It is surprising that the sociological and social scientific study of sport -ritualized, rationalized, commercial spectacles and bodily practices that create opportunities for expressive performances, disruptions of the everyday world and affirmations of social status and belonging -was still seen as something as a joke by mainstream sociology until recently. A similar comment was made in the introduction to a previous Sociological Review Monograph on Sport, Leisure and Social Relations published twenty years ago (Horne, Jary and Tomlinson, 1987). Yet, quite clearly, social aspects of sport can be considered from most classical, modern and postmodern sociological theoretical perspectives, even if the 'founding fathers' did not have much explicitly to say about them (Giulianotti, ed., 2004). Ritualized, civic, events and ceremonies (Durkheim); rationalized, bureaucratically organized, science driven behaviour (Weber); commercial, global spectacles (Marx); expressivity and the everyday (Simmel and postmodernism); and male cultural displays and cultural centres (feminism). These are just a few of the issues that have concerned sociological theorists and inform the sociological analysis of sport. It was Pierre Bourdieu, however, alongside Norbert Elias and his colleague Eric Dunning, who has been one of the few leading mainstream sociologists to have taken sport seriously and who recognized the difficulty in doing so: 'the sociology of sport: it is disdained by sociologists, and despised by sportspeople' (Bourdieu, 1990: 156).This book suggests that just as modern competitive sport and large-scale sport events were developed in line with the logic of capitalist modernity, sports mega-events and global sport culture are central to late modern capitalist societies. As media events, the Summer Olympic Games and the FIFA association football World Cup provide cultural resources for reflecting upon identity and enacting agency. More generally they provide resources for the construction of 'a meaningful social life in relation to a changing societal environment that has the potential to destabilize and threaten these things' (Roche, 2000: 225). Sports 'mega-events' are important elements in the orientation of nations to international or global society. As Munoz suggests in his chapter, mega-events,
