Ever since his introduction to the first--team at Manchester United FC, Cristiano Ronaldo Dos Santos Aveiro has been recognised as one of the footballing world's most stand--out football players. In turn, Ronaldo has drawn the attention of scholars working across a number of disciplines. While sports economists and sociologists of sport, amongst others, have contributed to a growing literature about Ronaldo and the social implications of his on and off--field behaviour, few critical analyses have considered the racialised aspects of Ronaldo's representations, or how audiences make sense of his racialised or ethnic identity. Using images of Ronaldo, which we presented to and discussed with self--identified physically active white British men, we explore what it is representations and audience interpretations of Ronaldo reveal about the complexities of white male identity formation. We do this to understand better how white male identities can be read and interpreted through and in the context of football. Facilitated by our conception of contingent whiteness, we argue that white British men's interpretations of Ronaldo's whiteness are inextricably linked to discourses of 'race', masculinities and football.

While scholars working in the sociology of the gender, body, health, sport and media have begun to address the paucity of research into media representations of men and masculinities, the literature to date has failed consistently to address the racialised aspects of media dwelling male athletic bodies. The same critique can be applied to recent explorations of popular men’s magazine, Men’s Health. Current research has thus systematically underplayed the significance of “race” as a defining feature of idealised, mediated masculinities. During this paper then, I use Critical Race Theory to guide a semiotic analysis of a year’s worth of Men’s Health magazine. Firstly, I argue that white male athletic bodies are represented as idealised masculine types, possessing both the virtues of body and mind, while their black male counterparts, to varying degrees, are depicted as spectacular, violent and hyper-masculine. Secondly, I go on to argue further that this idealisation of the white male athletic body is a reaction to broader social and cultural transformations, indicative of late-modern societies. That is, I suggest Men’s Health’s mantra of self-regulation is better understood as a call to white men to exercise greater embodied control in order to reaffirm jurisdiction and supremacy, during an epoch of uncertainty. Thirdly, following this line of argument, the paper contends that future readings of Men’s Health, and men’s magazines more broadly, must seek to understand better how racialised discourses inform dominant media representations of masculinities.

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Over the last 20 years or so there has been a proliferation of anti-racist organisations, campaigns and interventions across football at all levels, allied to broader social, cultural and political shifts in late modern digital societies. Indeed, relying on certain statistical data, which reports a decline in racist incidents in stadia, might lead many anti-racist policy-makers to champion liberal doctrines and to proclaim football fan cultures as quantitatively 'less racist'. However, in this article, using Critical Race Theory as a guiding theoretical framework, throughout, we foreground the qualitative experiences and stories of BAME football fans to understand why football fandom and spectatorship remain predominantly 'White' activities. Using semi-structured interviews and observational techniques, we explore critically the continued significance of 'race' as a mediating factor in football fandom, how BAME football fans negotiate-resist belonging in football fandom cultures and the implications of BAME fans' testimonies for policymakers. We conclude by arguing for an increase in intersectional research across football/football fan studies, to understand better the racialised aspects of football fandom, and we also urge scholars and policymakers, alike, to place greater emphasis on 'trust building' innovations, as opposed to 'diversity', given the latter has taken on a commercial value of late.

Leisure is a major sphere of both private and public life. It is thus of concern that the identity and profile of Leisure Studies in the Higher Education curricula of the United Kingdom have declined in prominence over the past decade. This trend is not peculiar to Leisure Studies; the social sciences as a whole are threatened by a neoliberal economic discourse which increasingly informs Higher Education strategic management. The aim of this article is to investigate the impacts of the declining status of Leisure Studies as experienced by lecturers and researchers in the subject field. It is based upon a project commissioned by the Higher Education Academy in 2015. It was found that Leisure Studies faces two principal challenges. The first is to re-establish its status as a subject field within the social sciences, the second is to ensure it retains a relevance to leisure practice, particularly in terms of the management of its provision. The article proposes greater academic engagement in ideational 'border crossings' to advance thinking on leisure in the social sciences and to explore opportunities for collaboration within them. We conclude that Leisure Studies arguably suffers from a crisis of representation, as opposed to a crisis of relevance.

The purpose of this paper is to elucidate how racism manifests 'behind closed doors' in the backstage private domain. We do this with reference to recent high-profile controversies in the US and UK. In particular, we use the concepts of frontstage (public) and backstage (private) racism to unpack the extraordinary case in point of the ex-National Basketball Association (NBA) franchise owner Donald Sterling. The paper concludes that though it is important for frontstage racism to be disrupted, activist scholars must be mindful of the lesser-known, and lesser-researched, clandestine backstage racism that, we argue, galvanises more public manifestations. The Donald Sterling case is an example of how backstage racism functions and, potentially, how it can be resisted.

As the digital revolution continues apace, emergent technologies and means of communication have presented new challenges and opportunities for the field of football studies. In turn, researchers active across the social sciences and beyond have responded and are beginning to carve out a new field of study -digital football studies. In the absence of any concentrated review of this field, the purpose of this paper is threefold: (1) to critically revisit previous 'waves' of football studies scholarship; (2) to identify themes in current digital football studies scholarship and identify areas for future study; and (3) to begin to map out some theoretical and conceptual traditions that might better equip scholarly enterprises for the study of football, and by association leisure and sport, in the (hyper)digital moment. We also postulate the establishment of digital football studies as a collective enterprise will be especially important for a post-Covid-19 globe given the rapid acceleration towards digital during the pandemic. To this end, we argue that leisure and football studies must develop empirically, methodologically, and theoretically to better capture the nature of (hyper)digitalised societies and the ways audiences are playing with, and shifting, the boundaries and possibilities for football and leisure.

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