Since the late 2010s, Rwanda has advertised its Visit Rwanda logo on the jerseys of prominent European football teams and has built new sports stadiums to host international sports competitions. Such strategies reflect the practice of sportswashing, which refers to the utilization of sports by political actors to gain global legitimacy while diverting attention from unjust processes occurring in their home countries. Dubinsky analyzes the effectiveness of Rwanda’s sportswashing through the concept of authoritarian image management, arguing that the mutual interests shared between authoritarian and Western actors facilitate the country’s sportswashing, despite the critiques it attracts.

Past research has documented ingroup favoritism, the tendency to cooperate more with ingroup members than outgroup members, in a wide range of intergroup contexts, and extensively discussed conditions under which ingroup favoritism emerges. However, previous studies have predominantly focused on a simplistic intergroup context, for instance, where group boundaries are static, and one group membership is present. To fill the gap, we leveraged data from professional volleyball players and investigated the influence of (1) varying levels of intergroup conflict salience, (2) past and present group memberships, and (3) national team membership on intergroup cooperation. Contrary to our hypotheses and the social identity perspective, we found that conflict salience and former ingroup membership did not influence intergroup cooperation. Additionally, we found that the more national team players there are in the ingroup, the more cooperative those who play for the national team are with ingroup members, leading to increased ingroup favoritism.

It made for a great photograph. Icons of the feminist movement, stars of women's sport, and amateur athletes joined in a show of solidarity, rallied around the torch that would inaugurate the 1977 National Women's Conference in Houston, Texas (Figure 1). It was the first federally funded meeting of its kind, and 20,000 people cheered the arrival of the flame and the illustrious if motley crew that bore it aloft. The moment was, according to the official proceedings, “one of the most dramatic features of the Conference.”

At the beginning of the 1970s, college sports were on turbulent ground. “Colleges prepare for the impact of rising costs and more campus unrest,” warned the New York Times. The Los Angeles Times was a bit blunter in its prognosis, reporting that “like housewives everywhere, athletic directors of the nation's colleges [were] having budget trouble.” National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) Executive Director, Walter Byers, warned of “cadres of disgruntled athletes,” demanding rights, money, and control. Byers was also troubled by Title IX, the new educational amendment mandating gender equity in federally funded schools, including in athletic departments. “The possible doom of our collegiate sports is near,” Byers proclaimed. “There is not an athletic department in the country where officials are optimistic,” University of Michigan's Athletic Director (AD), Don Canham, lamented. Norv Richey, University of Oregon's AD concurred, declaring, “The future of intercollegiate athletics are in peril.”

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, fans assembled at stadiums and arenas across the country to witness a recurring spectacular event. They headed toward the local ballpark or arena, not to watch their favorite teams and entertainers perform inside, but rather to witness the implosion of the facilities themselves. As the United States was in the midst of its latest stadium construction boom, a new community ritual took shape: the ceremonial demolition of stadiums that were built in the 1960s and 1970s. Facilities that were once celebrated for their modern designs and conveniences were deemed ugly and obsolete seemingly overnight. Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh, Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati, Market Square Arena in Indianapolis, among dozens of other professional stadiums, were demolished in this spectacular fashion (Figure 1). Explosives were strategically placed throughout the abandoned facilities, and fans gathered yards away to watch the buildings burst into gigantic clouds of dust and smoke, the environmental consequences of sending pollutants into the air notwithstanding. Television networks covered the detonations while fans donned team colors, cheered, and shed tears as their beloved community gathering places were blown into oblivion.

In 1975, New York Times sports columnist Robert Lipsyte published SportsWorld: An American Dreamland, a critical examination of how the values of American sports had become corrupted and distorted by power brokers who pulled the purse strings. “SportsWorld” was an infrastructure first built in the late nineteenth century by industrialists, educators, politicians, promoters, journalists, and military leaders who believed in the potency of sports and American exceptionalism. For the faithful, SportsWorld represented a positive cultural force that unified the nation, strengthened vigorous manhood, and advanced the country's democratic ideals of equal opportunity and fair play. “In sports,” Lipsyte reflected, Americans believed “children will learn courage and self-control, old people will find blissful nostalgia, and families will discover new ways to communicate among themselves. Immigrants will find shortcuts to recognition as Americans. Rich and poor, black and white, educated and unskilled, we will all find a unifying language. The melting pot may be a myth, but we will all come together in the ballpark.”

