No abstract

How and why do sports issues turn into politics? The aim of this paper is to explore how politicization of sports might happen, to show how social movement theory might contribute to such understandings and to contribute to a theoretical understanding of the political mobilization of sports issues. To achieve this aim, we outline a three-dimensional theoretical framework based on social movement theory. Thereafter we present six cases of more-or-less contested sports issues: gender, sexuality, doping, extreme wages, boxing/violence and failed talent development. Finally, we discuss the main features of our theoretical framework in light of these cases. How do political opportunity structures contribute to political mobilization of sports issues? How do cultural factors make a difference in political processes concerning sports? Which actors are involved when contested sports issues occur? The aim of this exploration is to discover how various societal factors addressed in our theoretical framework matter relative to how and why sports issues might turn into politics.

Sports are social, and the sociability of sports (e.g. individual experiences, group cohesion or generalised social trust) and its consequences (e.g. enjoyment, inclusion, or social capital) depends on the social networks in sports teams. In this study we investigate various types of social networks in sports-strong and weak-for boys and girls. We look at the number of social relations in each team (average degree), how centralised and hierarchical teams are, and how each team clusters and consists of subgroups. We hypothesise that: (i) Boys' and girls' teams differ in number of social relations, (ii) Boys' social networks are more hierarchical than girls' networks, and (iii) Girls' teams are more clustered than boys' teams. Network data from 387 adolescent athletes on 30 sports teams in football, handball, crosscountry skiing and biathlon were collected with an electronic survey-questionnaire. The results reveal large differences in network structures between teams. We find that the total number of social relations is higher in girls' teams, that there are small gender differences with respect to networks' hierarchies, and that girls' networks cluster more than boys' networks.

Young athletes value their social relations in sports, and these social relations can have consequences when it comes to joining, continuing, and quitting sports. Yet the important question of how social relations in sports develop has not yet been adequately answered. Hence, we investigated how athletes’ social relations in sports depend on social relations outside of sports: in leisure, school, and social media. A total of 387 athletes (aged 16–19) from 30 Norwegian sports groups completed a survey on electronic tablets. We asked how social relations in leisure, school, and social media—through the social mechanisms of contact, homophily, and contagion—influenced social relations in sports. We also controlled for the effect of exercise frequency and duration (years) of contact in sports. Exponential random graph modelling (ERGM) analyses showed that first and foremost, relations from social media and leisure, but also school networks and exercise frequency, influence sports networks. This study shows that social relations in sports are diverse and depend on social relations outside sports. We discuss how this has ‘counterintuitive’ consequences for sports participation, particularly the importance of supporting athletes’ social relations outside of sports for the strengthening of social relations within sports when addressing challenges concerning recruitment, continuation, and dropout from sports.