Mixing Business with Leisure? The Football Club Doctor,Sports Medicine and the Voluntary Tradition

The football club doctor has traditionally been a role fulfilled by a local general practitioner on a casual basis over a long period. Since the 1990s, due to football's accelerated commercialization, a number of clubs have appointed full-time doctors with specialist sports medicine knowledge. This article explores the origins and development of this role in its wider social context since the late nineteenth century and argues that initially club doctors were part of a voluntary tradition. In addition, the development of the role has reflected the nature of sports medicine in Britain and more particularly football, as well as highlighting the changing demands and pressures of the job in light of growing commercial demands.     

Sporting Entertainments,Discarded Possibilities and the Case of Football as a Variety Sport, 1905–1906

During the winter of 1905/6, Olympia held a series of spectacular indoor, electrically lit football matches. Organised by the showman Edwin Cleary, the purpose of these matches was to provide entertaining shows to large audiences. Using Pierre Bourdieu's theory of fields, this article argues that such an organisation was a continuation of a longer interaction between sport and the stage that was restricted during the coalescence of the sporting and exercise field in the late nineteenth century. The ultimate failure of the venture, moreover, is attributed to the power of the Football Association in the sub-field of football. The article uses the football games as a case study to demonstrate the usefulness of this theory to the study of sport more broadly.     

Mary Garber's Coverage of Black Sports in the US Segregated South, 1944–1964

This paper addresses the gap in literature that ignores sport as practiced, managed or communicated by women by focusing on sportswriter Mary Garber, and the meanings engendered through her coverage of black high school and collegiate athletics in the Twin City Sentinel of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, during the mid-1940s through early 1960s. She received numerous prestigious awards during a career that spanned seven decades, but limited historical treatises examine this influential figure. Few scholars have attempted to understand the history of women in this male-dominated field or the sociocultural forces and obstacles that contextualise and hinder their contributions. It is a sad irony that Garber was atypical for her time, and remains so in the contemporary climate. Therefore, one major objective of this paper is to create a discourse through Garber's body of work that will help to eradicate the gender inequalities of women in sport media. In contrast with representations of women and racial minorities in mainstream sport media, this paper demonstrates that Garber addressed pertinent social concerns and supplemented dominant ideological content with more inclusive depictions of the population she covered by resisting white, masculine, heteronormative assumptions about which sports and athletes merit attention.1 ^1. I use ‘black’, ‘African-American’ and ‘white’ throughout the paper not to reinforce false notions of race as an innate biological trait, but to refer to the ways ‘race’ has been socially constructed with real, material effects.     

German Sports Shoes,Basketball, and Hip Hop: The Consumption and Cultural Significance of the adidas ‘Superstar’, 1966–1988

During the 1960s, adidas was the world's leading sports footwear manufacturer. Based in Bavaria and with a history stretching to the 1920s, the company dominated elite sports through aggressive promotion and innovative shoes that catered to athletes' needs. The ‘Superstar’ is one of the company's most successful models, still in production over 40 years since its launch in the late 1960s. Designed to wrest control of the basketball market from American rubber companies, in the two decades that followed it developed cultural meanings far beyond those envisaged by adidas, becoming associated with hip hop, a youth music and subculture born in 1970s New York. Arguing that design is shaped by use and consumption is allied to practice, this article examines the processes by which the ‘Superstar’ came into being, placing it into a wider context of changes within basketball, corporate ambition, and international trade. Tracing the actions and influence of young consumers in New York, it also considers how new ways of thinking about the shoe arose, spread, and were eventually commodified by adidas. It argues that a product's meaning can never be fixed, that producers and consumers are engaged in a constant dialogue over how things are used and perceived.     

‘Pink Tea and Sissy Boys’: Digitized Fragments of Male Homosexuality,Non-Heteronormativity and Homophobia in the Australian Sporting Press, 1845–1954

Researching the gay sporting past is difficult because of the dearth of written evidence. This article employs digital history techniques, specifically the distant and close reading of newspapers, in an attempt to locate references to male homosexuality in the Australian sporting press. The focus is not on finding references to homosexual athletes, but rather on locating attitudes, innuendo and inferences concerning homosexuality, non-heteronormative masculinity and homophobia. The sophisticated search engine provided by Trove – the digitization programme of the National Library of Australia – allows for specific word searches across 170 million articles from 800 newspapers from 1803 to 1954, including a handful of sport-themed publications. This project uses a distant-reading approach to find instances of contemporaneous homosexual-related terms – colloquialism, euphemism, legal parlance and slurs – in four popular sport newspapers and to focus on two words: effeminate and sissy. Given the commonality and multiple meanings of these words, a close reading is necessary to filter these findings in order to facilitate a reading of the ‘snippets and shadows’ of homosexuality that remain.     

