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As the digital revolution continues apace, emergent technologies and means of communication have presented new challenges and opportunities for the field of football studies. In turn, researchers active across the social sciences and beyond have responded and are beginning to carve out a new field of study - digital football studies. In the absence of any concentrated review of this field, the purpose of this paper is threefold: (1) to critically revisit previous ‘waves’ of football studies scholarship; (2) to identify themes in current digital football studies scholarship and identify areas for future study; and (3) to begin to map out some theoretical and conceptual traditions that might better equip scholarly enterprises for the study of football, and by association leisure and sport, in the (hyper)digital moment. We also postulate the establishment of digital football studies as a collective enterprise will be especially important for a post-Covid-19 globe given the rapid acceleration towards digital during the pandemic. To this end, we argue that leisure and football studies must develop empirically, methodologically, and theoretically to better capture the nature of (hyper)digitalised societies and the ways audiences are playing with, and shifting, the boundaries and possibilities for football and leisure.

Over the last 20 years or so there has been a proliferation of anti-racist organisations, campaigns and interventions across football at all levels, allied to broader social, cultural and political...

In recent times, the semi-naked male athletic body has become central to the cultural imagination of late modern societies, in turn, inviting comment from social scientists of different shades on the changing gazes of heterosexual men. Interestingly, and despite frequently appearing in sport and leisure media, the racialized aspects of this change are yet to be explored fully. This article, therefore, considers how white heterosexual men (de)construct and (re)attach gendered and sexualized meanings to those male athletic bodies they struggle to define “racially.” Borrowing Gilroy’s use of the term “unruly,” which he employs to capture those moments of multiculture that are hard to “home” culturally or geographically, I refer to this struggle as a process of unruly racialization. After analyzing interviews with twenty-two self-identifying white, British, heterosexual men, this article argues that male bodies racialized as unruly are marked with varying degrees of intrigue, jealously, admiration, and fear. I conclude by reflecting on the extent to which this cultural shift can be read as a move toward a future beyond “race.”

This chapter argues that future scholarly accounts of Le Parkour and freerunning (PKFR), and all its associated elements, are well advised to consider the role of racialised and gendered discourse to avoid overstating the extent to which the movements distort ‘old’ certainties. PKFR emerged in a zeitgeist purportedly sympathetic to notions of enhanced civil liberty, multiculturalism and individualism. The genesis of PKFR has taken place at a socio-historical moment quite different to the ones in which older more traditional sports came into being. The history told by dreadlocks, particularly their aesthetic association with resistance and oppression, certainly appeal to some involved with PKFR who wish to associate with popular portrayals of traceurs as ‘heroic rebels and urban warriors’. Much of the literature on PKFR to date has understood the movements as consisting of disparate, but digitally connected, glocal communities, populated by boys and young men that struggle against ‘late modern capitalist modalities of life’.

Leisure is a major sphere of both private and public life. It is thus of concern that the identity and profile of leisure in the Higher Education curriculum of the UK has become less obvious over the past decade. This trend is not peculiar to leisure studies; the social sciences as a whole are considered to be under threat as neo-liberal discourse increasingly informs Higher Education strategic management. The aim of this paper is to investigate the potential reasons for the reduced status of leisure studies in HE institutions within the UK and to contribute to a theoretical basis of a counter-argument for the social and economic benefits of retaining leisure studies as a unifying field. We present a loosely diachronic account of the emergence and growth of leisure studies as a subject field, followed by a discussion of the impact of neo-liberal thinking on UK Higher Education. The principal challenge to leisure studies is to establish its importance and relevance to others within the social sciences. We propose a need for more academics to engage in ideational ‘border crossings’ to advance thinking in different subjects and disciplines; those subjects that may be under threat in the current climate of Higher Education (like leisure studies) may benefit from exploring opportunities to collaborate with those from outside of their immediate subject area.

While scholars working in the sociology of the gender, body, health, sport and media have begun to address the paucity of research into media representations of men and masculinities, the literature to date has failed consistently to address the racialised aspects of media dwelling male athletic bodies. The same critique can be applied to recent explorations of popular men’s magazine, Men’s Health. Current research has thus systematically underplayed the significance of “race” as a defining feature of idealised, mediated masculinities. During this paper then, I use Critical Race Theory to guide a semiotic analysis of a year’s worth of Men’s Health magazine. Firstly, I argue that white male athletic bodies are represented as idealised masculine types, possessing both the virtues of body and mind, while their black male counterparts, to varying degrees, are depicted as spectacular, violent and hyper-masculine. Secondly, I go on to argue further that this idealisation of the white male athletic body is a reaction to broader social and cultural transformations, indicative of late-modern societies. That is, I suggest Men’s Health’s mantra of self-regulation is better understood as a call to white men to exercise greater embodied control in order to reaffirm jurisdiction and supremacy, during an epoch of uncertainty. Thirdly, following this line of argument, the paper contends that future readings of Men’s Health, and men’s magazines more broadly, must seek to understand better how racialised discourses inform dominant media representations of masculinities.

Football is changing. Then again, it always has been; nothing ever stays the same. But at another, deeper level, much also stays the same. The introduction and the subsequent chapters in this book have primarily focused on the changing nature of football and set out a case for understanding digital technologies and changes in audience patterns as key drivers of this. Here, in this final chapter, we wish to take a more cautionary and reflective tone, which, while recognising the fast pace of cultural change we are witness in this new millennium, contextualises this in a consideration of the continuing evolution of football as well as its continuities. The chapter then moves on to consider two key developments in the (possible) near futures of football under the headings of ‘virtual environments’ and ‘augmenting technologies’. The first considers the possibility of fans being able to attend a ‘live’ football game via virtual reality headsets but concludes that possibly the best ‘virtual’ experience will get anytime in the near future are football-themed video games. Second, and finally, we consider how new technologies might be used to enhance or ‘augment’ the fan experience; however, again, we wonder if there is a mismatch here between what is, and might be soon, possible, and what fans really want? Might it just be that what (most) fans want most of all is simply an uninhibited sightline to the game they love?

