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Sport and Public Policy: Social, Political and Economic Perspectives

international perspectives do is reinforce a crucial point. And it is this: for all that modern, professionalised sport has functioned as an agent of greater global cultural homogeneity, local customs and political traditions still matter. They matter a lot. As do place, identity and memory – the big themes that dominate the third and final section of the book and which are discussed in the context of the issues and debates, often controversial, around site memorials and stadium developments. Here, Mike McGuinness of the University of Teesside, Middlesbrough, makes perhaps the most significant contribution, his commentary on the contribution of commemoration to the creation of ‘quasi-religious attachments’ to football grounds being particularly insightful. As McGuinness explains it, the fostering of the idea of the stadium as a sacred site plays no small part in the way which sport is perceived in the wider community and serves as a ‘key marketing tool in selling sport to its fans’ (p. 219). For a growing number of football clubs, indeed, history and heritage are conveniently dovetailed with commercial objectives, their stadiums increasingly promoted as visitor attractions in their own right, places where tourists and fans can come to wallow in nostalgia and celebrate an ‘imagined past’. Ultimately, this important book is nothing less than an interrogation of the very idea of public history – its form, function and value. It arrives at no neat conclusions and the bringing together of such a diverse group of contributors from academic and non-academic backgrounds serves, at times, only to emphasise the differences between them. Nevertheless, the quality of the analysis on how sport has been publicly represented in the past and present provides more than a few pointers on how future challenges might be met. If that, of necessity, demands a deeper engagement by historians of sport, then much better public history will undoubtedly result.