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More than a year into the pandemic, scholars and practitioners have highlighted several of the organizational implications of coronavirus-disease 2019 (COVID-19) on worldwide cultural festivals and sporting events. Following COVID-19, numerous major sporting events, including the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics, were postponed in February and March 2020. As the new dates of many rescheduled sporting events approach in time, the article discusses pressing questions related to sporting event risk, safety and security. The paper is conceptual and employs insights and frames from the risk management literature for its examination of sporting events staged in the mid- and late 2020 and early 2021. We analyse risk management strategies and safety practices at recent sporting events that have been staged throughout the pandemic. Our argument is that the rescheduled sporting events – exemplified by the 2020 Olympics – have been subject to organizational, social and spatial redesign processes. The paper can provide emerging lessons and considerations for sporting event stakeholders in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper adds to our understanding of emerging risk management strategies and safety practices that event stakeholders have adopted in the context of COVID-19. This is supplemented by an emerging and multidisciplinary research agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intersections of security, safety, and wider human rights concerns have long accompanied the hosting of global sport mega-events. This was highlighted in clear unmistakeable terms following the chaotic scenes which came to characterise the Champions League Football Final in Paris, 2022. Against this wider context, this intervention paper argues for greater legal and regulatory alignment between the Council of Europe (CoE) and the European Union(EU) through sport, which we suggest can be achieved by greater adherence by the latter organisation to the CoE's Saint-Denis Convention. Underpinning this suggestion is the two-fold contention that in view of sport representing a shared priority for both organisations, in addition to Europe being a site of key global sport mega-events, more cohesion and consistency between both organisations in terms of their approach to sports law and policy would contribute to greater European-wide legal unity and certainty from a sporting perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how spaces of fandom in the English Premier League (EPL) have developed over the last decade in light of globalization processes and technological advancements. This conceptual paper thus utilizes the existing literature and frames these insights to outline emerging 'offline' and 'online' spaces of fandom in the English football's top-tier. It is argued that these under-explored spaces have been enacted by broader, powerful processes and the two spaces – the fan zone ('offline' space) and the independent Fan TV ('online') do now comprise two important spaces that add vibrancy, meaning and socio-cultural elements to the practice of 'being' a fan. Crucially, the article ties into and extend current debates around the technology-fandom pair. It sustains that, in order to understand contemporary fan culture in the EPL, these spaces must, increasingly, be considered as sites for collective and individual identification, the performance of fandom and social interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the case of the 2020 Union of European Football Associations European Championship in men's football ('Euro 2020'), this article investigates stakeholder perceptions on the 'policing' of fans. On a European-wide scale, the policing of fans is a contested topic. Meanwhile, the policing and security efforts required for sport mega-events like Euro 2020, uniquely planned to be staged in 12 different countries, require years of planning and enormous resources. Adding to this, the Championship's timeline was prolonged following the coronavirus disease-2019-related event postponement. Drawing from original insights from documentary research and qualitative interviews conducted before the postponement, this article argues that stakeholders strongly advocated for a communication and dialogue-based approach to fans. More specifically for Euro 2020, consistency in the policing approaches across all 12 countries was highlighted by stakeholders as being of paramount importance for fans' security perceptions. The study thus extends existing insights into football policing and the wider understanding of security and policing in the present-day world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 has sent a shockwave into society and sport. As result of this, sport and football resuming without spectators - fans or supporters, has brought a number of financial issues that has threatened the sustainability and future of many clubs. This commentary unpicks what has happened and some of the tensions, decision-making and consequences surrounding the return of spectators. The commentary presents the case that spectators are key to the survival of football clubs and that the United Kingdom Government must reverse their decision to not let spectators return. Now more than ever, these words hold substance, meaning and truly matter to clubs and their networked communities, "Football without fans is nothing". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current COVID-19 pandemic has already impacted both elite and grassroots sports in a series of ways. Whilst accepting that many answers to emerging and relevant questions cannot be provided at this stage, this commentary discusses some of the organizational prospects of "post-pandemic" sports mega-events by focusing predominantly on the topics of volunteering and security management. Importantly, these are two central facets of mega-event organization that are likely to be impacted by the current crisis in some way as the world of sports aims to resume. By considering a number of emerging questions, this commentary calls for an engagement with some of the individual and social implications related to future mega-event organizations. It sheds light on some of the potential organizational challenges and management issues related to "restarting" sports and provides some directions for future interdisciplinary work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On May 15, 2016, reports emerged of a "suspect package" inside Old Trafford minutes before kick-off in Manchester United's game versus Bournemouth. The "suspect package," causing a full-scale evacuation, and match postponement, turned out to be a "fake bomb" accidently left following a security exercise. Minimal social research investigates responses from supporters to "security" and "safety" at large sports events. Although the "suspect package," fortunately, never "materialized," it represents an important case in English football. Theoretically, this study adopts a frame analysis technique pioneered by Erving Goffman and it empirically examines supporters' responses to security during the chaotic hours of the "fake bomb" incident, as articulated on an interactive message board. Overall, supporters were satisfied with police and security management's handling of the incident, although it was questioned how the "fake bomb" was not detected. Importantly, supporters agreed that "safety comes first." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The English Premier League (EPL) has proved to be an incontestable rich site of analysis for the understanding of globalization processes in sports, and more specifically, football. However, the global forces in the EPL persist. These continuing forces compose the starting point for this article, which focuses on a number of tentative, but fruitful, scholarly directions for the continued social analysis of the EPL. Through an unpacking of recent developments and emerging trends in what Millward called the "global football league", this study examines how inter-linked processes of globalization, commercialization and securitization perpetuate, and influence the ways in which the "current game" is organized, consumed and played. As we are entering the 2020s, the paper argues for an inter-disciplinary focus, which takes a bottom-up approach and asks critical questions about the steadily continuing global processes in the EPL, and how it affects supporters and the league more holistically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]