Since its emergence in Italy in 1968, one model of football fandom has become the most dominant in the world: the ultras. Producing complex choreography, chants, banners and pyrotechnics, ultras represent a highly organised style of fandom that has an increasing global reach and visibility. Over the last fifty years, ultras fandom has spread from Southern Europe across North Africa to Northern and Eastern Europe, South East Asia and North America. Their collective performance, unity and harmonisation not only distinguish ultras from other football fans, but from many other forms of group behaviour. By focusing on the common form of expression through the performance of choreographies, chants and sustained support throughout the match, this book shows how members build an emotional attachment to their club that valorises the colours and symbols of that team while mobilising members against opponents. This volume seeks to make a clear theoretical shift in studies of football fandom by asking fundamental sociological questions concerning group formation, collective performance and emotional relationships. As a collective that pride themselves on having a shared, coherent sense of identity based on an act of consumption, ultras represent an important site of enquiry into masculinity and nationalism in contemporary society. -- .

This book examines the gendered politics in the context of a merger of the women's and men's athletic departments at the University of Minnesota over a ten year plus span. Examining the athletic department merger helps us understand women's continual under-representation in University athletics despite Title IX legislation passing 40 years ago. Using interview with organizational stakeholders and archival document data, the book explores how organizational change in the form of a merger is gendered with relation to the premerger, merged, post-merger stages.

Corruption in the sport industry is a pervasive issue that threatens the integrity of sport as an institution. From doping and match-fixing to money laundering, corruption should be a concern to anybody interested in sport policy, management, governance, or ethics. This is the first book to explore the complexity of sport corruption in terms of its conceptualisation, causes, consequences, and reform. The first part looks at the concept of sport corruption, while the second examines the causes of sport corruption from individual, organisational, industry-wide, and longitudinal viewpoints. The third part discussed is the consequences of sport corruption and its impact on the global sport industry. Various approaches to regulatory reform are considered in the next part, as well as the challenges of combatting corruption in the sport industry. The final part assesses the current state of literature in this area and suggests opportunities for future research. Drawing on multidisciplinary case studies from across the world, this is a seminal contribution to the academic study of corruption in sport. It is important reading for all students and scholars of sport management, business, criminology, and law.

This book highlights the different roles of youth sport, from sport for all and community sport activities to elite sport and international competitions, to suggest significant new directions for youth sport research and practices. The collection addresses a range of prominent management and policy issues associated with the growing interest in research into youth sport. Major youth sport events such as the Youth Olympic Games and the European Youth Olympic Festival are included in this collection as important policy arenas. In addition, the collection addresses a series of under-researched topics including the welfare of young elite athletes, the process of talent identification and development in elite youth disability sport and how young athletes cope with emotional abuse. The contributors to this collection are drawn from a wide range of countries Canada, the United States, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Norway. The book ends with an overview of the state of research into sport-based youth development and highlights trends and gaps in the literature suitable for further research. The chapters were originally published as a special issue in Sport in Society.

Public health is a key priority for developed and developing nations. Indeed, many countries have sought strategies to promote health and reduce health inequalities. A 'settings approach' to promoting health has been endorsed by the World Health Organization, which has seen settings such as workplaces, schools, hospitals and prisons utilised to promote health. Alongside this, sport has received increasing pressure to consider its social role within the societies and communities in which it operates. Healthy Stadia is a European focused initiative with lessons relevant for global audiences to develop: (i) healthier stadium environments for fans and non-matchday visitors (e.g. smoke-free environments), (ii) healthier club workforces (e.g. bike to work schemes) and (iii) healthier populations in local communities (e.g. child obesity interventions). This book outlines lessons and insight from practitioners and empirical research for those seeking to learn and research stadia as a settings approach to health promotion. The areas covered include: practical considerations for health promotion in sports stadia; empirical research on the sports stadia as a setting for public health promotion; research on physical activity and health promotion programmes delivered by the outward facing community trusts attached to sports clubs; an analysis of the policy considerations for health promotion by sports clubs in school based settings and critical insight and discussion surrounding the use of physical activity and sport interventions to promote physical activity and public health. The chapters in this book originally published in a special issue of Sport in Society.

