Football and Fascism. The Politics of Popular Culture in Portugal tells the hidden history of football and discusses its political, social and cultural foundations, during the longest running authoritarian regime in Europe. Theoretically grounded on Bourdieu’s field theory, and using a multi-scalar methodology, this award-winning research explores the political tensions between the nationalization of sports envisaged by the Portuguese "New State" and the integration of national football in a globalized urban popular culture. Mobilizing unexplored archival sources, and a wide array of primary materials, this groundbreaking work offers new insight on the administrative structures of the corporativist state, the making of an authoritarian cultural program, and the relation between state institutions and civil society. Besides broadening the scope of existing transnational histories of football, this study also puts into question the conventional geographies and political chronologies adopted in sports history.
For his oustanding research, Rahul Kumar won the 2015 "Mário Soares Award - EDP Foundation" for best work in Portuguese history by researchers under 35 and received an honourable mention, also in 2015, in the "CES Award for Young Portuguese speaking Social Scientists", attributed by the Centre for Social Studies of Coimbra University.