Dr Renan Petersen-Wagner

This book explores social and political issues and trends emerging around the UEFA European Football Championships. It presents a contemporary sociology of the European Championships which, despite its significance as a mega-event, has been largely overshadowed by the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup in existing literature. At a time when both sport mega-events and Europe are undergoing dramatic transformations, this book explores a range of case studies and important topics such as changing consumption patterns, new types of sport media, social media, environmental policies and emergency politics, public opposition and co-hosting. It also situates the European Championships within wider European projects and discourses of European identities, integration and enlargement. Drawing on data from recent and historical European Championships, and looking ahead to the next tournament in Germany in 2024, this book serves to open up new debates within the sociology of sport and the study of mega-events. It is a timely and ground-breaking text which will resonate with students, academics and readers who are interested in football, the sociology of sport, megaevents, digital sociology, European politics and culture or sports business.

This paper advances an understanding of the platformisation of society through the prism of global football. With an analysis of four continental club competitions’ presence on Instagram and Facebook, this article seeks to question expressions of algorithmic consumer culture. Particularly, the article explores how users’ (dis)engagement with branded content on the relevant platforms speaks to processes of ‘algorithmic resistance’ but simultaneously can be contextualised by football supporters’ historically significant resistive practices in opposition to ‘modern football’s’ commercial rationalities. By arguing that platformisation processes occur ‘in’ and ‘through’ football, this article contributes towards an understanding of platforms’ (1) distinct, penetrative reach in football, and (2) responsive, everyday resistance practices in form of non-engagement with branded content, which could be seen to express football’s commercial rationalities. The article, hence, brings forward debates relevant to consumer and popular culture, platforms and, broadly, power-resistance in platform societies.

Arguably, the later process of globalization served to reshape how socializations are fostered and maintained across time and space. Additionally, in the last fifteen years a new phenomenon that reinvigorated time and space compression has emerged: social media. Moreover, it is argued that the conjunction of those processes can be seen as taking place on a distinct Age - the Anthropocene or the cosmopolitan epoch. Arguably those processes have the capacity to alter the way individuals enact their football fandom In this light, this paper seeks to conceptualize one particular football support identity that takes into account this fragmented period. Based on an 18-month ethnographic research with supporters of one English Premier League, this paper conceptualizes the football fan in the Anthropocene as the cosmopolitan flâneur. I conclude by pointing out to some prospective avenues for future research based on a cosmopolitan imagination.

In 2014, Boaventura de Sousa Santos awoke the global sociological community to the need to privilege ‘humanization’ in the exploration of transnational solidarities. This article presents the cultural consumption of a football club – Liverpool FC – to understand the common ‘love’, ‘suffering’, ‘care’ and ‘knowledge’ that fans who are part of the ‘Brazil Reds’ or ‘Switzerland Reds’ (although not all fans engaged in such communities are ‘from’ Brazil or Switzerland) experience. The argument is that the global North lexicon of social class, ethnicity, gender and, especially, nationality is less significant as starting points for analysis than humanization through shared love, which consolidates Liverpool FC fans’ transnational solidarities. Accordingly, the article calls for the epistemologies of the global South to be used to understand the practices of cultural consumption that constitute activities in the sphere of everyday life, such as those involved in ‘love’ for a football club.

The English Premier League possesses multiple global dimensions, including its clubs’ economic ownership, player recruitment patterns and television broadcasts of its matches. The owner of Hull City Association Football Club’s economic rights, Dr Assam Allam, announced plans to re-name the club ‘Hull City Tigers’ in an attempt to re-orientate the club towards seemingly lucrative East Asian, and specifically Chinese, markets in 2013. This article, first, draws upon Manuel Castells’ work in The Rise of the Network Society to critically discuss the logic of Hull City’s proposed reorientation to suit ‘new middle class’ consumers in China and the East Asian global region and second, uses the example to theoretically engage with Castells’ idea that ‘networks’ replace ‘hierarchies’ as social structures. This leads to the argument that while these plans might intend to strengthen the club’s financial position, they overlook a concern with local environments that Castells guides us toward. By looking toward the local consumer practices in China and the East Asian global region, Allam would find: (a) the normalisation in production and consumption of counterfeit club-branded sportswear and television broadcasts which makes increasing the club’s revenues difficult; and (b) that the region’s ‘new middle classes’ (marked by disposable income) are unlikely to foster support for Hull City, even if ‘Tigers’ is added to its name.

