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In the aftermath of Brexit's referendum polls, there were many predictions as to what its impact would be for the United Kingdom. While its socio-economic consequences have often featured as the main topic of discussion, this may lead to people overlooking its significance regarding its redefining of the British political community. One social field in particular which may see these dynamics play out is sports. More particularly, looking at England's favourite pastime, football and its top division, the Premier League, can be quite revealing in understanding how sports can contribute to defining the nation. Following from this idea, the theoretical framework of boundary-making processes is applied to the Premier League and its Brexit contextualisation. The findings from this approach demonstrate the government's underlying efforts in redefining the country's political community away from Europe through the sports regulation changes associated with Brexit. However, these are also found to be mitigated by the influence of external actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study confirmed that without crowds there was no home advantage in association football during the COVID-19 2020-21 season. Consequently, we sort to answer the obvious question, 'Are crowds influencing referees' behaviour?' The number of home and away red and yellow cards awarded in the 'no crowd' COVID-19 2020-21 season (all 4 top English divisions) were compared with the home and away cards awarded during the previous 10 'crowd' seasons (2010-11 to 2019-20). Results revealed that there was no home advantage in red and yellow cards awarded by referees in all 4 English leagues/divisions during the COVID-19 2020-21 season. Referees awarded significantly more cards to away players when adjudicating with crowds (seasons 2010-11 to 2019-20). However, in more recent 'crowd' seasons, Premier League referees are less susceptible to such influences with a narrowing of the gap between home and away yellow cards, suggesting that their preparation, management and training provides them with an element of 'crowd immunity'. It would appear that home crowds are able to influence all but the very best referees' behaviour. These new insights provide important information for the training and management of referees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The Apple TV+ series Ted Lasso (2020–23) presents a utopian vision of English football, which embodies both the positive and negative connotations inherent to utopian storytelling in entertainment and sports fiction more specifically. Using the example of a Premier League club, Ted Lasso presents an escapist and feel-good narrative, promoting values such as empathy, kindness and community to overcome personal challenges, something that was particularly valuable for many viewers during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, it neglects structural and institutional shortcomings in English football, such as sportswashing, racism and homophobia, while sharing financial interests with the Premier League and thus running the risk of absolving it of some of its shortcomings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the domain of coach education researchers have long called for a paradigm shift, whereby the quality of coaching practice is no longer measured against a checklist of prescribed competencies. This desire to evolve coach education and development, has been aligned to the need to better identify, understand and utilise what adaptive skill and expertise looks, sounds and feels like across specific sport coaching contexts. This paper outlines a broader research plan for the Premier League to drive the progress of research informed practice, in turn shaping a coach development agenda focused on developing adaptive and skilful coaches within Academies. In turn, this is a core feature of the Premier Leagues institutional aim of developing the most skilful coaches in the world. However, in order to begin the process of initiating such a shift in the way things work, there is a need to seek first to understand, before being understood. Therefore, to demonstrate an evidence informed basis to this shift within coach education and development, we ask three questions; (1) Do we understand what the coaches with the highest level of expertise can do? (2) How should we identify coaches with expertise across different contexts? (3) What does coaching expertise research need to do? In answer to these questions, we present the lack of empirical investigation previously conducted in the sports coaching discipline to explore coaching expertise and draw on wider domains to offer possible capacities of skilful coaches who possess expertise. To identify coaches with expertise, coherent with the broader expertise literature, we suggest that this is best conducted via means of social validation. Finally, we offer a road map of investigation designed to explore expertise, formed of a mix of evidence informed methodologies which have not yet been utilised in sport coaching research.

El objetivo de este trabajo fue diseñar y validar un instrumento (TOPSTATS) que permitiese calificar, clasificar y comparar el rendimiento de los jugadores profesionales a partir del proveedor de datos Wyscout. La validez de contenido a través de la consulta con tres expertos mostró un acuerdo considerable haciendo uso del índice kappa de Fleiss (k = .691). Extrayendo los datos de las actuaciones de los jugadores de la temporada 2019-2020 en La Liga española y la Premier League inglesa, se procedió a calcular la validez de criterio relacionando las puntuaciones totales de los jugadores obtenidas en TOPSTATS con las de Sofascore. La correlación de Pearson evidenció una asociación significativa en todas las posiciones de juego (r = 0.3-0.88, p < .05). Se utilizó el mismo procedimiento para garantizar la validez de constructo, relacionando las puntuaciones totales de los jugadores con su valor de mercado. En este caso, la correlación de Pearson mostró una asociación significativa en 17 de las 24 posiciones de juego (r = 0.36-0.80; p < .05). Se concluye que TOPSTATS mostró unos valores óptimos de validez. Es un instrumento capaz de comparar la competencia futbolística que muestran los jugadores en sus actuaciones durante una misma competición, de acuerdo con su posición de juego. Para ello, la herramienta permite calcular, de una forma ágil y semiautomática, un índice de rendimiento global obtenido a partir de la interacción y ponderación de variables que contienen datos proporcionados desde Wyscout, que, siendo una plataforma de suscripción, cuenta con cobertura en más de 200 competiciones.