Tag: Toby Miller

The 2026 FIFA World Cup for men is an event shared between Canada, the US and Mexico. Not equally, though, 13 matches will be played in Canada, 13 in Mexico, and the rest, 78 fixtures, in the US. Although Mexico thus is less the host than the bartender serving a welcome Margarita, the effects of a mere 13 matches will be felt strongly in Mexico by the taxpayer and the environment, which is shown in this feature by Gonzalo Serrano and Toby Miller.

Global Sports Go Green—Or Do They? by Toby Miller and Joan Pedro-Carañana (Palgrave Macmillan) explores the multifaceted impact of sports mega-events, from the World Cup to the Olympics, Formula One, and America’s Cup. Often celebrated for uniting nations, showcasing culture, and driving economic growth, these events also face increasing scrutiny for their ecological and social consequences. Russell Holden is much impressed by the authors’ efforts showing global sports at its worst – not going green at all, merely greenwashing.

Brothers Iñaki and Nico Williams play football for Athletic Club de Bilbao in Spain. With African roots—their parents migrated from Ghana—and a Basque-Navarrese upbringing, they symbolize a new era in the ideology of the club and the region. Although the brothers were brought up in the region and hence qualify, they break the mould in racial terms, incarnating a cultural hybridization that redefines Basque identity. In this feature article, Toby Miller, Joan Pedro-Carañana and Israel V. Márquez present the historical background to this development and its consequences for the future.

The World Cup, as Jonathan Wilson puts it in The Guardian, is “simultaneously the greatest sporting festival on the planet, and a tawdry commercial machine run at enormous human and environmental cost for the benefit of torturers, murderers, exploiters and the unquenchably greedy” – which pretty much sums up the facts that Toby Miller and Joan Pedro-Carañana present in their piece, previously published only in Spanish and Portuguese, leading to the inevitable conclusion: Abolish the World Cup!

The Oxford Handbook of Sport and Society, edited by Lawrence A, Wenner (Oxford UP), features leading international scholars’ assessments of scholarly inquiry about sport and society. Divided into six sections, chapters consider dominant issues within key areas, approaches featured in inquiry, and debates needing resolution. Our reviewer is Richards Giulianotti, who edited the Sage four volume set The Sociology of Sport in 2012, and he finds that this new collection, some unnecessary omissions notwithstanding, is a welcome addition to the existing list of handbooks in the field.

The edited volume Sport and Neoliberalism: Politics, Consumption, and Culture (Temple University Press), compiled by David L. Andrews and Michail L. Silk, takes a critical stance on neoliberalism as a dominant organizing mechanism, in society and in sports. Our reviewer Russell Holden has but few reservations to this vital and useful analysis of modern sports.

Britt-Marie Ringfjord has read what she deems an important contribution to contemporary sports media studies, Sport, Public Broadcasting and Cultural Citizenship: Signal Lost?, edited by Jay Scherer and David Rowe.

In his knowledgeable review of A Companion to Sport, edited by David L. Andrews and Ben Carrington, Alan Bairner, Professor of Sport and Social Theory at Loughborough University, finds that the volume offers something for everybody, if not everything for all.