ABSTRACT
Since the early 1990s the rhetoric of equality, equity, diversity and antidiscrimination has become common place in sport policy in the UK and beyond. Sport England’s policy developments around the concept of sport equity in the early 1990s (Houlihan and White 2002), alongside the emergence of lobby groups like ‘Kick It Out’ (English football’s anti-discrimination campaign) and Women in Sport (formerly the Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation) paved the way for a gradual hegemonic incorporation of the anti-discrimination and equality message in British sport. While I have argued elsewhere about the authenticity of the commitment to such campaigns (Lusted 2014), it would nonetheless be hard to find a sport organization openly refusing to endorse them. Significant progress has been made in many areas of social equality in sport in recent years – particularly in the reduction of overt racist chanting in English professional football, and the widening of opportunities and funding for under-represented groups like females and people with disabilities to participate in community sport. Sport England’s recent campaign to increase female participation in sport and physical activity, ‘This Girl Can’, is said to have inspired 2.8 million women to do some exercise after being exposed to the campaign’s marketing output (Sport England 2016). Almost all of English sport’s national governing bodies have their own equality/anti-discrimination policies and initiatives (such as the Rugby Football League’s ‘Tackle It!’ scheme); even professional clubs now have their own initiatives to promote equality, like Chelsea Football Club’s ‘Building Bridges’ programme.