‘How Steep is Steep?’ The Struggle for Mountaineering in the Canadian Rockies, 1948–65

This essay explores the complex struggles over the reinvention of mountaineering practices and ethics during the postwar period in the Rocky Mountains of Canada between competing interest groups of disparate climbers. Specifically, we focus on the increased challenges to the hegemony of the Alpine Club of Canada (ACC) by a wave of young, working-class emigrants, who contentiously broadened the limits and operative goals/meanings of the sport in the range. In doing so, this paper examines the controversy that erupted within the climbing community over first ascent of Brussels Peak in 1948, followed by a discussion of the arrival of renowned climber Hans Gmoser (1932–2006), whose early activities in the Rockies' eastern front irrevocably challenged local tradition and the hegemony of the ACC.     

Playing with Our Friends and Making Money: Real Madrid FC’s Economic Model and the Impact of International Friendly Matches, 1955–1963

This paper analyzes how Real Madrid Football Club took advantage of the enormous international prestige that they gained thanks to their victories in the first five editions of the European Champion Clubs’ Cup (between 1956 and 1960) to arrange a large number of international friendly matches that generated great income. Real Madrid created a new strategy by means of friendly matches and international tours that favoured an economic model centred on signing the best players of the day, as a way to attract fans to their stadium and to achieve new victories. Having access to the documentation of the Real Madrid archive has allowed the author to rely on primary sources which support these arguments, sources that hitherto had not been used. In the same way, this research demonstrates the important economic benefits that this activity brought to the Franco dictatorship.     

Who Counts as a Migrant Footballer? A Critical Reflection and Alternative Approach to Migrant Football Players on National Teams at the World Cup, 1930–2018

Abstract

Although there is a common belief that more footballers are representing countries other than their native ones in recent World Cup editions, a historical overview on migrant footballers representing national teams is lacking. To fill this gap, a database consisting of 10,137 football players who participated in the World Cup (1930–2018) was created. To count the number of migrant footballers in national teams over time, we critically reflect on the term migrant and the commonly used foreign-born proxies in mainstream migration research. A foreign-born approach to migrants overlooks historical-geopolitical changes like the redrawing of international boundaries and colonial relationships, and tends to shy away from citizenship complexities, leading to an overestimation of the number of migrant footballers in a database. Therefore, we offer an alternative approach that through historical contextualization with an emphasis on citizenship, results in more accurate data on migrant footballers – contextual-nationality approach. By comparing outcomes, a foreign-born approach seems to indicate an increase in the volume of migrant footballers since the mid-1990s, while the contextual-nationality approach illustrates that the presence of migrant footballers is primarily a reflection of trends in international migration.     

How Much Sport is there in Sport Physiology? Practice and Ideas in the Stockholm School of Physiology at GCI, 1941–1969

The physiology research at the Royal Central Institute of Gymnastics (Swedish acronym: GCI) in Stockholm was never primarily focused on sports, but has made significant contributions to sport and exercise physiology. Changing ideas about the human body (from form to motor) during the early twentieth century led to criticism towards the posture-oriented Ling gymnastics. The rationalisation movement of the 1930s and onwards also paved the way for a rationalistic physiology research. GCI recruited Eric Hohwü Christensen (1904–1996) from Copenhagen for the new position as professor in physiology in 1941. Christensen built his research programme on the ideas of the Copenhagen School, focusing on basic research, bodily limits and rationalisation of exercise. The majority of research at GCI focused on basic physiology, and the main goal was to rationalise the exercise of the entire population, which was in line with the ambitions of the emerging Swedish welfare state. But applications in elite sports became a claim to fame for GCI through names such as Per-Olof Åstrand and Bengt Saltin. This article aims at showing how the research programme was outlined during Christensen's professorship, 1941–1969. How does a scientific environment focused on basic, physiological research become famous for its impact in sports?