A existência de uma infinidade de dados, nos últimos anos, tem disponibilizado para a área de marketing novos horizontes para a definição e segmentação de mercados, auxiliada por bancos de dados, tanto privados e internos da organização, quanto públicos e externos. Um exemplo do segundo tipo são as comunidades virtuais, sendo o Orkut um dos seus expoentes. Este artigo, de caráter exploratório, tem o intuito de apresentar duas formas alternativas de segmentação de mercado (regressão logística e redes neurais), por meio de dados secundários coletados no Orkut, pressupondo que é possível prever determinadas atitudes de consumo explicitadas por membros das comunidades virtuais. Para tanto foram escolhidas duas comunidades autodenominadas eu amo cerveja gelada e eu odeio cerveja, das quais foram coletadas amostras probabilísticas aleatórias de 400 membros cada. Com o processamento e a análise dos dados desenvolvidos em três fases - limpeza de dados e seleção de variáveis de interesse, análise discriminante e análise através de redes neurais - confirmou-se a possibilidade de se determinar atitudes de consumo e, com isso, utilizar comunidades virtuais como bancos de dados para segmentação. As demais contribuições, limitações e implicações constam no estudo.

This study explores the theory of routine activities and its analytical potential to improve our understanding about the set of circumstances surrounding match-fixing in Brazilian football. This theory investigates the macro processes that may explain criminal events, which brings together three elements in the Brazilian case: (a) motivated offenders: (i) local bettors who seek out sports professionals to fix matches to obtain personal gains related to betting and (ii) organized international groups (i.e., syndicates) specialized in match-fixing; (b) available victims: (i) referees who act in the first divisions of the Brazilian League and (ii) athletes who play in lower divisions; and (c) a lack of surveillance: (i) difficulties in policing and investigation, (ii) matches not monitored by sports betting monitoring systems, and (iii) non-televised matches. The theoretical framework used in this paper allows for contemplating strategies and policies to face this particular social problem that are not exclusively focused on tools aimed at punishing offenders, even though legal enforcement could be understood as a fundamental deterrent. It supports the defense of reformulating institutional and organizational standards, the development of preventive and pedagogical actions, and the development of a better system for whistleblowers to come forward.

As argued by Niklas Luhmann (2000) what we know about society, and indeed about the world that surrounds us, we know through mass media. Luhmann’s (2000) perspective finds echo on Herman and Chomsky’s (1992) notion that mass media communication operates through five concomitant editorial biases. Building upon the notion of sourcing bias (Herman and Chomsky, 1992) I will argue in this paper that sport, by its inherent quality of being a cheap content that provides real human drama (see Rowe, 2004; Jackson, 2013), fabricates what I conceptualise as a ‘national’ sporting cultural bias. My argument derives from automatically classifying through machine learning news from 12 different media outlets from around the world. During April to August 2019 I have automatically collected (predicted based on my first month collection) 77,840 news that were then classified based on the topics covered. Early findings show that those news outlets operate on what I conceptualise as the ‘national’ sporting cultural bias by heavily focusing on particular sports that shapes readership perception of sporting culture.

