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In the highly competitive professional sports industry, managers of a newly established competition face many challenges, including “converting” or gaining the allegiance of new groups of consumers (fans, spectators) to their colors. One critical aspect in the converting process relates to the “ideal” game-day experience as perceived by would-be consumers. Gaining knowledge about this area could be critical to professional sport marketers in enhancing the perceived quality of sport events. This study examines the ideal football experience among 1,412 fans of an Australian A-League football (soccer) club. The importance of a lively atmosphere, that of high turnouts of spectators and the opportunity to watch quality and attacking football are highlighted in most comments, even relegating the game’s final score (winning) to a more marginal level of importance. Some of the implications of the findings for professional football marketers and avenues for future research are presented and discussed.

As the internet has evolved through the emergence of social media, so too have the communicative practices of The Archers listeners. Many of them now use Twitter to comment, discuss the show or participate in the omnibus episode ‘tweetalong’. Primarily, this chapter recognises the hundred-plus Twitter accounts which have been created by listeners to authentically roleplay characters, organisations, animals and even objects from the show. I frame these practices and ground the chapter in academic discourses of ‘fan fiction’. Reflecting on my own activity as @borsetpolice, I look at the role and place of this fan fiction from the individual practitioner’s perspective but also the wider listener base. In this chapter, I develop an argument that these practices contribute towards the community of listeners online, as well as the show itself. I explore the types of activities and accounts involved, where they often focus around major storylines, and then reflect in detail on the individual’s motivations and practice. I situate this in terms of an opportunity to become involved in an online community that aspires towards everyday rural ideals, and how this can be understood as a significant affective experience for listeners. This need for escapism into ‘banal’ worlds, the desire to participate, and the sense that fan fiction is a game that we take part in are also drawn out as significant.

Australian cricket has traditionally been an exemplar of hyper-masculine sporting conservatism. However, cricket, as with a number of Australian sports, has recently introduced an elite women's league. Despite growth in participation and funding of women's cricket, it remains poorly understood at the elite level and particularly its fans. Drawing on the concept of gender-bland sexism (Musto et al., 2017), we investigate differences in fan engagement and perceptions of men's and women's cricket matches. Through a case study of Australian Women's Big Bash cricket team the ‘Sydney Sixers’, this chapter explores how women's cricket was experienced on match-day by fans, as well as perceptions of the value and quality of attending women's professional cricket. We first undertook participant observation at matches to understand how women's cricket was delivered, experienced and engaged with by fans. These observations informed a survey which was distributed to club members. Our findings suggest that there continue to be noticeable differences in the presentation of women's matches when compared to their male equivalents, providing evidence for the presence of gender-bland sexism in areas other than sports media.

Purpose: Due to COVID-19, tourism to Tokyo Olympic is totally banned and sports enthusiasts are not allowed to view any sport event.

Need of the study: The need of this chapter is to explore Twitter content and analyse its sentiments towards the mega sporting event #Tokyo2020 Olympic.

Methodology: This research has adopted the behaviour of players and sport fans to analyse their Twitter messages using netnographic approach. Sample of 7,475 tweets of #Tokyo2020 an official Twitter online Olympic campaign was collected, and these tweets were categorised with frequency analysis, sentiment analysis, and context analysis using NVivo.

Findings: Results highlighted that majority of tweets are positive towards Tokyo Olympic even in COVID-19 scenario. Findings of the study showed that Tokyo Olympic had favourable emotions, sporting sprit, positive state of energy, and players’ lifestyles.

Practical implications: This research explored the dynamics of engagement practices and can be extended to other fields of study and is useful to sports authorities to strategize their forthcoming sporting events.

Writers, their practices, and their tools are mediated by the contexts in which they work. In online spaces and classroom environments, today’s writers have increased access to collaborators, readers, and reviewers. Drawing on our experiences as English teacher educators and as researchers of digital literacies and online affinity spaces, this chapter offers examples from three English teacher education programs in the United States and Australia to demonstrate how we link our research in out-of-school spaces to literacy practices in school contexts for our pre-service teachers. To do so, we share an illustrative example from each program and consider how in-class activities and assessment tasks can encourage pre-service teachers to learn about: the importance of clear goals and real-world audiences for writers; the value of self-sponsored, interest-driven writing in the English curriculum; and the role of authentic conversations between readers and writers as part of the writing, revising, and publishing process. The chapter concludes with recommendations for class activities and assessments that could be used within English education programs.

The history of Hungarian sociology of sport can be divided to two periods, which are different in terms of conditions but show similarities in many other ways. In the period between the mid-1960s and 1989, the intensive development of the discipline was hindered by the repression of sociology and the lack of interest in sport on the part of social scientists. However, the unique social functions of (elite) sport still created a demand for scientific inquiry. In the second period, from 1989 to the present day, the conditions of research freedom were established; yet, sport as an area for research failed to attract the attention of social scientists. In this respect, today’s scholars of sociology of sport face similar problems as the founders of the discipline, although the changing economic conditions in terms of research funding and institutionalization provide a more favorable environment for the scientific investigation of sport-related social issues. As a result, the number of sport sociological publications has steadily increased in the past decade and Hungarian scholars have the opportunity to participate in international conferences and research projects. This chapter reviews sociology of sport in Hungary, with a focus on historical heritage, institutionalization, the current situation, and barriers to development.