Christer Ericsson
Örebro University, Sweden

Sport, Globalisation and Identity: New Perspectives on Regions and Nations
232 pages, paperback
Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge 2022 (Routledge Research in Sport Politics and Policy)
ISBN 978-0-367-56034-8
A few years ago, I reviewed an anthology for idrottsforum.org. At the time, I expressed my doubts about the anthology as a form, so my personal relationship to anthologies is not straightforward. I meant that anthologies are difficult things, not only to read but also to review. What distinguishes a good anthology? Well, it may not be easy to decide, but in my subjective opinion, it works best when the articles in the anthology together form a cohesive whole. Unfortunately, this is a requirement that is often not met, and it is not uncommon to present a number of more or less incompatible texts that have been brought together under the guise that they have a great deal in common, while the truth is that they rarely connect to each other. So how does this particular anthology work? To which category does it belong?
In the introduction, the editors write that the aim is to present a coherent and accessible anthology that provides new perspectives with the aim of contributing to promoting and encouraging new creative ways of researching sport, globalization, and identity. The book is the result of a collaboration between the University of Vic–Central University in Catalonia and the Southampton Solent University, a collaboration that aimed to create an intellectual forum for mindsets and discussions for new ideas in sports research. The collaboration has brought together participants, academics, journalists, and active sportsmen from all over Western Europe and the Mediterranean countries.
Briefly, the book contains fifteen short articles that, from different perspectives, have the ambition to describe the complex interrelationships between nations, regions, and states in the contemporary globalized international sports landscape, with a particular focus on identity-creating processes – sport as an expression of identity or as a contributing force in the formation of identity. In the articles, through various case studies, contemporary and historical cases from different parts of the world are studied based on different areas such as the geopolitical significance of sports events, the impact of globalization on national identities, the role of politics and ownership relationships, and the power over sports and its impact on different sports cultures.
In the third part of the book, the articles form a more cohesive whole. Possibly this is a result of the fact that most of the articles have football as the object of study.
The anthology is divided into three parts. The first part presents articles that deal with the relationship between state, nation, and identity. Part two contains contributions that in one way or another discuss the issue of politics, power and sporting events, and the last part includes articles that discuss contemporary governance and ownership of sport and its consequences for how this affects sports cultures and identities. The anthology has, as mentioned, an interdisciplinary focus and contains a range of different perspectives under each of the thematically structuring headings. The authors of the various contributions also represent a multiplicity of different subject traditions from a number of universities, but of the 17 authors who contribute to the anthology, most are domiciled in media and communication research, while there are also contributions from sports journalism and contemporary historians.
So, how does this anthology work? Well, my initial impression when I read the articles in the first part, though they are individually reasonably interesting and worth reading, is that there is something missing that efficiently ties together the first part’s somewhat heterogeneous collection of articles. When I read the second part of the book, the same opinion lingers when all the articles have been read. Despite the readable, instructive, and thought-provoking contributions, the impression is that they are too sprawling and span a wide field of contemporary and historical cases from all over the world where each article very much lives their own life and they are difficult to bring together. From the flora of readable contributions, I would like to highlight one that more than the others caught my interest, written by Max Mauro and Raúl Martinez-Corcuera which is a study of Spanish sports radio. It introduces the reader to the Spanish sports media landscape and its contribution to the increased commercialization of sport which, according to the authors, has broken down the boundaries between sports journalism, public relations, and marketing, where sports journalism’s “spectacle journalism” has become part of “show business”. In their investigation of El Clásico between Real Madrid and Barcelona, they show how, in particular, the radio coverage has created a racist, xenophobic, and sometimes sexist environment. The fundamental hypothesis in the article is that the confrontation between us and them, between the teams on the pitch, is reflected in a confrontation/rivalry between different media discourses created by the various broadcasters. One of the underlying assumptions of the article is that mass media not only reflect reality, but that through their practices and discourses, they also actively contribute to the construction of it.
In the third part of the book, the articles form a more cohesive whole. Possibly this is a result of the fact that most of the articles have football as the object of study.

One of the readable and instructive contributions in this part is Richard Irving’s comparative study of fan ownership/influence in England and Germany. Irving formulates an initial claim that the potential crisis facing football is a direct result of neoliberal hegemony and the domination of capital that takes us further and further away from ideas of reciprocity and cooperation. Also interesting is Ginesta’s et al. contribution about the transformation of Spanish football, where the starting point is that football can no longer only be characterized as “the opium of the people”. The authors argue that we are dealing with a much more complex social phenomenon that is not only about consumption and entertainment, but today has developed into a fundamental part of several countries’ economies and policies. They focus on three trends that are inextricably linked in contemporary football, namely the transformation of clubs into multinational entertainment companies, their function as paradiplomatic agents, and finally the volatility of their identities in the postmodern, or fluid society.
Most of the articles are based on fairly extensive and interesting empirical data from different sources, and they employ several interesting methods, or combinations of methods, such as participant observation and/or semi-structured interviews. What is also positive is that most of the contributors identify clear problems, formulate hypotheses or questions that also serve as guides for the analyses. There are also, as we have seen, contributions that make meritorious comparisons.
Having closed the book, my conclusion is that this anthology does its job. It fulfils its purpose to present a number of interesting new studies based on the diversity of texts and the interdisciplinary approach. Each chapter in the book reflects in its own way on the implications of the interconnected dynamics between sport, globalization and identity. Based on the articles presented in this volume, there is nothing to suggest that the power of global media companies will be controlled or regulated in the foreseeable future. The cultural and political potential of the market will drive elite sport further into the world of business and entertainment, exacerbating inequalities within and between sports, and further concentrating ownership, which will eventually erode the dynamics of competition. However, as several chapters in this volume testify, despite these developments there is still some room for national and regional forces to present alternative visions of identity and community. Although constructions and manifestations of identity change in response to global politics, the topics covered in this volume illuminate the enduring legacy from the national and the regional and help to increase our understanding of sport in our own time. Several of the case studies, while pointing out the tensions between the global, the national, the regional, and the local levels in constructions and representations of identity in sport, show that there are nonetheless circumstances that demonstrate sport’s ability to recreate traditional, historical feelings of identity that are still an active force in shaping the complexity of the relationship between sport, globalization and identity.
The editors conclude the book by tying together the contributions and commendably reflecting on the collected empirical data presented in the contributions. Based on this, they discuss and highlight theoretical perspectives and concepts that they believe will be fruitful to use for future studies on sport, globalization, and identities.
Copyright © Christer Ericsson 2024
Table of ContentIntroduction Part I: International Sport: States, Nations and Identity
Part II: Politics, Power and Sports Events
Part III: Contemporary Perspectives on International Sport: Governance, Ownership and Sporting Cultures
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