The penetration of social media platforms in the cultural production and consumption circuits of sport mega-events means that organisations like the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) are afforded new and alternative channels to engage with their audiences. TikTok, one of the largest platforms, is characterised by a higher degree of playfulness and humorous content and has been used to mobilise audiences for prosocial political aims. Using TikTok’s Research API access, this article relies on automatically collected metadata from all IPC posts between May 2023–May 2024. After consolidating and manipulating the data through Python, statistical analyses were performed on SPSS to understand how certain content becomes more visible on the platform. In a second stage, videos with most virality underwent visual discourse analysis. We hold that the IPC, to challenge invisibilities, arguably one of the biggest obstacles for disability sport, engages in the circulation of humorous content with the aim of promoting inclusion and social change for persons with disabilities. While TikTok and the circulation of humorous content afford the IPC wider visibility to new audiences, it might provoke unintended consequences through further stigmatisation of disability sport as non-serious activity.

The 2018 FIFA Mens World Cup saw the introduction of video-assistant-referee (VAR) as one of its main talking points. For the first time officials had the assistance of replays and VARs to support decisions. Nevertheless, the introduction of VAR was not without controversies. To understand how fans experienced VAR we employed a digital sociological approach (Marres, 2017) by focusing on one loosely defined community (FIFA’s Official YouTube channel), and used digital tools (Rieder, 2015) to scrap users’ comments. We scrapped over 300,000 comments from 31 videos that were analysed through CDA (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999). Three main categories emerged: Global North vs Global South; Non-Neutrality of Technology; VAR is Killing the Beautiful Game. In this paper our analysis focus on the first category - using the remaining two as support - to argue that VAR was comprehended as a tool for neo-colonialism. Fans recognised VAR as: favouring loosely defined Global North sides; improving Global North sides’ chances; controlling Global South players’ actions. We argue that VAR operated as a panopticon (Foucault, 1985) that rationalised/standardised the ways of playing (Mignolo, 1999; Santos, 2014) following an Eurocentric interpretation of the rules. Our findings highlight the paradoxes of technology, where VAR operated as a tool for systemic control and YouTube acted as a site for anti-systemic movements (Bragança & Wallerstein, 1982) that allowed for transnational networks of hope (Castells, 2012). We conclude by showing the reflexive nature of borders (Beck, 2004) where boundaries, barriers and belongings become more transient and fluid.

A central question within social theorizations relates to the rescaling of ‘power’ in a globalized world. This paper advances sociological debates on power by cross-pollinating Beck’s power game theory with Bourdieu’s field. Hence, it conceptualizes what we call a ‘power game field’. This captures the power competition that cuts across local, national and global fields and involve, likewise, local, national and transnational actors whose capital and social relations shape the field’s outcomes. Using a global sport mega-event as our empirical setting, we explore the struggles and compliances in the power game field. Specifically, in the context of how the standards imposed on Brazil by football’s governing body (FIFA) - framed nationally as ‘Padrão FIFA’ - were contested within a localized media setting (2007-2014). This is done through a frame analysis of readers’ letters and media articles, which reveals the importance of Beck’s ‘both-and’ logic and the notion of ‘communal capital’.

This article advances sociological work on globalization processes. It concerns itself with conceptualizations of how the local and global ‘clash’, utilizing Ulrich Beck’s work on globalization, cosmopolitanism and power. By employing Brazil’s 2014 FIFA men’s World Cup as a case, this article seeks to builds on Beck’s theorizations into the field of football; using the General Law of the World Cup as a symbolic representation for the global/local, interest-driven interactions between Brazil and FIFA. In particular, this article is concerned with how FIFA’s requirements, standards and norms, as imposed on the host nation, were framed within local media and journalistic discourses. The article extends Beck’s insights by problematising how global demands meet local socio-spatial, legal and cultural contexts and how these demands, seeking to regulate and secure consumption, are resisted by various domestic and localized actors situated within a power game.

