ABSTRACT
Woodward (2002) refers to as the crisis of identity. The march towards global sport has meant that the processes associated with globalisation have placed questions of identity centre stage in terms of explaining the importance of sport to those countries, for example, that have emerged out of the break up of the former USSR or other former European countries such as the former Yugoslavia. Many nationalist movements during the later part of the twentieth century have fought to develop and sustain forms of identity and sport has become one of the very visible forums for the expression of such imagined communities whether they be nationalist in orientation or not.