In a world of competing public policy priorities, economic challenges and political uncertainty, sports development organisations and initiatives need to adapt to survive. This book makes the case for 'Sporting Capital' as a new conceptual model of sports participation with the potential to transform public policy and practice in sports development. The central argument presented is that a model of Sporting Capital - with its three domains of physiological, social and psychological attributes - provides a missing framework, creating a new impetus for sustained growth in community sport by joining up the levels at which sports development is planned and implemented. Touching on important issues such as youth sport, public health, volunteering, disability, ethnicity and social inequality, it examines patterns of sports participation in relation to age, gender and social class and offers recommendations for strategic policy improvements that can be implemented by practitioners working on the frontline of community sport. Sporting Capital: Transforming Sports Development Policy and Practice provides valuable insights for all those interested in sports development, youth sport, community sport, or sport and social policy.

Taking part in a sport means that one must acquire the relevant skills: mental, physical and strategic. This book presents a new perspective on the role of skills, knowledge and intentionality in sporting contexts, examining how these skills and practical 'know how' can be perfected to a level of expertise. Contributors study broader trends of how we can best understand the role of skills, as well as using case studies of expertise to add depth and nuance to existing scholarship. This book was originally published as a special issue of Sport, Ethics and Philosophy.

This book offers a rare chance to understand how sport and architecture come together to create an outstanding building type - a symbol of our times. Rod Sheard shares the experience and expertise of HOK LOBB in this beautifully illustrated book, offering practical advice and guidance on commissioning, designing and managing sports venues around the world. The award-winning work of this firm includes the Millennium Stadium, Cardiff, the Wembley National Stadium, London and the Stadium Australia in Sydney, commissioned for the Olympic Games 2000.

Managing Football is the first book to directly respond to the rapid managerial, commercial and global development of the sport and offers a thorough analysis of how the football industry can meet the challenges that flow from these developments. Expertly edited by two well known specialists in football business management, it draws together the work of a world-class contributor team to form a comprehensive analysis of the most important issues facing the managers of football businesses across the world. The cutting edge analysis examines all the important business challenges in the football industry and the management of football businesses and covers all of the key football markets including England, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, North America, China, South Africa, South Korea, the Netherlands and Belgium, and Mexico. Managing Football is simply a must-read for anyone studying or working in football business management and is set to be an important landmark in this rapidly moving and globally expansive field.

Sport is a global business. Now more than ever, sport communication professionals need to understand sport's global reach in order to develop their full potential. This is the first textbook to introduce the fundamental principles and practice of sport communication from an international perspective. Combining business strategies with insights into social issues such as gender, disability and national identity, this is an accessible, practical and engaging guide to the essentials of sport communication. Aimed to enhance learning at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, each chapter contains special features tailored to meet the needs of students and instructors. These include learning objectives, chapter summaries, activities, reflections, discussion questions, recommended resource lists and original cross-cultural case studies that demonstrate sport communication theories put into practice. Its twenty chapters explore communication in sport across all levels, from interpersonal communication and team building to strategic communications, and in all forms of media, from print and broadcast to social media. Sport Communication: An International Approach is an essential text for any course on sport communication, sport business or sport management.

This book brings together many new and exciting international approaches to sport heritage. It provides a thought-provoking sport heritage case study that would be of interest to students and researchers in history, geography, anthropology, marketing, and industry practitioners at sporting events.

