Niall Quinn - The Autobiography (London, Headline Book Publishing, 2002) Niall Quinn played football for Arsenal, Manchester City and Sunderland, a career spent almost wholly in the top flight of the English game, from 1983, when signed by Arsenal and brought over to London from the Republic of Ireland, to 2002, when he retired after… Continue reading Book Review: Niall Quinn – The Autobiography
Tag: Prof Alan Tomlinson
Away from the Heart of the Matter: the Little Olympics
Sydney 2000 was the Bumper Summer Olympics. It welcomed more than 11,000 athletes, several thousand officials and coaches, and as the 16 days whizzed by estimates of the number of mediafolk in town reached 21,000, although official estimates had been initially put at around 15,000. Athens 2004 plans to cater for 18,000 media. The Main… Continue reading Away from the Heart of the Matter: the Little Olympics
The Emergence and Development of UK Leisure Studies
This address was first delivered as the opening presentation at Leisure Studies 25 (September 21, 2006), a symposium to celebrate a quarter of a century of success of the Leisure Studies Association's journal Leisure Studies. The presentation is also to be reproduced in the Leisure Studies Association's Newsletter in the Autumn of 2006. Opening Comments… Continue reading The Emergence and Development of UK Leisure Studies
Summer back then: waiting for football
I wonder why I’m not at a game today. It’s Saturday at the start of another football season. But I remember discussing the overkill of boom-time sport with the old Labour Minister Denis Howell, just before he died. He agreed that the solipsistic sloshings of money in the game, the media saturation of coverage, bordered… Continue reading Summer back then: waiting for football
Istanbul, May 2005
Another airport again, sitting looking out at concrete runways through characterless glass panes. The check-in and passport controls and security checks and duty-frees and toilets could be at any airport on any continent. There’s something both comforting and frightening about this: the processes become familiar, the environment spookily déjà vu. You’ve done all that travel… Continue reading Istanbul, May 2005
Seb Coe’s Biggest Challenge
In mid-September 2006 Lord Coe, public supremo of the successful London 2012 Olympic bid, turned down the opportunity to become chairman of UK Athletics. Sport journalists had widely assumed that Coe would slot into this made-for-Seb post, after Dave Moorcroft’s resignation as the chief executive of UK Athletics in August. But Lord Coe had bigger… Continue reading Seb Coe’s Biggest Challenge
Football in the Last Ten Years
In 1998, Argentinean journalist Juana Libinsky published a series of articles on UK academics, including a feature in La Nación on my work on international sport culture and world football. In 2006, invited to publish her journalistic work in book form, she asked whether I would respond to some questions that would help her update… Continue reading Football in the Last Ten Years
Studying Leisure
In September 2006 the journal Leisure Studies celebrated its 25th anniversary. As one of its former editors, and a long-standing member and erstwhile Publications Officer of the Leisure Studies Association (LSA), I was interviewed, for the journal, about the growth of Leisure Studies in the UK, and delivered the opening presentation on this theme at… Continue reading Studying Leisure
Professor Alan Tomlinson - Research 