idrottsforum’s weekly newsletter gives you the past week’s on-site activities in your mailbox every Monday morning, in the form of a letter with a link to a web page presentation of new publications. Click below to access that page, which also offers you a chance to subscribe to the Monday morning mail in case you’re not already a subscriber. And do friends and colleagues a great favor by telling them about this invaluable and totally free service.

Drawing from across twenty-five years of interdisciplinary scholarship, Jeffrey W, Kassing’s collection of articles from the Soccer & Society journal States of Play: Soccer and Society Perspectives on the Global Game in America (Routledge) documents the development of soccer along five interrelated trajectories. Jan Andre Lee Ludvigsen has read an interesting, welcome and well-timed text that will be of interest to scholars working on the cultural, historical and social dimensions of soccer. As intended, the collection illuminates both the challenges and potential of soccer in the US by signposting the reader towards the key trajectories in the literature.

The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) is currently gathering input for its globally recognized Fitness Trends Survey for 2027. This annual initiative plays a critical role in identifying emerging directions, evaluating evolving practices, and guiding evidence-based decision-making across the health, fitness, and performance landscape. The results are widely referenced by practitioners, researchers, policymakers, and organizations worldwide. Your participation would contribute directly to a more accurate and representative understanding of where our field is heading.

In Global China and the Global Game in Africa: China-Africa Engagement through the Lens of Football, edited by Jonathan Sullivan, Tobias Ross, and Angela Lewis and published by Peter Lang, uses the interaction between China and African countries in football to critically examine how engagement through football reproduces unequal outcomes but also positive developments on both sides. Alan Bairner finds that the collection deserves to be read not only by people with a specific interest in football in China and Africa but also by anyone who simply wants to learn more about the important relationship between these two parts of the world in an era in which the global order is being dramatically reconfigured.

As they compete in leagues around the world, elite women’s basketball players continually adjust to new cultures, rules, and contracts. In Double Crossover: Gender, Media, and Politics in Global Basketball (University of Illinois Press), Courtney M. Cox follows athletes, coaches, journalists, and advocates of women’s basketball as they pursue careers within the sport. María Teresa Ortiz Romero is our reviewer, and for her the book succeeds in opening important avenues for reflection on the conditions under which women athletes live and work, as well as the forms of resistance they collectively promote.

The aim of the Emilie Mass Dalhaug’s PhD project was to investigate the effects of high‑intensity exercise and heavy‑load resistance training on maternal and fetal health in pregnant elite and recreational athletes, an area where current recommendations have traditionally been conservative and have discouraged such training. The findings from the project suggest that high‑intensity exercise, heavy‑load resistance training, and a high training volume were generally well tolerated by both the pregnant athletes and their foetuses.

Wingate-testet ger en god möjlighet att utvärdera maximal effektutveckling inom idrott. Man får mycket exakta svar på anaerob effekt. Personer som arbetar med, genomför eller undervisar i Wingate-testet och vill bidra med sina erfarenheter erbjuds härmed möjlighet att medverka i en studie vid Malmö universitet för att utröna hur ett av de mest använda testerna för anaerob kapacitet faktiskt genomförs i praktiken.

idrottsforum’s weekly newsletter gives you the past week’s on-site activities in your mailbox every Monday morning, in the form of a letter with a link to a web page presentation of new publications. Click below to access that page, which also offers you a chance to subscribe to the Monday morning mail in case you’re not already a subscriber. And do friends and colleagues a great favor by telling them about this invaluable and totally free service.

The Centre for Culture, Sport and Events at the University of the West of Scotland is pleased to announce our next FREE ONLINE SEMINAR, which will take place on the 20th of May at 5pm CEST. The theme for this seminar is “The 2026 World Cup: Human Rights, Sportswashing, & Authoritarian”, featuring Drs Jules Boykoff and Callum McCloskey.

Doping and Anti-Doping in Africa: Theory and Practice is the first book to focus on the problem of performance-enhancing substances and methods – also known as doping – in sports from African perspectives. Edited by Yamikani Ndasauka & Simon Mathias Makwinja, contributions from nearly twenty African scholars and practitioners provide commentary and insight into the African experience. Jules Woolf’s knowledgeable review finds that although some arguments are more fully developed than others, the book opens important avenues for future research and invites scholars and policymakers to engage more fully with the cultural, philosophical, and social contexts in which doping occurs.

In this essay, Joseph Lewandowski argues for a distinction among dangerous sports, dangerous sports that involve violent interactions and constitutively violent sports. He maintains that while all combat (i.e. constitutively violent) sports are dangerous, not all dangerous sports are constitutively violent. Clarifying such a distinction makes explicit the unique nature of combat sport violence; it also highlights how and why participation in combat sport competitions, especially for youth, should be understood as a special case in debates about the value of dangerous sport more generally.

Mike Mentzer was a strikingly handsome man with a brilliant mind and a “perfect” physique — the first bodybuilder to receive a perfect score in both amateur and professional competitions. But he was also a man who wrestled with mental illness his entire life and ended up living on the streets and being sent to prison, but eventually finding it within himself to reboot his intellect and revolutionize bodybuilding training. Łukasz Muniowski has read John Little’s biography, which, he concludes, is not a simple hagiography or a thing for bodybuilding fans, but a story about an actual person, who lived, sweated and suffered while trying to achieve perfection in his craft.

