This special issue of the Journal of Consumer Culture investigates the complex intersections of global sport and consumer culture. Our aims in putting together this issue have been interrelated and twofold. First, most importantly, we have sought to open up new knowledge and critical understanding of the underexplored nexus of consumer culture and global sport.In doing so, second, we have endeavoured to facilitate a critical and comparative grasp of this relationship, by providing studies of different sport and consumer cultures in diverse national and transnational contexts, and by drawing on a wide range of social scientific disciplines and standpoints.Thus, the special issue features seven papers on global sport and consumer culture that have disciplinary moorings in sociology, anthropology, history, management and marketing studies, and cultural studies, and which harness research from Europe, East and South Asia, North America, and Australasia. Our contributors utilize studies and illustrations from many sporting domains, notably baseball, cricket, football, Olympic sports, and e-sports.A quick glance at contemporary global sport attests to its multifarious ties to consumer culture. Sport fans follow clubs and athletes across local, national, and, increasingly transnational levels, and display these allegiances in part through branded sport merchandise.Global consumer culture is increasingly populated by baseball caps, training shoes, t-shirts with team logos, and other sport-related consumer products. A burgeoning transnational fitness industry promises to sculpt the idealized consumer body, on which these products are to be worn, and on which self-tracking exercise devices are to be appended (Lupton 2016;Sassatelli 2004). Advertising and endorsements for consumer products feature prominent inputs from global sport stars, clubs and governing bodies (Horne, 2006;Smart, 2005). Sport fans now access vast volumes of top-level sports, which are wrapped in corporate advertising, and screened worldwide on commercial television and digital platforms (Hutchins and Rowe, 2012). Powerful corporate interests drive the founding and global spread of glamorous sport events and tournaments -from the Olympic Games and football's World Cup finals, through to numerous 'national' leagues -that are marketed to fast-consuming urban middle-classes (Giulianotti, 2015). Yet, these commercial processes are not uncontested, but instead 2 germinate unease, criticism and protest over the influence of capital on how sport is experienced, played and organized (Lupton, 2016;Walsh and Giulianotti, 2007).These and many other intersections of consumer culture and global sport provide the focus for this special issue. Our introduction has three main parts. First, we set out the extensive historical ties that exist between global sport and consumer culture through a three-phase model of the relationship. Second, we detail the large-scale social processes that underpin global consumer sport, and the major substantive social themes that emerge ...