This study explored the experiences of 14 players who took part in women's 11-a-sidewinter football (soccer) leagues in Australia. Interviews informed by a social constructionist approach were conducted to examine experiences of social safety within community (grassroots) football spaces. New insights regarding the experiences of players in women's football leagues show that players go to great lengths to maintain their physical and psychosocial safety, however they are often at risk of injury or attack due to failings in the sport system. The findings that community football is more expensive in Australia compared to other community sports, despite it being one of the most played team sports in the world, calls into question the way that local councils and elite football organisations charge individual players at a community level. Future directions include taking an intersection of players' experience into account when directing funding and development strategies for community football.
This article examines how inspiration, as a public feeling or affect, is central to the legacy claims of mega sport events, such as the Olympic and Paralympic Games, in effecting change in how everyday citizens feel, think and act through sport participation. In this article we examine how inspiration is mobilized as an intimate affective register within the institutionalized and normative parameters of sport legacy plans through analysis of official documents produced for the Brisbane Olympic and Paralympic Games, released between 2021 and 2023. In addition, we also analyze a collection of five short video documentaries on inspiration produced by the International Olympic Committee. Using a post-humanist feminist lens we introduce the idea of 'affective disjuncture' to explore the ways citizens are urged to be inspired through mega sport events. Mapping the affective ecologies that mobilize inspiration in the imagined potential of mega sports events, we identify the limitations and possibilities of thinking outside the normative parameters of pride, nationhood, and individual competitiveness for communities.
This paper analyses the legal reform aimed at implementing a centralised marketing model for audiovisual rights in Portuguese professional football, interpreting it as a politically contested and transformative process. Promoted through legislation as an instrument to correct revenue distribution inequalities among clubs and to enhance competitive balance, the measure translates into a reconfiguration of the institutional, symbolic, and media fields, exposing structural tensions within the Portuguese football ecosystem. Grounded in a qualitative documentary analysis, the study examines the frictions between dominant clubs, regulatory bodies, and media dynamics. Assemblage theory constitutes the central analytical lens, enabling an understanding of how actors, discourses, and dispositifs, in the Foucauldian sense, articulate and reconfigure in contexts of pronounced power asymmetry. The article contributes by conceptualising centralisation as a dynamic relational assemblage, critically demonstrating how reforms oriented towards competitive balance may simultaneously reconfigure and reproduce structural inequalities within the football ecosystem.
Research shows that large-scale sporting events and accompanying media coverage contribute to the dissemination of nationalist and neoliberal ideologies intersecting with gender norms embedded in the power structures of the modern nation state. Elite athletes competing in these events often become media focal points, with women athletes susceptible to intense scrutiny and differential coverage. Despite a recognized need to investigate the gender-sensitive interplay between ideologies, power and context through mediated sport, scholarship has frequently focused on gender-blind, isolated expressions of ideology in the Global North. Through an innovative critical discourse analysis (CDA) of online media portrayals of Indonesian women athletes competing in the Southeast Asian (SEA) games, this article highlights the complex manifestations of nationalist and neoliberal ideologies with gender in a nation of the Global South. It delivers a deeper understanding of the contextually contingent, multifaceted relationships between ideologies and power expressed in discursively mediated sport, and the impact on women in sport and broader society.
Taylor Swift's presence at National Football League (NFL) games to support her partner Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce has drawn significant interest from sport media and organisations since 2023 as her fans (Swifties) and new to sport fans began participating in football fandom and drove revenue, increased merchandise sales and broadcast numbers. This paper considers this impact from a fan experience perspective in contrasting the behaviours and trends exhibited by Swifties and new sports fans in a hypermasculine sporting environment to the fan cultures of women's sport where diverse fandom is celebrated. An autoethnographic methodology allows for personal reflections and lived experiences of participation in these intersecting cultures to be analysed alongside the literature and social commentary of this significant moment in sports and pop culture.
Using a corpus of 509 popular US sport films (1920-2024), this study aims to examine the disparity between audience reception, critical acclaim and financial success. It does this by using publicly available data from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), critical reception (Metascores) and box office receipts (The Numbers). This study finds three key findings. Firstly, boxing narratives overwhelmingly dominate the genre, achieving high critical and popular acclaim alongside strong box office success. Secondly, while films featuring female protagonists are in a clear minority, their audience and critical ratings are comparable, and at times superior, those of male protagonists. This finding suggests that the underrepresentation of women's stories is a product of industry bias rather than audience preferences. Finally, a clear cultural divide emerges between which sport stories resonate with domestic and international audiences; some quintessential American sports, such as American football and baseball, are less successful internationally, while boxing enjoys universal appeal.
By reviewing how social science researchers have utilised the triad of sport, gender, and violence, this article identifies variations, changes, and continuities in how these elements have been understood since the 1980s. Based on searches in two databases, the ten most-cited articles from each decade were analysed. The review shows that critical perspectives on men and masculinity were foregrounded in the 1980s, while research connecting sports participation and violence has expanded since the late 1990s. The findings reveal a spectrum of approaches that either challenge or reproduce static understandings of gender and violence. The review demonstrates that the triad, developed as a structural feminist critique and later expanded into research on causal and intervention-oriented models, widens the field's analytical and political horizons and raises questions about where responsibility for violence in and around sport lies. The concluding discussion highlights the importance of normative guidance where violence occupies a grey area.
