The purpose of this article is to provide an understanding of the emergence of LIV Golf, a new tour in the sport of professional golf, funded by finances from the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth, th...

Many debates within the sociology of football fandom allude to the ostensible lack of authenticity, or the idea that all forms of football fandom in the present day are merely different forms of post-fandom, and are categorized as such. It is stated by scholars that to consider one football fan being more authentic than another is problematic. This paper will critically discuss the relevant football fandom literature indelibly linked to fan typologies and authenticity to consider the implications of football support for shaping football fans identities and what this tells us about what it really means to be an ‘authentic’ football fan, in what Bauman calls a liquid modern society underpinned by consumerism.

The COVID-19 outbreak led to the cancellation of sporting events across the world in the spring of 2020 and forced billions of people across the globe to stay home and self-isolate for a number of months. One of the first sports to reposition and adapt their product during the global lockdown in March/April 2020 was professional darts. The Professional Darts Corporation (PDC) took an opportunity to promote their version of darts via an elite online home tournament, the PDC Home Tour, in a vast sports market craving live sporting action. This commentary provides an understanding of how professional darts, a sport that has relied on fan interaction within multi-purpose arenas at live events, attempted to move online to a home-based tournament for a temporary period to fill a sporting void. The commentary discusses the reaction to the tournaments held by the PDC and MODUS and issues encountered, before exploring the reasons for the tournaments being held during the primary global lockdown. As a niche sport, it is hoped that this commentary can provide some insight into the contemporary sport of professional darts, a sport rarely discussed in the scholarly field of sport and leisure.

Informal conversations have been used in qualitative research for over 100 years. Whilst originally identified as a minor part of ethnographic study, scholarly literature in the 2020s has aimed to promote a greater use of the informal conversation method in qualitative research. In agreement with Swain and King (2022), informal conversations create a greater ease of communication and often produce more naturalistic data than other forms such as interviews. Using experiences from two qualitative studies at a range of multi-purpose arenas in the UK and Europe and English association football stadia, this article explores the use of informal conversations as a research method at live events. It provides strategies and guidance regarding how to successfully implement this method when collecting data; explains how informal conversations can be recorded effectively; and outlines how beneficial they are in producing valid and authentic data. The article also explores the ethical challenges that are faced when conducting informal conversations in live event spaces in terms of ethics, validity, and reliability.

Various sport scholars have noted the transition of sports from amateur leisure pastimes to professionalised and globalised media sporting spectacles. Recent developments in darts offer an excellent example of these changes, yet the sport is rarely discussed in contemporary sports studies. The only sustained theoretical research on darts focuses primarily on the origins of the sport in its nostalgic form as a working-class, pub taproom pastime in England. This article critically examines the transformation of darts from a leisurely game to a professional sport between the 1970s and the 1990s. The change was enabled by the creation of the British Darts Organisation (BDO) and the introduction of television broadcasting, which together fed a continual process of professionalisation. Initially, this article discusses both the concept of professionalisation and similar developmental changes in a selection of English sports. Following this, via selected interviews, documentary analysis and archival information, the reasons behind the split in darts are explicated, shedding light on how the BDO did not successfully manage the transformation and the sport split into two governing bodies, from which the Professional Darts Corporation (PDC), the sport’s most successful organisation in the present day, has emerged to dominate the world of televised darts.