�����Դ�ɼ���

Fostering community through sports

Suggs stumbled upon this question as a graduate student at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. He had just come to the state’s flagship university, which sported an enrollment over 20,000, from tiny Rhodes College, about the size of a large high school. Even in 1996, Suggs was blown away by the size of the athletics enterprise on a college campus.

“A lot of people’s mental health depended on how the football team did on Saturday,” he said. “And this was a mediocre team in a second-tier conference. It’s a question I’ve been asking now for 30 years: Why do we do sports in this educational context both at the high school and collegiate levels?”

The United States stands alone in developing athletes through its schools. Within that system is a sizable disconnect between each level of competition—from youth clubs and high schools to colleges and universities, all the way up to professional and national teams.

“None of these clubs talk to each other or work together,” Suggs said.

It’s a different experience than those that shaped the vast majority of (non-American) World Cup players. In England, for example, a child playing youth soccer outside of Manchester might play for their town team and get picked up by another regional team somewhere within the tiered league structure. If skilled enough, they may eventually be noticed by a professional club like Manchester City or Manchester United, enter the club’s academy, and progress through that system.

Filling a market demand for its own elite pathways, Georgia club soccer has exploded as an industry over the past three decades, explored recently in a paper co-authored by May graduate Gabriella Etienne.

“That elite pathway, which started at Atlanta private schools and spread outward from there, set a template that we’ve seen repeated with lacrosse and rowing and other sports,” said Suggs, who is writing a book on the topic for �����Դ�ɼ��� Press due to publish in 2027. “Economically advantaged schools were able to start these teams as a way of helping their kids get access to other colleges.”

Interest in soccer spawned an expansive, albeit expensive, youth sports economy starting in Buckhead, DeKalb County, and other parts of metro Atlanta. But there’s another angle to the conversation that Suggs is examining in his book. Two generations later, shifting demographics in the state have resulted in new communities around the sport.

“In places like Dalton and Gainesville, home to many Hispanic immigrants, they’ve brought their own cultures that is very different from those other programs,” Suggs said. “That’s what is most fascinating to me when I look around the state. … [At an Atlanta United game] you are surrounded by every part of Georgia—East Atlanta hipsters, young professionals from the metro area, immigrants from across the state.

“It made me realize that soccer has formed the foundations of this new broad, inclusive community.”

Soccer and politics

For Cas Mudde, community isn’t just a biproduct of the sport. It’s part of its DNA.

The Stanley Wade Shelton UGA Foundation Professor of International Affairs and Distinguished �����Դ�ɼ��� Professor in the School of Public and International Affairs, Mudde lived his youth in Eindhoven, the Dutch city best known as the birthplace of electronics company Philips. There, the local team, appropriately named the Philips Sport Vereniging, or PSV, was founded by local workers of the company. Over time, Eindhoven’s residents weren’t just fans of the club—they were the reason it functioned.

“The team is the team of the town, not a franchise to be moved,” Mudde said. “My team cannot be anywhere else but Eindhoven. It doesn’t make any sense. It represents the town, and the people feel that.”

Mudde brought that deep connection with him when he moved to the United States nearly two decades ago. He is now what people in the soccer community call a “groundhopper,” someone who goes to as many different grounds (stadiums) as possible. His total tally reached 550 when he attended a match in Tampa Bay earlier this spring.

“For me, soccer has always been community,” said Mudde, who became a fan of the Portland Timbers Major League Soccer (MLS) team while working at the University of Oregon.

As someone who spends most of his time researching difficult topics like political extremism, the sport is a welcome escape—one he found he shared with many of his students. Many, after learning of his fandom, would stay after class to talk about English Premier League results or the MLS. There, Mudde noticed most Americans experience soccer—and athletics, in general—in a very different way than fans in Europe or Latin America.

“It’s entertainment as a product,” he said. “So, I wanted to teach them about soccer as a community and part of society.”

Mudde began teaching a class called “Soccer and Politics” four years ago, in which he outlines a few key points to his students: One, sports and politics are always connected (“It’s a myth that sports can be apolitical,” he said); and, two, that soccer reflects society as a whole.

