened the link between sport and nationalism. This, in turn, has consequently caused a change in the image between sport and society. Crisis in the sovereignty of the nation-state, along with the reorientation in political loyalties toward other forms of territorial organization supposes a weakening in the manner of organizational politics upon which the globalisation of football was based.

What now emerges corresponds to the global-local dialectic of which the basis of global tendency consists. In our communication we shall analysis the case of football and exemplify the way in which this global tension between the global and local identity is reoriented.