The book highlights 'new perspectives' on volunteerism in sport, covering frameworks, methods, context and variables on several levels from community sport clubs to international events. In analysing the processes of control within voluntary sport clubs, a new theoretical framework - critical realism (CR) - challenges how we think about theory and how scientific inquiry should proceed. Further themes raised are: Should sports clubs be viewed as a crossing between a traditional volunteer culture dominated by collective solidarity, and a modern volunteer culture focused on the individual benefits? Are former athletes a new group of possible volunteers? Can personal narratives of experiences of being a volunteer in a big international event provide us with new insight that has not previously been considered? Identity is suggested as a motive for understanding volunteers at sporting events. Two new theoretical models are presented, one on the development of volunteer commitment and the other on a framework that incorporates both individual- and institutional-level variables. All chapters have recommendations for future research. The testing of these theories and influencing factors will provide new directions in the research of sport volunteerism. This book was originally published as a special issue of European Sport Management Quarterly.

Do small- and medium-sized sporting events affect the overall wellbeing of people living in the host community? If so, how they do they affect local life? This book specifically addresses the strategic choices that host communities make when hosting non-mega sporting events, and looks at the outcomes of those choices. The contributions to this study assess a variety of tangible and intangible effects, including the economic and social impacts, and the effect on tourism and participation in sport. It contains analysis of a variety of events, including spectator and participant events, single-sport and multi-sport events, and one-day and multi-day events, all hosted in different types of cities and communities around the globe. Overall, this book identifies and extends our understanding of the nature, management, and implications of non-mega sporting events. The impacts and strategic outcomes highlighted here have practical value for sport event management and strategy, and advance our understanding of the economic and social consequences of hosting an event. This book was originally published as a special issue of European Sport Management Quarterly.

This volume presents research on policy responses to racism in sporting codes, predominantly Australian Rules football, in a global context. While the three guest editors are based in Australia, and their work pertains to the uniquely domestic game of Australian Rules football, the outcomes, research vectors and key issues from this research are part of a much larger on-going international conversation that is equally relevant when considering, for instance, racism in English Premier League football, first class cricket and basketball. The book is an outcome of an Australian Research Council (ARC) funded project titled Assessing the Australian Football League's Racial and Religious Vilification Laws to Promote Community Harmony, Multiculturalism and Reconciliation, which investigated social participation and the impact of the Australian Football League's anti-racial vilification policy since its introduction in 1995. This book was published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

Highly acclaimed UCLA Women's gymnastics coach Valorie Kondos Field shares insights on how to use uniqueness and authenticity to achieve success.

How did a professional ballerina become one of the winningest coaches in NCAA history? Valorie Kondos Field-or Miss Val as she's affectionately known-has never even tumbled, flipped, or ever played any type of organized sports and yet she has been able to craft a legendary coaching career through curiosity, creativity, intention to detail, and unwavering care for the overall well-being of her athletes. For Miss Val, it's not about the X's and O's, it's about choreographing your life and owning the choices you make.

Miss Val has shaped her UCLA Gymnastics program as a life skills class and now she's sharing those lessons with you, whether you're an athlete, business leader, or simply someone who wants to own their destiny. Miss Val's philosophies are timeless. Her coaching style is unorthodox. LIFE IS SHORT, DON'T WAIT TO DANCE is a thoughtprovoking, fun journey through the personal stories and anecdotes of the 35-year career of a dancer/choreographer turned athletic coach.

This innovative and timely volume moves beyond existing operational and pragmatic approaches to events studies by exploring sports events as social, cultural, political and mediatised phenomena. As the study of this area is developing there is now a need for critical and theoretically informed debate regarding conceptualisation, significance and roles. This edited collection explores the core themes of consumption, media technologies, representation, identities and culture to offer new insight into how sports events contribute to generation of individual and shared meaning over personal, community and national identities as well as the associated issues of conflict, resistance and power. Chapters promote a critical (re)evaluation of emerging empirical research from a diverse range of sports events and locations from the international to local level. A multi-disciplinary approach is taken with contributions from areas including sports studies, media studies, sociology, cultural studies, communications, politics, tourism and gender studies. Written by leading academics in the area, this thorough exploration of the contested relationship between sports events, society and culture will be of interest to students, academics and researchers in Events, Sport, Tourism and Sociology.

