SHORT COMMUNICATION THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF SPORTS The Case of Iceland
Abstract This report describes patterns of professional sport in Iceland that have in the past decades displayed increasing exchanges of players with other countries. Soccer and handball are given prominence because of their great popularity in the country; chess, an activity defined as a sport in s...
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| Format: | Text |
| Language: | English |
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| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.198.2369 http://irs.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/36/1/59.pdf |
| Summary: | Abstract This report describes patterns of professional sport in Iceland that have in the past decades displayed increasing exchanges of players with other countries. Soccer and handball are given prominence because of their great popularity in the country; chess, an activity defined as a sport in some contexts, is featured as well because of the world successes of Icelandic players and the Icelandic venue for the epochal Fisher–Spassky match in 1972. ‘International ’ has partially been subsumed by the use of ‘globalization ’ in the past 10 years, and the participation of Iceland in the new, volatile, but highly variable arrangements of global exchange of sport labour talent is sketched. Key words • incentives • internationalization • system changes • transfer of players The purpose of this article is to provide baseline information on the internationalization of sport in Iceland, noting, first, trends in soccer, which can be associated with general patterns in this widely disseminated sport. To capture something of the distinctive character of Icelandic sport, the soccer trends are noted in connection with handball, which has an especially strong concentration in the Nordic countries, and with chess, a competitive game of intense interest to Icelanders. The article seeks to fill a void in the current coverage of Iceland in recent overviews of Nordic sport (Meinander and Mangan, 1998). The article intends, as well, to be a ