International Review for the Sociology of Sport

Across newsrooms and journalism schools, questions as to what constitutes or ‘counts’ as excellent reporting are currently inciting much debate. Among the various frameworks being put forward to describe and encourage ‘excellent’ journalism in its various forms, sport is seldom mentioned – a legacy perhaps of its perennial dismissal as trivial subject matter. This essay grew from our curiosity as to whether the reverse was also true: that is, whether and what those who study sports journalism and sports media – in particular sociologists of sport – have contributed to understandings of ‘best’ and even excellent journalistic practice. We identified and analysed 376 articles from eight leading scholarly journals that feature sports media research with the aim of examining instances where ‘excellent’ sports reporting was either highlighted, described or advocated. After outlining the major themes that emerged from this analysis, we reflect on why so few of the sampled articles explicitly advise on what best practice sports journalism might look like – especially when it comes to coverage of the sport-related social issues that sociologists of sport tend to focus on – and why so little theoretical attention has been afforded to the question of excellent sports journalism more generally. While there are good sociological reasons for focusing on problematic sports reporting, on structural and systemic issues in which media are implicated, and on producing alternatives to hegemonic sports media, we conclude that it is high time for instances of excellent sports journalism to be afforded the theoretical and empirical attention long granted to their ‘bad’ journalistic counterparts.

In recent years there has been growing concern about concussion in sport in general and rugby union in particular. The qualitative study reported here draws on interviews (n=20) with adult players in non-elite club rugby union in Ireland in order to explore the frames of reference within which they perceive, give meaning to and manage concussion. Within a sporting subculture which emphasizes lay sporting values – particularly the value of ‘playing hurt’ – and which reflects a functional view of injury, non-elite players tend to display an irreverent attitude towards concussion which encourages risky behaviours and underplays, ignores or denies the significance of concussion. We analogously describe these beliefs and actions as being ‘head strong’. The paper concludes by identifying the contextual contingencies which make the regulation of injuries in rugby union so difficult and by establishing some core principles of public health education campaigns that might be deployed to militate against the high incidence of concussive injury in future.

This article explores public expenditure in Brazilian sport from 2004 to 2015 and aims to understand if hosting sport mega-events has influenced investments in different types of sport (elite sport and educational/participation sport). Data were collected through governmental records and examined through descriptive statistics. Positive and negative variations of spending were reported, regarding both the overall budget allocated to sport and among the different types of sport. This study concluded that sport mega-events have influenced the funding of sports programs to some extent, but other aspects of public funding are likely to be more significant influencers on the observed variations. The study also argues that further research on different host countries is necessary to understand the impact of sport mega-events on public sport funding.

Globalization theorists have typically described the post-Bosman football labor market as an amalgam of global value-added chains funneling players from (semi-)peripheral countries to Europe’s core leagues. However, due to their cross-sectional design, most globalization studies actually do not observe the longitudinal migratory trajectories through which players move towards, within and out of football’s global core. To fill this lacuna, this study examines a unique longitudinal dataset of 4730 complete careers of male professional football players and identifies four characteristics of their migratory trajectories: (1) recurrent mobility; (2) domestic careers for 60% of the players and frequent cross-border transfers for the other 40%; (3) clear career progress towards the top teams for the elite 10% of players and circulation for the other 90%; (4) a highly skewed distribution of transfer fees leading top teams to earn and spend the bulk of transfer fees. This suggests that football’s labor market is somewhat like a game of snakes and ladders in which an elite minority of players seems to be moving in tightly managed global value-added chains towards the top teams. However, the migratory channels through which the majority of players moves are much more porous, two-directional and complex than usually suggested in the literature.

Scholars have written extensively on the emergence of mass sports in modern industrial societies, and the factors that have facilitated the development of ‘hegemonic sports cultures’. Less has been written on how the structure and content of ‘national sport spaces’ change over time, and the reasons that certain sports cultures have failed to sustain their popular appeal amid processes of political, social and cultural transformation. This article analyses the sharp decline in the popularity of Spanish boxing during the 1970s and 1980s. In explaining this decline, we draw attention to a series of developments that disrupted rituals of spectatorship that were key to sustaining the sport’s fan base. Our findings highlight the importance of ritual to the reproduction of hegemonic sports cultures and identify ‘ritual disruption’ as a mechanism through which broad societal changes may alter the configuration of national sport spaces.

Over the last two decades, the Finnish community of dog agility practitioners has worked diligently towards gaining recognition for agility as a sport. The process reached an important milestone in 2016 when the National Sports Council listed the Finnish Agility Association as eligible for financial support from the state. As one of the pioneer countries in this regard, Finland is of great interest, as the agility sport continues to become more popular and professionalised worldwide. Using the findings from a qualitative study of media coverage and expert interviews about attempts to gain recognition for agility as a sport, this article explores the strategies that practitioners and the Finnish Agility Association have utilised in their work. This article shows that recognition comes with the need to find a balance between elite sports, on the one hand, and sport for all on the other. Although agility may risk losing some of its particular character as a human–animal teamwork dynamic, it has the potential to contribute to the culture of sports more widely.