This examination of changes taking place in the world of football focuses on its growing commercialization. It covers such topics as fans becoming shareholders, with a say in the running of the clubs, and the setting-up of a government-sponsored scheme to support shareholder trusts.

This study provides an account of the role of race, nation and identity within contemporary football cultures. Focused on four clubs, this work shows how different clubs understand and experience race in different ways.

World football has undergone unprecedented change over the past decade. On the field, the richest European clubs have retained their pre-eminence, but with multinational playing squads backed up by global marketing industries. Club ownership rests increasingly with impersonal shareholders, rather than local business figures. Domestic and international football competitions are being transformed by the financial power of the mass media. The world's top players are paid far more than their peers from previous eras. This volume covers a wide range of topical issues which football players, fans and administrators will have to confront in the years to come.

In 1995 rugby union became the last significant international sport to sanction professionalism. To some this represented an undesirable challenge to the traditions of the game. To others the change was inevitable and overdue – an acknowledgment of both the realty of modern sport and the extent to which money had already permeated the game. While there are some commonalities in the response to professional rugby, the contributions to this book, representing almost all of the significant rugby playing countries, reveal much more that was shaped by particular local contexts both within rugby and in terms of its place within the economic, political, class and social structures of the surrounding society. The authors assess the contrasting ways in which rugby administrators at local, regional and national level grappled with the changes that were required and the demands of the corporate backers who funded the transition to professionalism. But the more contentious relationships considered are those involving the many amateur rugby players and committed fans who found that significant community and historical reference points were subtly altered or simply obliterated in the face of new commercial imperatives – and especially new competitions that separated elite players from the grassroots of the game. Some have adapted to the replacement ‘product’ with relish, others have not. Some have genuine and well articulated grievances against the processes of changes. Others have fallen victim to a nostalgia which appropriates very selective memories of the amateur past to highlight apparent problems with the professional present. Above all, these contributions provide a range of perspectives that enable the reader to take stock at a particular point in what is still a rapidly evolving game. Read in ten or twenty years, this book may confirm that many of the right paths have been taken – or it may provide pointers to crisis as yet unimagined.

For cricket enthusiasts there is nothing to match the meaningful contests and excitement generated by the game’s subtle shifts in play. Conversely, huge swathes of the world’s population find cricket the most obscure and bafflingly impenetrable of sports. The Changing Face of Cricket attempts to account for this paradox. The Changing Face of Cricket provides an overview of the various ways in which social scientists have analyzed the game’s cultural impact. The book’s international analysis encompasses Australia, the Caribbean, England, India, Ireland, South Africa, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe. Its interdisciplinary approach allies anthropology, history, literary criticism, political studies and sociology with contributions from cricket administrators and journalists. The collection addresses historical and contemporary issues such as gender equality, global sports development, the impact of cricket mega-events, and the growing influence of commercial and television interests culminating in the Twenty20 revolution. Whether one loves or hates the game, understands what turns square legs into fine legs, or how mid-offs become silly, The Changing Face of Cricket will enlighten the reader on the game’s cultural contours and social impact and prove to be the essential reader in cricket studies. This book was published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

Anti-Racism in European Football: Fair Play for All challenges the issue of racism in European football, identifies the causes of the problem, and seeks its remedy.

Global fashion markets, particularly those aimed at prosperous millennial consumers in China, are in thrall to Burberry, and connect the company's output in the 21st century to a quintessential notion of British tradition. The Changing Face of Burberry examines how the company successfully built this sense of tradition and how it has retained and capitalized on it within contemporary consumer culture. Charting the company's modest beginnings in semi-rural Hampshire in 1856 when it primarily produced waxed smocks for agricultural workers, the book follows the ebbs and flows of its fortunes over its 150-year history, from creating garments for the early motorist, the gentleman officer, and the aristocratic adventurer, to its current status as global fashion brand. It also explores Burberry's more problematic associations, when the brand was sold in tourist souvenir stores and linked to 'chav' culture. Combining interviews and archive material, including close analysis of advertising campaigns from the late 19th to the 21st century, The Changing Face of Burberry provides an authoritative account of shifting forms of British identity, consumer culture and fashion production, and highlights the shift over two centuries from an era when garments were made by a single hand, through to a digitized and global marketplace.