As a significant pillar of the leisure world, the sports industry makes substantial contributions to climate change through carbon emission and its influence on sustainable practices, rendering some sport mega-events environmentally destructive. In line with wider trends, researchers have increasingly examined sport mega-events, their governance, and environmental impacts. In this context, this article contributes towards an understanding of how ‘sustainability’ is framed by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) through a digital sociological analysis of its YouTube channels. Drawing on Ulrich Beck’s concept of ‘staging’, the article addresses two research questions focused on (1) how the issue of climate change is publicly staged by the IOC, and (2) how social media provides another outlet for the IOC’s sustainable practice discourses. By exploring these questions, the article develops an understanding of how policies staged to address global risks now formulate a key aspect of sport governing bodies’ presence on social media.

As a significant pillar of the leisure world, the sports industry makes substantial contributions to climate change through carbon emission and its influence on sustainable practices, rendering some sport mega-events environmentally destructive. In line with wider trends, researchers have increasingly examined sport mega-events, their governance, and environmental impacts. In this context, this article contributes towards an understanding of how ‘sustainability’ is framed by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) through a digital sociological analysis of its YouTube channels. Drawing on Ulrich Beck’s concept of ‘staging’, the article addresses two research questions focused on (1) how the issue of climate change is publicly staged by the IOC, and (2) how social media provides another outlet for the IOC’s sustainable practice discourses. By exploring these questions, the article develops an understanding of how policies staged to address global risks now formulate a key aspect of sport governing bodies’ presence on social media.

Arguably, in the last 15 years globalisation fuelled by social media have reshaped how socialisations are fostered and maintained. Moreover, the same processes have had a profound impact on one of the most fundamental emotion of humankind: love. Departing from those assumptions, based on an 18-month (n)ethnography of football supporters of one particular English club in Brazil and Switzerland, I sought to unveil the discourses supporters crafted in relation to their historiographies as cosmopolitan flâneurs. The critical discourse analysis showed that they used both individual and collective stories to craft their biographies as true Liverpool FC supporters. From those findings I argue that individualisation in cosmopolitan times entails a ‘Dasein für ausgewählte Andere’, being this other the re-traditionalised structures of modernity. I conclude by pointing out that precarious freedom does not relate to the necessity of choosing, but to their necessity of constantly legitimising their choices.

Este trabalho analisa o que vem sendo chamado de Movimentos Contra o Futebol Moderno (MCFM), buscando particularmente compreender os significados desse slogan no Brasil. Através de uma metodologia híbrida, que reúne análise de redes e de mensagens postadas nas páginas mais populares do Facebook que se identificam como espaços ligados aos MCFM, o artigo tem dois objetivos principais: 1) compreender contra o que exatamente os torcedores brasileiros se posicionam; e 2) explorar as tensões e contradições percebidas naquilo que é entendido como “tradição”. Acionamos uma diversidade de conceitos no artigo, com destaque para o arcabouço da (​des​)​politização que nos possibilita destrinchar o entendimento que o “tradicional” pode ter em movimentos de resistência ao neoliberalismo.

Hoje, em um jornal, vamos encontrar referências ao campo esportivo tanto na seção de saúde como nas páginas policiais, tanto no caderno de economia como no de moda. É de esperar-se que essa exposição do objeto esporte venha a impactar na produção do pensamento acadêmico, procurando melhor compreendê-lo e interpretá-lo. O livro vai buscar ilustrar, pelo menos em parte, essa riqueza temática que desafia o pesquisador com sua complexidade e seus rápidos processos de mudança. Manifestações sociais que, em um determinado momento, parecem ocupar um espaço importante nas interações pessoais, podem desaparecer em pouco tempo ou então serem relegadas à paradoxal obsolescência de um passado recente. Procuramos, assim, disponibilizar aos leitores uma coletânea ampla e diversificada que ilustre, pelo menos em parte, a complexidade da reflexão sobre as diferentes manifestações contemporâneas do esporte, no âmbito de uma sociedade cada vez mais integrada, em função da rápida evolução dos meios de comunicação.

