International Review for the Sociology of Sport

This article investigates the domestic, intra-state labour mobility of professional footballers. Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with a snowball sample of 49 male professional footballers who represent a range of career trajectories; the specific object of 19 interviews was to examine meanings and experiences tied to job relocation. An interactionist perspective was employed to highlight the ways in which players came to define, control and negotiate their workplace social realities. The article explores the working contexts that lead players to find new employment and appreciate the temporally oriented workplace situations that colour their experiences. The interview data illuminate the way ‘work’ opportunities are denied, how players are marginalised from the club’s central activity, and why these contexts lead to the dilution of feelings of job security. The conclusion argues that the spirit of community needs to be retained in professional football, and offers direction for further research for an activity that has become somewhat instrumental and expedient.

Departing from previous research that focused only on how ‘the Irish’ became White, this essay will instead explore how the color line was used to define and divide the Irish Diaspora in the United States. The color line will be used as part of a bifocal perspective on the Irish Diaspora, which examines how certain sections of the Irish Diaspora became White and how others became Black. This approach can provide critical insights into the workings of racial formations by highlighting the social and political nature of race and tracing the concept’s historical flexibility. A historical overview of the interactions between Irish American athletes and American sport is conducted to reveal many racial variations and tensions found within the Irish Diaspora. While sport has actively contributed to these Irish racial formations, it can also be used to challenge and transform the foundations of the racial formations that are currently found in American society.

The fan sports blogger, a sports fan who contributes their own narratives to the quotidian reportage of sports by publishing an online sports news site on platforms like Blogger and Wordpress, is a relatively new fan presence. The scant research devoted to this nascent culture has questioned its potential impact on mainstream sports media, or the blogging behaviour of sports entities, but little yet is understood about the output and information-seeking behaviours of these fan bloggers. Given the increasingly entwined relationship between media and sport, these bloggers can be viewed as both sports fans, of which there is a growing corpus of surrounding literature, and as media consumers who gather information from the source they emulate. An increased understanding of these fan bloggers can illustrate how sports media audiences both harness and make sense of the media they consume and offer key insights into the interpretative behaviours of sports audiences. In this project a case study of 20 fan sports blogs from two sports blogospheres were analysed, looking for ways in which fan sports bloggers both use mainstream sports media and emulate sports media in two different sports contexts.

Understanding gender differences in fantasy sport consumption involves in-depth assessment of personal attributes, consumption, sport fandom, and motivations to participate. The study addresses the area of gender and fantasy sport, examining motivation and consumption behaviors of men and women concerning this activity. In this research, a total of 530 men and women fantasy sport users were surveyed about their media consumption and overall motivations for participating. Results indicated men consuming nearly 10 hours more of sports media content each week than women. Regarding motivations, men and women yielded consistent motivations for play on five of the seven measures, with the two remaining measures, enjoyment and passing time, being significantly higher for men. Implications and directions for future research in this relatively new scholarly realm are offered.

The relationship between sport and social capital is drawing the attention of a growing number of writers and researchers. However, its analysis is often limited to social capital accruing to communities or regions through involvement with sport and to the effects this may have on local wellbeing. While participation in sport can facilitate social capital creation at the community level, social capital accruing to wider communities, and particularly sporting communities, can affect the technical development of athletes. This paper reports on research employing both quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the role of social capital in the development of female football players (i.e. soccer) in South Australia. In particular, this paper considers how social capital accruing to players from their personal social networks can influence their early ‘career step’ between recreational and school football to formal football clubs. The paper focuses on social networks encompassing players, their families and acquaintances, and highlights both positive and negative implications of social capital accumulated by means of membership in those networks.

In this paper, we critically examine the burgeoning scientific discourse about sports-based interventions for socially vulnerable or disadvantaged youth from a socio-pedagogical perspective. It is argued that the call for more well-defined sports-based social interventions with easier-to-follow outcomes may be at odds with the open-ended philosophy that is viewed as a fundamental principle when engaging with socially vulnerable youth in a leisure context (Smith, 2003), and could potentially undermine the effectiveness and value of such practices for young people. We examine the question if supporting young people in social vulnerable situations will be best served with well-defined sports-based interventions with easy-to-follow outcomes. We argue that if outcomes are to be formulated or analysed, such outcomes need to go beyond narrow conceptions of individual development, and need to be defined in consultation with young people. Adopting a socio-pedagogical perspective, we have proposed an alternative way to define (and evaluate) outcomes, in consultation with young people, in terms of biographical, institutional and political competences. Furthermore, it is argued that there is an acute need for re-socialising sports research regarding social interventions for socially vulnerable groups, and in particular youth.

The ‘greening’ of mega-sporting events such as the Olympic Games (OG) has become an increasing priority of event organizers in the past two decades. This paper explores the legacies from the greening of the OG through an analysis of Beijing 2008, Singapore 2010, and London 2012, drawing on interviews with key stakeholders. While each OG is different, the key determinants for green legacies include: the breadth and depth of environmental commitments during the bid process; embedding sustainability in the vision, mission and branding of organizing committees; embedding sustainability in various aspects of OG organization, which is an important practical application of a sustainability vision; and the transfer of knowledge from one OG to the next, allowing newer host cities to enhance green legacies. The findings indicate institutionalization of elements of sustainability in the OG with legitimation and mimetic processes at play. The study found that legitimation is a key strategy during the bidding process and in operations of the OG.