Anthony May

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Senior Lecturer at Birmingham City University

This article critically considers the extent to which sporting issues were harnessed by pro-independence political campaigners during the Scottish independence referendum campaign. Developments such as the inclusion of sport within the Scottish Government’s White Paper on Scottish independence, the establishment of the ‘Working Group on Scottish Sp...

This article examines the relationship between football and literature in the novels of Irvine Welsh, taking a cultural materialist approach in treating all cultural production as equally significant in the construction of societies. Irvine Welsh’s novels are chosen to demonstrate the value of this approach as they discuss football extensively. Wit...

The 2010-11 football season in Scotland was affected by many incidents of violence and threatening behaviour. Fans of the two Glasgow clubs, Celtic and Rangers, were involved in the majority of these incidents. Players and officials of Celtic were targeted by Loyalist terrorists and sent bullets through the post. The Scottish government felt that m...

The use of third-generation artificial grass pitches (AGPs) is growing in English semi-professional football. As usage grows, research into the impact of AGPs is needed, in order to examine the potential impact of such surfaces for a football club and local community. This article analyses the experiences of National League South club Maidstone Uni...

In December 2019 the world was first informed of a new virus, called SARS-CoV-2 (hereafter Covid-19) spreading fast originally in China and quickly in the rest of the world, resulting in the hospitalisation and death of millions of people worldwide (World Health Organisation, 2020). The quick and almost unstoppable spread of the virus called for Go...

This book vast array of philosophical, political, cultural, and ethical perspectives on how best to organise the visitor economy. The book presents a series of international cases, from Cambodia to China, Egypt to the British cathedral city of Lincoln. Therefore, it, if not explicitly, implicitly intimates a view on 'how things are done' differentl...

This special issue was inspired by the challenges faced by sport managers in our global community in the face of the economic downturn. During the calls for the special issue, society faced one of its most unprecedented challenges, COVID-19. This provide significant shock waves to the daily rituals in sport and society. The manuscripts in this spec...

The paper begins by outlining the key elements of the primordial approach to nations and nationalism central to which is the belief that national attachments and relations can be attributed to criteria that are perceived to be objective – language, ethnicity, geography – and which are likely to predate the emergence of the modern nation state and o...

Purpose/Rationale Due to the increasing commercialisation of football, the rise of “Against Modern Football” (AMF) movements has been investigated in several European countries. Using Legia Warsaw football club as an example, this study examines the consequences of football modernisation and commercialisation in Poland. Design/Methodology/Approach...

Aims: There is an increased focus on the internationalisation of the learning experiences of university students¹. One way this can be achieved is through ‘virtual internationalisation’², which can be promoted through the use of Online International Learning (OIL) programmes. This article on sport pedagogy investigates the attitudes of sport studen...

Research Question: This qualitative research explores the impact of austerity on community sport facilities across England (United Kingdom), drawing upon resource dependence theory (RDT) embedded within network theory. Research Methods: In-depth semi-structured interview data were collected from 24 stakeholders related to community sport facilities...

In Imagined Communities Anderson ([2006]. (Revised ed.). London: Verso) discusses the novel as a cultural form which contains ‘a sociological landscape of a fixity that fuses the world inside the novel with the world outside’. This article utilises Anderson’s ideas to examine the work of the Northern Irish novelist Eoin McNamee. The author’s imagin...

This article utilises English professional football club Birmingham City FC as a case study to examine the place of football within the globalised economy. In October 2009, the Hong Kong based businessman Carson Yeung led a takeover of Birmingham City (BCFC). The Birmingham International Holdings (BIH) group that he led aimed to develop the club’s...

This article critically reflects upon the process of planning and executing a microteaching session undertaken as a unit of assessment on ‘Introduction to Learning, Teaching, and Assessment’ (ILTA), the first module studied for the Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice (PgCap). Personal reflection and feedback from participants and the asse...