Consider briefly how urban reputation is projected into the world. A city's image competes with other cities' images for recognition, prestige, and status. In the simplest of terms, we tend to think of a city as a 'good place' or a 'bad place' and position it somewhere on the global urban status hierarchy. Even a city's name can evoke a feeling, memory, or image that may range from terrible to terrific. When coupled with sport mega-events, these reputations are especially enduring. We might, for example, think of Sydney as clean and friendly, Atlanta as traffic-congested, and Montreal as financially burdened, and images connected to the 2001 terrorist attacks in the US might long spring to mind when someone mentions Salt Lake City. Sometimes, especially in the case of tragedy or disaster, connection with place may be so powerful that the city's name itself becomes shorthand for the event that occurred there, stigmatizing the city for years to come. Interestingly, other than naming a Treaty or an Accord after the city in which it was signed, rarely is this place/occurrence shorthand done in the case of 'good' events. But we need only say 'Chernobyl' to refer to nuclear disaster and to an entire era of nuclear regulatory failure. And events and images of the 1972 Olympic Summer Games have saturated our consciousness so thoroughly that a recent Hollywood depiction needs only one word in the title: 'Munich'.The 'deep play' concept was originally coined in the 18th century by the philosophical radical Jeremy Bentham (1789) who used it to refer to a form of gambling in which the stakes are so high it is irrational to engage in it at all. Bentham argued that deep play should be outlawed because, in part, what might be won does not come close to offsetting the price of what might be lost. Clifford Geertz (1973) morphed the concept to suggest that deep play may be 'irrational' according to Bentham's utilitarian standpoint, but that there are more than purely economic considerations at stake. To paraphrase Geertz, it is not the money itself, though the more of it involved, the deeper the play, but what the money causes to happen: the migration of status hierarchies into the body of the event. Thus,

In this article, which was delivered as the Alan G. Ingham Memorial Lecture to the 37th annual conference of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport, I extend Ingham’s ideas regarding sport as civic ritual and combine it with my own work on the relationship between sport and the increasing militarization of US cities in the post 9/11 era. I suggest that militarized civic rituals have now become an ever-present feature of urban life and represent a troubling new conflation between military and civilian discourses and practices employed through sport, specifically the NFL and the Super Bowl. The term “citizen soldier” is used here to provoke thought about the role of “ordinary” citizens in this context where domestic security telescopes down from the highest levels of the US Department of Defense to the micropersonal. Legally equated with a soldier at war, the NFL fan’s call of duty is received through a mobile phone application, everyday citizens recruited to assist, in the name of patriotism, in terrorism prevention. This blurs legal and operational separations between intelligence-gathering and citizenship and further collapses civilian-military boundaries suggesting a changed notion of duty for all of us.Dans cet article, qui a été présenté en tant que Conférence Commémorative Alan G. Ingham au 37ème Congrès Annuel de la Société Nord-Américaine de Sociologie du Sport, je prolonge les idées d’Ingham sur le sport vu comme un rituel civique et je les combine avec mon propre travail sur la relation entre le sport et l’augmentation de la militarisation des villes américaines dans la période post 11 septembre. Je suggère que des rituels civiques militarisés sont maintenant devenus des composants omniprésents de la vie urbaine et qu’ils représentent un nouvel amalgame troublant entre les discours civils et militaires et les pratiques employées dans le sport, plus spécifiquement dans la NFL et au Super Bowl. Le terme de « soldat citoyen » est utilisé ici pour provoquer une réflexion sur le rôle des citoyens « ordinaires » dans ce contexte où la sécurité intérieure s’interpénètre des plus hauts niveaux du Département Américain de la Défense au niveau micro-individuel. Légalement assimilé à un soldat en guerre, l’appel du devoir du fan de la NFL est reçu sur une application de téléphone portable, les citoyens ordinaires sont recrutés pour aider, au nom du patriotisme, à la prévention du terrorisme. Cela brouille la séparation légale et opérationnelle entre les services de renseignements et la citoyenneté, et, en outre, anéantie les frontières entre le civil et le militaire, suggérant une nouvelle notion du devoir pour nous tous.