The Black Country, a region that is only loosely defined geographically, is an area located in the West Midlands of England, which its inhabitants claim holds a distinct geographical and cultural personality. However, despite the territory's perceived uniqueness, popular imaginations of England have often overlooked the Black Country's historical and socio-cultural individuality. Therefore, given those working in a number of disciplines have recognised local football spectator communities to be significant cultural arenas, through which localism is performed and remade, this article explores the role of fandom in imagining, preserving and/or contesting notions of ‘Black Countryness’. Utilising semi-structured interviews, netnography and participant observation, as key methodological techniques, this study explores how local-spectator communities at Walsall Football Club (one of three professional football teams based in the Black Country) continually (re)negotiate a collective sense of local and regional ...

The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) are keen to increase the participation of British Asian groups, including those of British Pakistani Muslim (BPM) backgrounds, at mainstream levels of the game in order to meet their twin strategic aims of raising participation levels and fostering elite development. We argue that the potential to include BPM men in and through cricket is achievable, but strategies to engage them must address their social needs and circumstances rather than be superficial and tokenistic. Cricket agencies and bodies must be willing to adapt and change to become more inclusive, and indeed supportive of real meritocracy. Using research testimonies garnered from interviews with BPM men who play cricket at amateur mainstream and/or alternative formats of the game, we identify and forward strategies that can be activated by cricket development officers in order to create new possibilities for the social inclusion of BPM men.

The significant rise in the number of black male professional footballers, who not only compete at the elite level of English football but who are idolised by football fans across the world, coincided with the beginning of the English Premier League (EPL) in 1992. This chapter considers how liberal doctrines have shaped anti-discriminatory practices and policies in elite English football, and explains why liberal approaches to 'race' equality have failed to achieve the outcomes they profess to desire. Racist chanting at football matches and racial slurs uttered during altercations between players are the most easily identifiable instances of racism. Unlike their South Asian counterparts, the transition of black players, despite having fashioned a space within elite football playing cultures, to football management and coaching has been more arduous. In the spirit of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and its promise to elevate the voices of minoritised individuals, it is important to consider testimony from ex-England international John Barnes.

The purpose of this paper is to elucidate how racism manifests ‘behind closed doors’ in the backstage private domain. We do this with reference to recent high-profile controversies in the US and UK. In particular, we use the concepts of frontstage (public) and backstage (private) racism to unpack the extraordinary case in point of the ex-National Basketball Association franchise owner Donald Sterling. The paper concludes that though it is important for frontstage racism to be disrupted, activist scholars must be mindful of the lesser-known, and lesser-researched, clandestine backstage racism that, we argue, galvanizes more public manifestations. The Donald Sterling case is an example of how backstage racism functions and, potentially, how it can be resisted.

Ever since his introduction to the first-­-team at Manchester United FC, Cristiano Ronaldo Dos Santos Aveiro has been recognised as one of the footballing world’s most stand-­-out football players. In turn, Ronaldo has drawn the attention of scholars working across a number of disciplines. While sports economists and sociologists of sport, amongst others, have contributed to a growing literature about Ronaldo and the social implications of his on and off-­-field behaviour, few critical analyses have considered the racialised aspects of Ronaldo’s representations, or how audiences make sense of his racialised or ethnic identity. Using images of Ronaldo, which we presented to and discussed with self-­-identified physically active white British men, we explore what it is representations and audience interpretations of Ronaldo reveal about the complexities of white male identity formation. We do this to understand better how white male identities can be read and interpreted through and in the context of football. Facilitated by our conception of contingent whiteness, we argue that white British men’s interpretations of Ronaldo’s whiteness are inextricably linked to discourses of ‘race’, masculinities and football.

The predominance of the male ‘Other’ on the pages of contemporary sport and leisure print media has become increasingly ordinary over the last decade or so. Many subjugated ethnic groups have utilised sport and leisure stages to challenge the fallacies of psychological and biological inferiority and other ill-founded vestiges of nineteenth-century bio-racist discourses (Carrington, 2002; Hylton, 2009; Messner, 1993). Evidently, whilst ‘black’ females remain underrepresented in media spaces (Knoppers and Elling, 2004), their male counterparts, particularly those of African-Caribbean heritage, have accessed the realm of the popular en masse (Carrington, 2002). The mere presence of these men no longer seems to threaten the status quo of modern Western social democracies; in fact, images of African-Caribbean males are often held as exemplars of neo-liberalism and its fetish for championing quasi-multiculturalism. Indeed, according to some, media consumers only have to open a magazine (Hylton, 2009), switch on the television (Carrington, 2002) or visit the cinema (Giardina, 2003) to experience “a bit of the Other”. Before one is falsely charmed by some gloriously liberating homily of absolute social improvement, it is important to consider the instrumentalism of these developments more critically. This paper therefore aims to address the implications of racialisation in the context of the sport and leisure media and its role in representing athletic bodies in highly stylised and particularised ways. It will be argued that the racialisation of ethnically differing athletic bodies, through modes of photographic and digital manipulation, delivers messages that disadvantage particular ethnic groups, whilst advantaging others. Throughout, racialisation is conceptualised as a process of “categorisation, a representational process of defining an Other, usually, but not exclusively, somatically” (Miles and Brown, 2003: p. 101). For the purpose of this paper, I employ this conception to foreground the negative implications of racialisation.