This chapter explores the promotion of marketing in the Paralympic Games and in related disability sport contexts. It addresses traditional marketing, consumer behaviour, sponsorship acquisition and return on investment. In addition, it considers how athletes with disabilities are perceived and how these perceptions impact the promotion of Paralympic sport in unique ways. Finally, this chapter includes excerpts from an interview with a marketer for the British Paralympics. The inclusion of this interview allows for comparisons between peer-reviewed research and experiences from a practitioner of Paralympic sport promotion.

Technological changes have dramatically transformed the ways in which contemporary sport mega-events are produced and consumed worldwide. As the production and consumption of these global spectacles have moved beyond the traditional television and radio broadcast, this article examines and reflects on the hyper-digitalisation of sport mega-events. More specifically, we explore how one emerging platform presents a window for examining questions of power and inequality; social integration and identity; social change and development, and finally, the experience of time and space related to sport mega-events in the present-day. By employing video-sharing platform YouTube as a paradigmatic case study of the Olympic Games’ digital shift, the paper contributes towards an enhanced understanding of mega-events, technologies and digital platforms. We argue that systematic efforts to understand the digital manifestations of mega-events in a ‘platform society’ remain extremely crucial when situated against the emerging but overlapping fields of digital sociology, digital leisure studies and digital football studies in which mega-events feature.

The 2018 FIFA Men’s World Cup saw the controversial introduction of VAR in the global stage, meanwhile little research has examined supporters’ reactions to it. To understand how fans experienced VAR we employed a digital sociological approach by focusing on one loosely defined online community. We scraped over 300,000 comments from 31 videos on YouTube that were subsequently critically analysed. Three main categories emerged: Global North vs Global South; Non-Neutrality of Technology; VAR is Killing the Beautiful Game. In this paper our analysis focus on the first category to argue that VAR was experienced by supporters as neo-colonial technological tool. Fans recognised VAR as: favouring loosely defined Global North sides; and improving Global North sides’ chances of winning. Our nuanced analysis of technologization of sport shows how it was both experienced by supporters as a power implementing artefact, but also provide a place for loosely defined antisystemic movements to emerge.

This article aims to explore the digital consumption of the Paralympic Games on the video-sharing platform YouTube to understand how the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) engages consumers in a digital setting, enabling an “alternative” consumption of the event. Using YouTube Data Tools we have automatically scraped data from 17,701 YouTube videos from Paralympic Games’ channel. After data manipulation and consolidation, statistical analyses were performed in order to understand how the IPC have adapted to the algorithm logic of platforms. Our findings demonstrate that YouTube should be comprehended as complementing and substituting television as the traditional medium of sport consumption. Thus, the digitalization of the sport industry adapts and continues, rather than revolutionizes, the symbiotic sport/media relationship. While digital revolution allows the IPC to reach wider audiences by bypassing a traditional media editorial logic, it does so within the algorithmic logic of platforms resulting from the unpaid digital labour of users.

Sport mega-events (SMEs) attract the attention of billions worldwide, while also becoming a growing space for concern regarding Corporate Social Irresponsibility (CSI). By employing a systematic literature review using Antecedents-Decisions-Outcomes (ADO) framework we answered where and when does CSI occur in SMEs? What are the stakeholders involved in CSI in SMEs? And how do stakeholders respond to CSI in SMEs? Our findings revealed key CSI drivers: economic pressures, governance and transparency issues, organizational culture, and media influence. We propose an effect decision typology, including three actions: sponsorship and commercial decisions, governance and transparency, and social and ethical impacts; and three categories of outcomes: social impacts and legacies, fan and consumer reactions, and organizational consequences and subsequent behaviors. The article contributes to the literature in SMEs and CSI by proposing a research agenda for further studies of CSI in SMEs.