“On one hand, I use soccer to teach about politics. But on the other, I teach how politics affects soccer,” he said. “When people think about keeping politics out of sports, it’s often about taking a knee [during the national anthem] or something, right? But within the conversation about the World Cup, there are conversations about ticket prices and the commodification of athletics, about re-selling tickets and local norms about transit, parking, and all the other goods sold in tandem with the event.

“There’s always an interaction between the two—it can be used for good or bad, and that’s what the course is about.”

Telling the story

��In the Carmical Sports Media Institute, students are learning about more than just theoretical connections between sports and politics. They’re experiencing it through a handful of experiential programs that put students where the news breaks.

For the World Cup this summer, 24 students will divide their efforts between four locations—Miami, Monterrey, Mexico City, and Vancouver/Seattle—working on direct assignment for either USA Today or the Associated Press. Carmical director Vicki Michaelis and Grady faculty Carlo Finlay, Mark Johnson, and Sam Jones will advise students at their respective locations.

It’s the kind of experience Michaelis envisioned when she transitioned her career from sports media to academia in 2012, arriving as the institute’s inaugural director after a career that spanned the Palm Beach Post, Denver Post, and USA Today.

��

“When I decided to make this shift, it wasn’t because I wanted to leave what I was doing or what journalism was becoming,” she said. “Instead, I was looking at it and saying, OK—the industry is going to belong to people who adapt. I can go and actually affect that by being the person who is helping them. And as much as they learn from me, I learn from them.”

The World Cup assignment is one of several real-world opportunities Carmical students have had. They’ve worked as credentialed media at the 2016 and 2018 Olympic Games, the 2016 Paralympic Games, and the 2023 Women’s World Cup, among others. As part of their experience, they receive assignments from editors at USA Today or the Associated Press, working on deadline to produce news on matches, training, viral moments, breaking news like injuries, and more.

“This is real media coverage,” Michaelis said. “The moment something happens, they’re sitting in the press box having to write and file immediately so these outlets can stay in front of the story.”

Michaelis called it “ripping off the Band-Aid with a safety net.” She’s been in those environments before, and she knows how challenging they can be for new reporters. On her office wall hangs a picture from the 2008 Olympics. On the right is the lanky frame of legendary swimmer Michael Phelps. On the left is Michaelis, surrounded by a scrum of competing reporters.

“That’s what a mix zone looks like,” she said. “If you walk into that and you’ve never been there before, and you’re the only person there for your media outlet—whew. That can be rough.”

Carmical makes it a point to offer a variety of these types of experiences as often as possible. , where students run social accounts for local high school sports teams. The student is embedded with a team, plans content, and covers the program as the promotional account of record.

“It’s everything,” Young said in a story published last spring. “There is nothing we could teach them in a classroom that’s better than getting out there and interacting.”

A cultural nexus point

That’s what Suggs plans to do during the World Cup matches in Atlanta. While the students are scattered throughout North America covering the news, he plans to find a few local watch parties to experience the atmosphere from a different angle.

He isn’t convinced that there is going to a cultural rush in the United States centered around the sport—at least not like there was after the 1994 men’s World Cup and, again, in 1999 when U.S. star Brandi Chastain created one of the most iconic photos in sports history. Soccer is firmly entrenched here now, unlike in the 1990s.

But he is interested to learn whether, in the face of many barriers to entry at the matches themselves (price, travel, etc.), these nation-specific watch parties can become their own cultural nexus points, bringing communities together to experience a different aspect of the atmosphere even if they aren’t traveling to the events themselves.

“Soccer has a longer history in Georgia than most people know about,” Suggs said. “It took off in 1907, when Irish immigrants to the city formed the original Atlanta FC. It’s stayed around the city in pockets through world wars, expanded in the 1950s with high schools and, later, the Atlanta Chiefs.

“Soccer as a proxy for immigration and communities coming together from different places is a cultural touchstone that forms an identity that continues to evolve today.”