This is a Call for Papers for a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Global Sport Management titled “Sports Communication and AI from Organizational Perspectives: Transforming Culture, Practices, and Ethical Standards.” This special issue invites scholarly work that critically examines how artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping communication practices, organizational structures, and ethical standards within the sport industry. We welcome conceptual, empirical, methodological, and case-based studies that address both the opportunities and challenges associated with AI integration in sport communication.

The BBC has announced the end of one of its longest-running programmes, Football Focus. It’s been a fixture of Saturday lunchtimes since 1974. But the final whistle will blow when this season finishes. The BBC has blamed a decline in audience for the BBC One broadcast as fans now get their pre-match news and views from a wider range of sources. In this Conversation piece, Richard Jones looks at the BBC sports reporting and the changes that are related to the general media landscape upheaval.

Allan Grønkjær’s PhD study examines the management and leadership of high-performance organisations in elite sport. He works from a conceptual framework of multi-level leadership. This approach acknowledges the variation of different influences, which a leader, e.g., a high-performance director, experiences in the short term (everyday work life) and in the long term (creating and implementing strategy). There is a clear focus on how the context of sport affects leadership.

idrottsforum’s weekly newsletter gives you the past week’s on-site activities in your mailbox every Monday morning, in the form of a letter with a link to a web page presentation of new publications. Click below to access that page, which also offers you a chance to subscribe to the Monday morning mail in case you’re not already a subscriber. And do friends and colleagues a great favor by telling them about this invaluable and totally free service.

Recent world events underline the need to see sport as a political arena in which democratic values must be defended. Continuing to participate without raising one’s voice risks, as history has shown, leading to a growing credibility problem. Sport is very much political. The question is: what kind of values should it promote? writes Daniel Svensson, Associate Professor of Sport Science at Malmö University.

Peter Millward’s Football Fandom, Sexualities and Activism: A Cultural Relational Sociology (Routledge) is the first book to examine the growing movement of organised networks of LGBT+ football supporters, exploring activists’ biographies and the meanings they ascribe to participation in identity politics-centred social movements. Our reviewer Mads Skauge finds a swell of ambition and a swell of data – maybe enough for more books than this one – and the end product, he argues, presents an abundance of useful information about LGBT+ fandom and supporter culture in football.

In this peer review article for Scandinavian Sport Studies Forum, Petter Gottschalk asks the question of what might work best in sport management when the focus is on preventing, detecting, and correcting individual deviance, which is a negative phenomenon in sport as it refers to behaviors that go against and violate expectations, norms, values, as well as rules, regulations, and laws. While ethical and democratic leadership styles are normally recommended, sometimes dictatorial and narcissistic leadership styles are needed to fight deviance.

idrottsforum’s weekly newsletter gives you the past week’s on-site activities in your mailbox every Monday morning, in the form of a letter with a link to a web page presentation of new publications. Click below to access that page, which also offers you a chance to subscribe to the Monday morning mail in case you’re not already a subscriber. And do friends and colleagues a great favor by telling them about this invaluable and totally free service.

Sportswashing has recently grown into a vital concept in scholarly and public discussions of sport. In 2022, the Collins dictionary named ‘sportswashing’ one of their ten Words of the Year, reflecting the extent of public discussion of the term in the run-up to the 2022 Men’s Football World Cup in Qatar. The term is used as a criticism of owners of clubs or hosts of competitions and has established a foothold in both journalistic and academic work. But there has been very little academic discussion of what exactly sportswashing is or why it matters.

The Psychology of Sports Fans by Aaron C.T. Smith (Routledge) explains the intricate psychological foundations of sports fandom, exploring why sports hold such emotional power across cultures and demographics, and uncovers how sports provide meaning, identity, and community, making them an essential part of human life. Peter Hassmén is our excellent guide to this book, presenting its strengths and weaknesses equally detailed and respectfully, concluding that the sometime lack of scholarly depth affecting for instance the discussion on religion and hooliganism is well compensated for by its accessibility in structure and writing style.

In this paper, Enrique Cubillo proposes the first formal classification of switch-kick locomotion—bilateral alternating propulsion on wheeled platforms—as a distinct locomotor class. To the author’s knowledge, no existing biomechanical, sports science, or physical literacy literature has formally defined bilateral alternating propulsion on wheeled platforms as a distinct locomotor class with necessary and sufficient constraints. The paper documents what appears to be no systematic or formalized switch-kick instruction in global skateboarding pedagogy.

The Swedish Association of Sports Historians (SVIF) publishes a yearbook, Idrott, historia & samhälle (Sports, History & Society) which is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal of sport history, published in Sweden for the Scandinavian market and beyond. The Forum Editor’s choice from the current issue: Taming or Revering Nature? Equestrian Sports as Mirror of Nature Perceptions in the Early 20th Century by Noemi Steuerwald (open access).

All manuscripts must focus on elite athletes navigating the emerging adulthood developmental period and address the unique setting of athletic careers in which EA athletes are nested. Athletes competing at high levels of sport, including but not limited to premier or major professional leagues, professional developmental and minor leagues, and collegiate/quasi-professional athletics, are the primary focus of this Special Issue. Recreational, intramural, or lower-intensity sport contexts fall outside the scope of this Special Issue and will not be considered.