European National football came together in the summer of 2012 for the 14th occasion. This book sets out to examine the enduring social tensions between supporters and authorities, as well as those between local, national and European identities, which formed the backdrop to the 14th staging of the European National football tournament, Euro2012. The context of the tournament was somewhat unique from those staged in previous years, being jointly hosted for the first time by two post-Communist nations still in the process of social and economic transition. In this respect, the decision to stage Euro 2012 in Poland and Ukraine bore its own material and symbolic legacies shaping the tournament: the unsettling of neo-liberal imaginings and emergent 'East-West' fears about poor infrastructure, inefficiencies and corruption jostled with moral panics about racism and fears surrounding the potentially unfulfilled consumerist expectations of west European supporters. The book seeks to explore the ideologies and practices invoked by competing national sentiments and examine the social tensions, ambiguities and social capital generating potentials surrounding national, ethnic, European identity, with respect to national football teams, supporters and supporter movements. This book was published as a special issue of Soccer and Society.

Celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Boston Bruins’ 1970 Stanley Cup championship season by reliving all the moments in Kooks and Degenerates on Ice. While the United States seethed from racial violence, war, and mass shootings, the 1969-70 “Big, Bad Bruins,” led by the legendary Bobby Orr, brushed off their perennial losing ways to defeat the St. Louis Blues in the Stanley Cup Finals for their first championship in 29 years. In Kooks and Degenerates on Ice: Bobby Orr, the Big Bad Bruins, and the Stanley Cup Championship That Transformed Hockey, Thomas J. Whalen recounts all the memorable moments from that championship season. Behind the no-nonsense yet inspired leadership of head coach Harry Sinden, the once laughingstock Bruins became the talk of the sporting world. Nicknamed the “Big, Bad Bruins” for their propensity to out-brawl and intimidate their opponents, the team rallied around the otherworldly play of Bobby Orr and his hard-hitting teammates to take the NHL by surprise in a season to remember. Kooks and Degenerates on Ice brings to life all the colorful personalities and iconic players from this Stanley Cup-raising team. In addition, the season is placed into its historical context as the United States struggled with issues of war, race, politics, and class, making this a must-read for sports enthusiasts, hockey fans, and those interested in twentieth-century American history.

Bringing together many of the most influential scholars in sport and media studies, this book examines the diverse ways that media influences our understanding of the world's most important sport events, dubbed sports mega-events. It sheds new light on how these events have been changed by the media, and have, in turn, adapted to media to further their brand's cultural influence. Focusing on the central concept of "mediatization" - the permeation of media into all spheres of contemporary life - the book presents original case studies of major events including the Olympics, FIFA, rugby and cricket World Cups, Tour de France, Super Bowl, World Series, Monaco Grand Prix, Wimbledon, and many more. Written from a truly international perspective, this is a seminal work in sport and media studies that reveals the growing political, economic, and cultural influences of sport mega-events in contemporary society. Sport, Media and Mega-Events is an essential text for any course on the sociology of sport, event management, sport marketing, or featuring a cultural, communication or media studies approach to sport.

Contemporary sport is big business. Major teams, leagues, franchises, merchandisers and retailers are in fierce competition in a dynamic global marketplace. Now in a fully revised and updated second edition, International Cases in the Business of Sport presents an unparalleled range of cutting-edge case studies that show how contemporary sport business is done and provides insight into commercial management practice. Written by a team of international experts, these case studies cover organisations and events as diverse as the NBA, the Americas Cup, the Tour de France, the PGA tour, FC Barcelona and the Australian Open tennis. They explore key contemporary themes in sport business and management, such as broadcast rights, social media, strategic development, ownership models, mega-events, sports retailing, globalisation, corruption and financial problems. Each case study also includes discussion questions, recommended reading and links to useful web resources. International Cases in the Business of Sport is an essential companion to any sport business or sport management course, and fascinating reading for any sport business professional looking to deepen their understanding of contemporary management.