This essay explores different understandings of fans and fandom between sport studies and pop culture studies through presentation of survey data originally collected for a study on global fandom/global fan studies. Email surveys from 65 fan scholars around the world reveal important distinctions between sport scholars and pop culture scholars in terms of their basic understandings of fans and fandom, the role of self-reflexivity in fan research, and the location of sport and other pop culture scholarship in the academy. Analysis points to a disjuncture between sport and pop culture fan studies that ultimately limits the ability to fully understand the range of fan experiences and fandoms.

In this article I focus on intersections between the National Football League’s (NFL) security practices and the US Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) counter-terrorism agenda, including new policies and legal structures that support pre-emption, protection, and preparation activities that manage and mitigate the effects of terrorist attacks. As I will argue, the intensifying and mutually supportive relationship between the NFL and the various forces employed to keep it safe is both unique in US sports and implies the militarization of football fans in somewhat unexpected ways. I will argue that the security strategies of the US government and those of the NFL are mutually beneficial in ways that help secure the NFL’s position and profitability and, more importantly, help implement and secure consensus for the US Department of Homeland Security’s continued ‘war on terror’. Coaffee’s recent work on urban resilience in the UK (Coaffee, 2009; Coaffee and Wood, 2006) contends that in the present historical moment, ‘security is becoming more civic, urban, domestic, and personal’ (Coaffee, 2009: 9). How, if at all, does resilience play out in the context of anti-terrorism policy in post-9/11 America? How, if at all, does US professional football articulate with that policy? These are two key questions I intend to address during the course of this article.

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This study focuses on emerging discourses of stadium and event security at the US National Football League’s (NFL) annual Super Bowl game. Unlike the championship series in other US sports leagues in which games are located in the cities of the teams that qualify, the NFL’s Super Bowl game is ‘awarded’ to cities after a competitive bidding process. The Super Bowl provides an interesting case study because football stadia are now developed based not only on franchise owners’ demands regarding profit and control, but also on the NFL’s requirements for hosting a Super Bowl. These requirements reach beyond the confines of the stadium itself and into the urban spaces and communities in which stadia are located. In this new geo-political context, ‘Super-Bowl-ready’ means shifting from ‘violence-complacent’ to ‘terrorist-ready’—indeed, since 9/11, the US government has classified the Super Bowl as a ‘national special security event’. Both the host city and the event are, in military parlance, ‘target-rich environments’, offering tantalising opportunities for ‘terrorists’ to strike at the very heart of the ‘American way of life’. This new discourse of security complicates the longstanding and well-documented rhetoric connecting stadium development with urban growth. Rather than replace the pro-growth discourse, post-9/11 frames were effectively incorporated by journalists into the pro-growth discourse—both vulnerability and safety are now presented as contributing to the ‘fact’ that hosting a Super Bowl is good for the city-as-a-whole.

On the 50th anniversary of the ISSA and IRSS, Kimberly Schimmel, one of the leading scholars on sport, urban policy and the political economy of development reviews the trajectory of research into the relationship between cities and sport. Three principal themes are identified: city-building -politics and profits; city-life -culture and community; and city-space -semblance and spectacle. The current challenges are then outlined: for example, the emergence of new relationships between sport cultures and transforming urban developments; how urban spaces are increasingly viewed as terrain on which military tactics and weaponry are deemed necessary to protect capital investments, control crowds and prevent and respond to terrorist attacks; and the experiences of those who live and work in, and visit, urban areas. Future directions of the sociology of sport with regard to sport and the city are considered, with the reminder that sociologists of sport across the globe view with informed scepticism any notion that sports can act as a solution to general urban problems: the city is not a unitary entity that benefits uniformly from sport-related policy, as recent events in Brazil have amply illustrated.

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