Sport, Media and Regional Identity

The increasing potency of identity politics across Europe often sees sport acting as a vehicle for the promotion and celebration of regional and sub-national identities. However, while the relationship between sport, the media and national identity has featured in numerous academic and political debates in recent years, the links between sports media and regional identity have generally received little attention. This seems a curious oversight, because the links between sport and region frequently become a celebration of the local and the distinctive, emblematic of community and continuity. This volume will explore that sense of the counter-hegemonic, where sport is celebrated by a media often keen to promote notions of difference, which might verge on rebellion in some contexts, conceived as resisting global homogeneity or national hegemony. At other times, they may merely reflect a commercial nose for the local audience's tastes, but there is always the sense of preserving something important, a celebration of the diversity that makes us human. This book considers the centrality and cultural significance of particular sports, or clubs, to regional and sub-national identities across Europe and beyond, adopting a comparative approach to the mediatized nature of such portrayals.

The Deputy Head of Media and Senior Lecturer at the University of Chester, Simon Gwyn Roberts worked as a financial and business journalist, editing several London-based publications, before re-entering academia in 2003 to launch the Journalism programme at the University of Chester. His current research interests include the democratizing potential of online journalism, the role of online media in the communication strategies of minority language groups, critical regionalism and the mediation of place, and the relationship between the news media and political devolution.