ABSTRACT
Globalisation processes accelerated markedly during the twentieth century. It has become increasingly difficult to comprehend events at the local or national level without reference to these processes – this case study is no exception. Developments in the world of sport, such as increases in transnational player migration and ‘global’ sports events, all indicate a more interconnected world with nation-states situated in a closer and more intense network of interdependencies. Sport is an aspect of popular culture which has the power to both reinforce and challenge the concept of globalisation (Maguire, 1999; Miller et al., 2001). Sport provides an important arena for the construction, maintenance and challenging of identities and has the capacity to bind together individuals, local communities, nations and the world – but also to fragment them (Billig, 1995; Blain, Boyle, and O’Donnell, 1993; Bloom, 1990). Modern sport provides a complex cultural location for the coming together of the individual, the nation and the global, and, through this commingling the nation can appear more than what Anderson (1983) terms an ‘imagined community’. In making this case we draw on a process-sociological approach to the study of national identity (Elias, 1996).