This is a multidisciplinary contribution to the burgeoning literature on and around mega-events in general and sports mega-events in particular. The volume is not specifically about mega-events or their management, but rather how such events act as a lens through which a number of important and critical questions about the decisions to host, the host nation, its society and the politics of culture, sport and leisure more broadly can be dealt with. In doing so this book seeks to build on, and out from initial work on (sports) mega-events by acknowledging the major shift towards 'emerging' states awarded such events since 2006 and incorporating the latest advances in research that have taken place in recent years. For example, debates about what constitutes a 'mega-event', what is meant by a 'legacy', what is 'soft power' and so on are dealt with from a team of leading academics from a variety of academic disciplines. This book was previously published as a special issue of Leisure Studies.

The international nature of the sport industry presents many management challenges and opportunities for sport organisations. This book brings together cutting-edge research from leading sport management scholars around the world, surveying a wide range of topics and issues facing the sport industry today. It represents an essential platform for the international exchange of ideas, best practice and research in sport management studies. The globalisation of the sport industry has brought increased complexity to organisations' operations in terms of regulation, competition and multiculturalism. Drawing on a wealth of original research from fifteen countries, this book addresses a variety of global, regional, national and community issues that are central to successful sport management. Combining both qualitative and quantitative studies, it explores key themes, such as managing resources and organisational change, marketing and promotion, law and regulation, sport-for-development and research protocols. Global Sport Management Studies: Contemporary issues and inquiries is essential reading for all students and scholars of sport management, sport business and sport marketing, as well as for any professional working in the sport and leisure industries.

Olympic Event Organization is the first text to address a number of important questions in contemporary mega-event management: Which organizations are involved in the Olympic Movement and in what capacity? What are the interorganizational flows of authority and finance between them? How is work grouped, in what unit sizes, how specialized and formalized are work processes? How complex, dynamic, diversified, or friendly is their environment? What are the power issues and how do the technological processes affect these organizations? How do the OCOGs evolve in their life cycle, what pressures shape their structures and management processes and how is work co-ordinated? The examination of the Olympic Games event organization in the 10-year period, from bidding to post-games closing down, draws material from host cities to explore the types of interorganizational flows that take place at various stages for the Olympic Games to be delivered. Knowledge transfer from one host city to the next and an established organizational field also means that management practises sometimes follow some externally imposed organizing logics. The challenges faced by organizers are discussed and the tensions that a strong management template from the IOC creates are also examined. Finally, the issue of sustainability of the Olympic Games is identified along with an analysis of the ways in which the concepts of impact are appropriated by the various stakeholders involved with the Olympic Games as they attempt to influence public opinion. Written in an accessible and insightful manner Olympic Event Organization is essential reading for both academics and practitioners alike.

The increasing availability of data has transformed the way sports are played, promoted and managed. This is the first textbook to explain how the big data revolution is having a profound influence across the sport industry, demonstrating how sport managers and business professionals can use analytical techniques to improve their professional practice. While other sports analytics books have focused on player performance data, this book shows how analytics can be applied to every functional area of sport business, from marketing and event management to finance and legal services. Drawing on research that spans the entire sport industry, it explains how data is influencing the most important decisions, from ticket sales and human resources to risk management and facility operations. Each chapter contains real world examples, industry profiles and extended case studies which are complimented by a companion website full of useful learning resources. Sport Analytics: A data-driven approach to sport business and management is an essential text for all sport management students and an invaluable reference for any sport management professional involved in operational research.

This book explores the connection between politics and mega-events in post-handover Hong Kong and Macao. It also offers an in-depth account of the two cities' keenness to integrate with China and engage in the international society and China's eagerness to build image, boost influence and gain respect on the global arena. This work will facilitate academics, think tanks, diplomats and government officials to further understand the politics and international relations of China, Hong Kong and Macao.