15th Sport&EU Conference - Book of Proceedings

Welcome to the book of abstracts of the 15th Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Sport and the European Union (Sport&EU). The annual conference is the association’s flagship event, and we are extremely grateful for the University of Rijeka, Faculty of Law and Prof. Vanja Smokvina’s tireless work to make the 2021 edition happen after we had to cancel the conference in 2020 due to the COVID pandemic. Sport&EU is an inclusive association. We seek to advance the study of the importance of sport in Europe from a multidisciplinary perspective, which spans from the political sciences, to economics, law or sociology. Our ethos is to encourage equality and equal opportunities amongst academics, and we are extremely satisfied that in this edition of the conference you will see record number of papers and keynote addresses scholars and practitioners who identify themselves as female. It is also a pleasure to see many good contributions from PhD students or early career academics. Sport&EU was born in 2005 from the idea of three PhD students who met at a European Studies conference in Oxford. Since then, the study of sport in Europe has developed both in quantity and quality. Research on sport and Europe is now a legitimate area of research on its own. The contributions presented in our 2021 conference confirms how our members’ work draw on and contribute to mainstream disciplines such as law, political sciences, sociology or European studies. But Sport&EU conferences are not just academic events. We are renown in the academic community for our informal and welcoming conferences. This year was no exception, even if the networking and socialising had to be online. We were even able to take a virtual boat trip along the Croatian coast! It really is too long since we could all meet in person in Malta in 2019, where we had a fantastic time and an excellent conference. The good news is that we already have a place and a date for our 2022 conference. We look forward to welcoming you and meeting you in person once again on 17- 18 June 2022 at the University of Lausanne. We are grateful to our honorary member Professor Jean-Loup Chappelet and the team at UNIL for making this happen. I hope you find this book of abstracts of interest. If you want to know more about specific papers or research projects, please do not hesitate to contact the authors directly. In the meantime, I want to wish you all a great academic year. Please keep safe and I look forward to meeting you again in Switzerland. Borja Garica Garci