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This chapter critically evaluates whether football can attain recognition as a national sport in China. Article No. 11, released by the Chinese government in 2015, aimed to develop a new national strategy centralised on the sport of football to foster consumption and enhance national soft power. Consequently, this also means encouraging Chinese football fans to support the national football team. Comparing the significance of local football clubs and the national football team to Chinese football fans is deemed meaningless and unable to generate useful information to comprehend Chinese people's attitudes towards local and national communities. Through literature comparisons with established Chinese national sports such as Chinese martial arts, badminton and table tennis, the discussion reveals that football currently falls short of meeting the general criteria of invention and popularity to be considered a Chinese national sport. In the specific Chinese context, it also proves that football fails to meet the criterion of politics, hindering its identification as a national sport. Consequently, the chapter rebuts the assumption and advocates for the validity of comparing how fans assess their fandom for local and national football teams.

In modern China, sports and nationalism always have close connection, and nationalism is the important reason for the promotion of Chinese sports. However, the relationship between Chinese sports and nationalism in globalised China could be much more examined by academics, as well as its influencing factors. This chapter selects the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games as the context and representative three Chinese sports heroes in the period of globalisation to study. The findings show that in some extent, Beijing 2008 Olympic Games and three Chinese sports heroes represent the national image of China in the globalised world, also bearing the burden of washing away historical humiliation and pursuing national glory. Furthermore, it is manifested that China have a complex nationalism in the process of hosting the 2008 Olympic Games. Under the influence of mass media, market economy and sports professionalisation, nationalism still exists in Chinese sports, but people gradually start to reflect on the ‘Juguo Tizhi’, the traditional Chinese sports system and the concept of ‘winning glory for the nation’. The relationship between Chinese nationalism and sports shows the important implications of rapid Chinese sports development.

This chapter offers insight into Italian sociology of sport. It first describes the fragmented history from the 1990s to the present of a discipline that has never developed as a truly mature field in the academic environment, and then outlines some main areas of research strengths and outcomes. Four strands can be highlighted: fandom and organized soccer supporters (Ultras); changes in sport through the forces of television, new media, sponsorship, and globalization; hybridization of sport, mass media, and politics with Berlusconi’s entrance into the Italian political scene and the advent of the era of “football politics”; and lastly, the body, bodywork, formal/informal sport activities, and gym culture with a microsociological perspective. However, despite their sociological relevance, these topics have had no regular, substantial development. They constitute separate fields of knowledge appearing in the sociological landscape in conjunction with social alarms, mainly related to soccer violence, or the emergence of new mass sport events or trends. It is difficult to predict what the future will hold. There is currently emerging attention to new urban sports and some sporadic in-depth ethnographic investigations of sport in micro arenas, such as soccer pitches, fitness gyms, and dance schools. Otherwise, Italian sociology of sport is folded into physical education science and is only considered as a field of inquiry for physical health and wellbeing.

This chapter covers many angles of the role national identity plays in the production, consumption, and reception of sport via social media channels. More specifically, it explores what sociology specifically brings to the equation regarding theories of group identity, identifies the core studies that represent what we currently know about national identification in the social mediated sports world, and determines fruitful themes and paths for subsequent investigation.

The approach to the chapter largely involves the synthesis of a diverse set of literatures in the academic spaces of nationalism, fan behavior, and social media.

The chapter advances the argument that only a handful of investigations in social media content focus on how national identity is forged within sport. Global events (Olympics, World Cup) seem to be the current areas of investigation, with social media facilitating various forms of BIRGing and CORFing depending largely on real-time results.

Relevant and understudied areas for future investigation on the nexus of sport, social media, and national identity include gendered correlates, GORFing (Glory Out of Reflected Failure), redefinitions of sport fandom, eSports, and the application of new technologies, applications and platforms in the social media space.

The chapter establishes a foundation of knowledge triangulating sport, social media, and national identity while creating warrants for key scholarly agenda advancement in the future.

Sociology of sport in the United Kingdom is as old as the subdiscipline itself but was uniquely shaped by the prominence of football hooliganism as a major social issue in the 1970s and 1980s. While it remains a somewhat niche activity, the field has been stimulated by the growing cultural centrality of sport in UK society. This quantitative and qualitative development has been recognized in recent governmental evaluations of research expertise. Current research reflects this expanded range of social stratification and social issues in sport both domestically and on a global level, while the legacy of hooligan research is evident in the continuing concentration on studies of association football. Historically, this empirical research has largely been underpinned by figurational, Marxist/neo-Marxist, or feminist sociological theories, but there is now a greater emphasis on theoretical synthesis and exploration. As a consequence of the expansion of the field, allied to its empirical and theoretical diversity, there is a burgeoning literature produced by UK sociologists of sport that spans entry-level textbooks, research monographs, and the editorship of a significant number of specialist journals. The chapter concludes by noting the future prospects of the sociology of sport in the United Kingdom in relation to teaching, research, and relations with other sport-related subdisciplines and the sociological mainstream.