Every two years sport mega-events such as the Olympic Games and FIFA Men’s World Cup disembark in a different country, refocusing the global media attention for a period. Commonly media scholars have focused on how international media has framed the local host, nevertheless not much is known from the perspective of the host. This chapter analyses how a Brazilian newspaper during 2010-2019 have framed the 2014 Brazil FIFA Men’s World Cup, focusing on one of the polemical points of the Lei Geral da Copa (General Law of the World Cup): the legalisation of alcohol commercialisation and consumption inside stadiums. Correio Braziliense explicitly framed the legalisation as problematic because it was an imposition by FIFA and invoked audiences’ historical frame of reference regarding the association between alcohol consumption and violence.

On April 17, 2023, the football giants Real Madrid and FC Barcelona engaged in an unexpected mutual institutional cancelation on social media by accusing each other of having maintained and benefited from historical ties with Franco’s oppressive regime. To understand how the respective fan bases reacted to the exchange of allegations linking their clubs with Franco’s regime, the motivations behind clubs’ engagement in cancel culture and the subsequent stances during the conflict, and what were the practical consequences from economic and brand/image perspectives to these clubs, we employed a digital socio-psychological analysis of three videos on YouTube, including over 4,000 comments. Four main themes were developed: supporting Official Counter- canceling while Reinterpreting history; Fans’ Mockery as a Counter Canceling Culture Reinforcement; Fear, Repression, and Persecution: Explaining FCB’s compliance with Franco’s regime; “White-washing” the history: RM’s Propaganda and Manipulation. Findings suggest that football supporters tend to reject their clubs’ historical associations with dark periods and figures, thereby mitigating potential cancel culture effects such as sponsorship losses, brand damage, and decline of fan support. This study encourages future research into sports cancel culture to consider the interplay of distinct cultures, sociopolitical contexts, supporters’ collective identities, and team identifications inherent in the sports world.

Football can be one of the most illuminating domains of globalisation, where Global South and Global North dynamics operate. In a sense, to understand the business world of football it becomes imperative to understand the particular regional and local aspects. In this chapter we trace the historical development of South American football through the figure of CONMEBOL, discuss the position of South American football in relation to global and European football by arguing against the mechanical division of Global South and Global North, and then present a three part analysis of the case of Brazilian football to illustrate the concomitant dimensions of political, social, and economical to understand the business of football. We conclude by providing future points of research in respect of the business of South American football.

At the beginning of each new Olympiad - the four years pe riod between two Olympic Games - fresh discussions arise in academia, in general day-to-day discourse and in the media, about the intended legacies for the new Games. Moreover, this debate tends to use comparisons between editions of the Games as rhetorical tool in order to assess the plans and preparations of the legacies and the Games itself. In those debates, legacies - or footprints - are commonly linked to questions of jobs creation, urban regeneration, sport participation, and the environment. What is proposed here in this chapter is to discuss the apparent symbolic footprint left by third parties - the media - through how they discursively construct the host city and nation, and the links between that with the organisation of the Games.

This handbook provides a critical assessment of contemporary issues that define the contours of the Paralympic Movement generally and the Paralympic Games more specifically. It addresses conceptualisations of disability sport, explores the structure of the Paralympic Movement and considers key political strategic and governance issues which have shaped its development. The Palgrave Handbook of Paralympic Studies is written by a range of international authors, a number of whom are senior strategists as well as academics, and explores legacy themes through case studies of recent Paralympic games. Written in the wake of the 2016 Rio Paralympic Games, it provides an assessment of contemporary challenges faced by the International Paralympic Committee and other key stakeholders in the Paralympic Movement. Its critical assessment of approaches to branding, classification, social inclusion and technological advances makes this handbook a valuable resource for undergraduate study across a range of sport and disability related programmes, as well as a point of reference for researchers and policy makers.

