This special issue was inspired by the challenges faced by sport managers in our global community in the face of the economic downturn. During the calls for the special issue, society faced one of its most unprecedented challenges, COVID-19. This provide significant shock waves to the daily rituals in sport and society. The manuscripts in this special issue provide an insight into sport management during this period. The research presented is both rich and diverse and we believe provides readers and the global sport management community with important contributions for reflection and learning from a policy, management and practical level.
This article is concerned with an emerging trend in political participation: the role played by football fans in engendering activism and protest. The role of fan activism in the debate on patterns of civic and political (dis)engagement – in the age of so-called anti-politics – has been ignored by the scholarly literature thus far. As a corrective, this article examines the development of football fan activism over the last thirty years, since the creation of the English Premier League in 1992. It adopts a case study approach centred on supporters’ movements since 1992. It argues that the political activism of football fans has both quantitatively and qualitatively changed over this period. Employing the sociological theory of Manuel Castells it claims that collective identities developed in resistance to the commercialisation and commodification within football have developed into more distinct ‘project identities’ that seek bring about more profound social change through football.
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