Download or read book More Than Sport: Soft Power and Potemkinism in the 2018 Men's Football World Cup in Russia written by Sven Daniel Wolfe and published by LIT Verlag. This book was released on 2021-01-07 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the 2018 Men's Football World Cup in Russia through a comparison of the host cities of Ekaterinburg and Volgograd - two major but peripheral cities little discussed outside of Russia. It unpacks the World Cup at multiple scales of analysis, from global political economic processes, Russian national state spatial strategies, uneven municipal developments, the creation and distribution of soft power narratives to the domestic audience, and varieties of adoption or refusal of those narratives among host city residents. In so doing, the book offers a light and revisable framework for understanding mega-events regardless of national context. Sven Daniel Wolfe is junior lecturer at the University of Lausanne. He studies mega-events, urban development, and the cultures of protest and resistance.