The prevalence of digital technologies and emerging social media platforms in the 21st century has altered the ways in which individuals and groups produce and consume elite football (soccer). Elite football is no longer consumed merely through ‘traditional’ media as television or radio. By comparing the ‘big five’ football leagues (the first divisions in England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain), this article examines how these leagues have adapted to an algorithm logic (monetization strategies/content strategies) on YouTube. Drawing from data collected (64,247 YouTube videos) using YouTube Data Tools, we argue that the ‘big five’s’ content creation on YouTube work in a complementary manner to ‘traditional’ platforms, allowing for the testing and adaption of their content practices based on instant consumer feedback. This article makes a contribution to the literature on the symbiotic media/sport relationship with its analysis and insights into the digital transformations occurring in a ‘platform society’.

This chapter follows with a review of the symbiotic relationship between mass media and sport, and the digital disruptions when new media collide with this sedimented relationship; then, data from two distinct social media platforms are used to illustrate how the digital revolution is better understood as transformations that contain both patterns of continuities and discontinuities; finally, it ends with a discussion on how digital media transformed the once sedimented relationship between mass media and sport by extending rather than replacing it. The impacts of digital transformations were also experienced in sociological enquiry practices to a point where an enlarged tradition of research has emerged. New digital media distinctiveness in relation to traditional analogue media centres around four features in terms of affordances: capacity for interactivity; on-demand and real-time access; all users become consumers and producers; hybridity of mixing one-to-many, one-to-one and many-to-many forms of communication.

This article examines processes related to platformization in the case of 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup. By focusing specifically on how this World Cup edition was produced and consumed on TikTok, we primarily are concerned with how World Cup-related content was engaged with by users who, in this case, are assumed also to be fans, or followers of football. By drawing together insights from digital sociology, the sociology of football, and the cultural production of platforms, this study argues that patterns identified on TikTok reveal how the (dis)continuity in the production and consumption of the World Cup affords multiple and distinct peaks of interests that does not necessarily align with the World Cup’s natural flow. Importantly, this showcases (i) the ways in which the World Cup is characterized by processes of platformization in modern societies and (ii) that this platform offers a culturally and socially important space for narratives, ideas and images to develop, relating to the World Cup.

This paper puts into conversation the concepts of platformisation, digital sovereignty, and leisure by exploring the shift to Bluesky during the legal suspension of X in Brazil between 30th August and 8th October 2024. To analyse the impact on Brazilian users of the Supreme Court decision to block access to X’s servers during this period, we map the adoption and use of Bluesky by the 20 football clubs playing in the Brazilian first division. We use engagement metadata (e.g., likes) as a proxy for end-user adoption and map how Bluesky emerged as an alternative platform during the suspension in the consumption and production circuits that take place within the broader processes of platformisation of leisure and sport. The paper contributes to the literature on digital and platform leisure by demonstrating how digital sovereignty (e.g., state legislation) affects the platformisation of leisure and sport by reshaping user behaviours, fostering platform adoption, and transforming the consumption and production circuits of platformised sport. The broader significance of this paper relates to how political actions (in)directly intersect with leisure infrastructures and cultures.

This chapter embarks on a critical naming of what we call the ‘banterification’ of professional sport clubs’ social media channels. With an emphasis on critical and ethical aspects of communication strategies, the chapter deconstructs how banter is employed as a strategic tool for fan engagement. Drawing on examples from elite sport leagues, the chapter explores the precarious balance between humorous engagement and the risk of causing offence or diluting professional decorum and brand identity. The chapter will raise critical questions about the ethical implications of this form of communication and its possible implications for brand identity and public perceptions of professional sport teams. Finally, it seeks to consider this in the context of a much broader trend of cultural infantilisation, locating the actions of social media managers as both a cause and a symptom of a broader shift indicative of late modern societies.

This chapter embarks on a critical naming of what we call the ‘banterification’ of professional sport clubs’ social media channels. With an emphasis on critical and ethical aspects of communication strategies, the chapter deconstructs how banter is employed as a strategic tool for fan engagement. Drawing on examples from elite sport leagues, the chapter explores the precarious balance between humorous engagement and the risk of causing offence or diluting professional decorum and brand identity. The chapter will raise critical questions about the ethical implications of this form of communication and its possible implications for brand identity and public perceptions of professional sport teams. Finally, it seeks to consider this in the context of a much broader trend of cultural infantilisation, locating the actions of social media managers as both a cause and a symptom of a broader shift indicative of late modern societies.

