Football and the Emergence of Diasporas: Representing Post-Soviet Conflict States Beyond Europe

This chapter traces the emergence of Non-FIFA and alternative football associations and tournaments. Paying specific attention to the attempts to politicize these tournaments through representation on the football field, the chapter identifies a new form of soft power that re-territorializes identity and ethnicity at sporting, political and cultural levels. More specifically, it considers the emergence of post-Soviet conflict States playing at a representative level in the nascent world of alternative international football and how this practice gets deployed to rebuild the notions of a greater Russia and Hungary. Through a mix of fieldwork, media analysis and theoretical considerations the chapter examines how the construction and accomplishment of nationality in unrecognized diaspora through football can be used to expand, revive and assert national identities.