On a winter's night in 1968, in a yellow sedan barreling down a dark New Hampshire highway, Richard M. Nixon talked football with Hunter S. Thompson. Nixon would soon win the state's Republican primary—an important kickoff for his deliberate, disciplined campaign. Thompson was an unlikely choice for an intimate audience with the buttoned-down candidate. The outlaw writer in shabby jeans, a chronicler of hippies and Hell's Angels, cast Nixon as a “foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad.”1

In April 1970, the African American defensive end Houston Ridge's $1.25 million lawsuit put the issue of drug use in professional football in the public eye. It also raised questions about the league's exploitation of athletes for the sake of profits, at any cost. Plagued by a hip injury sustained during a game in October 1969, the twenty-five-year-old former San Diego Charger's suit charged conspiracy and malpractice, naming team personnel and both the American Football League (AFL) and the National Football League (NFL) as defendants. Ridge's suit claimed that he was permanently disabled, in part, because of the mix of amphetamines, barbiturates, and methandrostenlone given to him by the Chargers, “not for the purpose of care,” but for the purpose of performance enhancement. And they had done so “without warning him of the consequences.” An X-ray later revealed that he had broken his hip, but the drugs had so dulled his sensation of pain that he had continued to play, exacerbating the injury. A married father of four who now had to walk with the help of crutches, Ridge also filed a worker's compensation claim, accusing the Chargers with willful misconduct.

Crowd monitoring for sports games is important to improve public safety, game experience, and venue management. Recent crowd-crushing incidents (e.g., the Kanjuruhan Stadium disaster) have caused 100+ deaths, calling for advancements in crowd-monitoring methods. Existing monitoring approaches include manual observation, wearables, video-, audio-, and WiFi-based sensing. However, few meet the practical needs due to their limitations in cost, privacy protection, and accuracy.

In this paper, we introduce a novel crowd monitoring method that leverages floor vibrations to infer crowd reactions (e.g., clapping) and traffic (i.e., the number of people entering) in sports stadiums. Our method allows continuous crowd monitoring in a privacy-friendly and cost-effective way. Unlike monitoring one person, crowd monitoring involves a large population, leading to high uncertainty in the vibration data. To overcome the challenge, we bring in the context of crowd behaviors, including (1) temporal context to inform crowd reactions to the highlights of the game and (2) spatial context to inform crowd traffic in relation to the facility layouts. We deployed our system at Stanford Maples Pavilion and Michigan Stadium for real-world evaluation, which shows a 14.7% and 12.5% error reduction compared to the baseline methods without the context information.

Within US professional sports, trades within one’s own division are often perceived to be disadvantageous. We ask how common this practice is. To examine this question, we construct a date-stamped network of all trades in the National Basketball Association between June 1976 and May 2019. We then use season-specific weighted exponential random graph models to estimate the likelihood of teams avoiding within-division trade partners, and how consistent that pattern is across the observed period. In addition to the empirical question, this analysis serves to demonstrate the necessity and difficulty of constructing the proper baseline for statistical comparison. We find limited-to-no support for the popular perception.

The objective of this paper is to measure and compare the subjective time discounting of professional athletes and non-athletes. By using a questionnaire, we found higher subjective discounting for professional athletes than for non-athletes. We also found that the professional athletes’ win-orientation positively affected their present preferences. On the other hand, professional athletes’ play- orientation, which reflects their attitude towards the game itself, negatively affected their present preferences. No such effects were found in non-athletes. We argue that the “win-at-all-costs” competitive approach that leads athletes to sacrifice everything in order to win may cause (or reflect) their higher preference for the present.

Three Black women pose for a photograph mid play, a golf course stretching out behind them. With slight smiles, they squint in the sun at the camera, taking a break from the meditative intensity of the game. Two women wear skirts, or maybe one is sporting a culotte, bobby socks, and at least one of them seems to be wearing a regulation cleated shoe. A breeze blows fabric against legs. Each holds her club atop a golf ball, their bodies and the flagstick casting shadows on the putting green (see Figure 1). They are members of the Par-Links Black Women's Golf Club, formed in California's East Bay in 1958. Advertising for new members in the Oakland Black newspaper, the California Voice, the club held its first tournament the following year at Tilden Park Golf Course in Berkeley. “… challenge or be challenged,” the group cheered: “Your place on the ladder depends on your win.”

We examine whether politically irrelevant events can cause conflicts, by analyzing the effects of professional football games in Europe on protests in Africa—an unintended spillover across the continents. By expanding psychological theories, we argue that the outcomes of the football games in Europe can affect African people's subjective evaluation of domestic politicians, which in turn can trigger protests. By exploiting as-if random variation in the results of 15,102 close football games conditional on betting odds, we find that compared to draw games, close losses of African players’ teams increase peaceful protests in their original countries while not changing the likelihood of riots or armed conflicts. The effect is particularly large for non-ethnic protests targeted at a central government. Close losses also temporarily decrease people's trust in their country's leader. By contrast, close victories do not have equivalent or compensating effects on protests or public opinion. These results suggest asymmetric misattribution: people in Africa unreasonably blame domestic politicians for bad luck in European football games, prompting protests; but they do not credit politicians with football victories.