With the 2026 FIFA World Cup starting today, the Sport and Psychoanalysis (Cogent Social Sciences) journal invites submissions that explore the psychic, social, cultural, and political dimensions of football’s most visible global event (https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/oass20/sections/sport-and-psychoanalysis).
The World Cup offers a rich site for psychoanalytic inquiry. Whether in relation to nationalism, fandom, desire, identification, embodiment, spectacle, media, race, gender, inequality, anxiety, enjoyment, failure, or collective belonging, the tournament continues to generate profound emotional investment across players, fans, nations, and media institutions. This provides an important opportunity to think critically about why sport matters, and why football, in particular, continues to occupy such a powerful place in our social and subjective lives.
With this in mind, we welcome submissions on topics including, though not limited to:
- Fan identification, nationalism, and collective desire
- Race, gender, class, and inequality in football
- Embodiment, pressure, performance, and failure
- Media spectacle, digital culture, and online abuse
- The politics of enjoyment, rivalry, and sporting antagonism
- Football, fantasy, memory, and nostalgia
- Documentaries, films, television, and media coverage of the World Cup
The section welcomes original research articles, review articles, and film, television, or documentary reviews.
Please get in touch with Joseph Reynoso (drjsreynoso@gmail.com) or me (j.black@shu.ac.uk), if you would like to discuss a potential article.
For more information on the journal, see: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311886.2025.2488200
Kind regards,
Jack and Joe
