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It is often remarked that all that is required for children to play football are ‘jumpers for goalposts’. Space is also required, however, and so is permission to play, and to see the game through. Some of the spaces associated with British youth football through history include private school playing fields, villages, back streets, leisure centres, artificial pitches, and concrete sports courts or ‘cages’. This article explores some of these green and grey spaces, and shifts between them, in informal youth football in the UK. We also pay attention to the symbolic greyness – the ambiguous and often contradictory attitudes – surrounding informal youth football at various times, and interactions between forms of football and ideas around ‘restricted’ and ‘polluted’ leisure. We trace the origins of the modern game back to the 1800s, before discussing significant developments over the past fifty years. We then examine the factors which have influenced where football can be played and the history of its association with some of the green and grey spaces mentioned above. The paper concludes by highlighting the increasing importance of grey leisure spaces to young people, and the greyness and nuances associated with such spaces within contemporary Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International football can be considered the main site for meaning-making processes related to national and racial/ethnic diversity. Various scholars have argued how international football, with the World Cup as its apex, can be seen as a barometer for understanding dominant attitudes towards societal diversity. A key domain where this diversity is interpreted and given meaning to is mediated football. To provide a wider overview of – often intersecting – meanings given to nationality and race/ethnicity over a longer period of time, this explorative study uses a historical approach to inquire how Dutch-mediated football – especially football commentary on television – has given meaning to a diversifying Dutch national team at three moments in time (the World Cups of 1974, 1998 and 2014). Further, it discusses how mediated football serves as a site for the (re)construction of discourses surrounding nationality and race/ethnicity in the Netherlands. Our findings show that meanings given to nationality and race/ethnicity are fluid, context-dependent and reconstructed in a particular temporal context. Further, it appears that key players have provided a significant role in meanings given to (super-)diversity of the Dutch national football team. Commentary on White Dutch key players was dominated by positive comments (in the World Cups of 1974 and 2014), while comments on Black Surinamese Dutch key players was relatively more negative (in the 1998 World Cup). Moreover, our results contrast with earlier studies in that Dutch commentators did not rely on stereotypical representations of Black Dutch footballers as 'naturally' athletic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The inclusion of foreign-born sportspeople in national sports teams has become increasingly common. At the same time, the assumed increase in diversity within national football teams has turned into a major subject of (inter)national controversy and debate. This applies, in particular, to the football World Cup, as the assumed increase in foreign-born players in national football teams detracts from the (homogeneous) nation-state basis of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association's (FIFA) international football competitions. However, the actual dynamics and complexities of the presence of foreign-born players in national football teams within this context have remained under-researched. In this paper, we use the idea of 'migration corridors' to examine the underlying structures that contribute to the diversification of national football teams, in particular during the World Cup. We do so from both an immigration and emigration perspective. By connecting our foreign-born player data to three types of migration corridors, we discuss the bidirectionality of player movements and nationality choices. Our outcomes indicate that the selection of foreign-born footballers within national football teams in the World Cup can mainly be considered as an echo and/or reversal of preceding migration flows between pairs of countries, indicating that historically embedded migration corridors sustain or are rediscovered in this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the case study of a New Zealand rugby club, in this article, we highlight the role of gender and performance in place attachment. We discuss various performances that contribute to achieving a sense of attachment of club members to the (imagined) community of the rugby club and the different physical spaces of its home ground. Even though performances are played out and read against the backdrop of a popular discourse of New Zealand rugby masculinity, we did not observe characteristics of stereotypical ‘rugby masculinity’ in all rugby places, nor were performances the same throughout one day. Instead, variations were found depending on whether performance was ‘front stage’ or ‘backstage’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]