The role of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in sports has been extensively discussed in previous research. In this chapter, we particularly focus on how CSR initiatives, aligned with UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), are communicated by a sport firm and its impact on sport consumers. We automatically collected data from adidas’ YouTube channel and categorised them using an artificial intelligence tool: Bard. This served to eliminate potential subjectivity on the part of the authors. Employing econometric analysis - forward stepwise Ordinary Least Square (OLS) regressions - we investigate the demand and engagement of the 194 adidas’ YouTube videos and examine whether the UN SDGs alignment has any significant effect in both aspects. Our empirical findings show evidence that UN SDG alignment does not significantly impact either demand or engagement. Associate football content and older videos displayed larger demand, while the engagement levels on the videos (e.g., likes and comments) remain largely unaffected by SDG alignment. The chapter suggests a need for adidas to refine its communication strategy for sustainability goals, given the potential overshadowing effect of sport-focused content. Further research replicating our analysis in different sport organisations is encouraged.

Research Questions: Digital transformations have brought changes to the consumption of football. Traditionally live televised football matches commanded total attention of viewers. With the proliferation of new media channels fans are now afforded to consume games anytime and anywhere, specifically by watching short highlights on-demand videos. Research Methods: We employ a three-stage least squares (3SLS) model to address endogeneity and estimate the determinants of viewership and engagement. The analysis, based on 2,268 observations, explores engagement metrics, video characteristics, and sports elements influencing demand. Additionally, we incorporate match attendance and comment volume as instruments for the number of likes on each video. Research and Findings: The model explains about 89% of the variance of the demand. The results indicate a significant positive association between views and likes, length of the videos, total number of red cards, total number of own goals, and uncertainty of outcome level, as well as the number of goals scored and the goal differences. A significant quadratic relationship between views, goals scored, and goals difference was observed, suggesting that the positive impact from both variables diminishes and, beyond a certain point, turns negative. Implications: We hold that YouTube highlights are an important aspect of the consumption of football. On-demand highlight clips have both continuations and transformations to traditional demand models. Its free availability on YouTube and the data affordances constitute a potential change in the mediatisation of sports, having deeper implications for monetisation and financial models.

The (hitherto) burgeoning academic discipline of event management developed from and feeds into a vibrant global industry, employing millions of people around the world (Eventbrite, 2018). As events management has professionalised, different sectors of this diverse industry explore interconnections between practice and theory. This book focuses on the sociological, cultural and anthropological perspectives of funerals as events. Yet there also exist events management and practitioner perspectives, not only from within the traditional funeral industry, but also from more diverse celebrations and memorials of death in contemporary practice, as well as historically. Despite the wide variety of events studied or addressed by event scholars and event managers, very few consider death from a perspective of event studies or events management. But death is the one event that none of us can evade. Death is articulated through the events that surround it, through ways in which the end of life is marked (whether that be the life of an individual, a group, or a community), and through evental structures across and between diverse cultural, ideological and societal contexts. There are considerable faith and non-faith practicalities to attend to in the highly stage-managed events of commemoration or memorialisation, from a state funeral or a day of remembrance, to the loss of someone personally close to us.

Research Overview: This research project, commissioned by BUCS and undertaken by the Centre for Social Justice in Sport and Society at Leeds Beckett University, was designed to respond to the recognition that volunteers from diverse ethnic backgrounds are underrepresented within university football, and as participants in BUCS football leadership programmes. The project sought to understand how football clubs, universities, and BUCS can contribute to enhancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in volunteering by producing insight to: • Understand who is engaged and not engaged in university football volunteering. • Gain insight into the football volunteer experience. • Identify the contextual conditions that enable or constrain volunteer engagement.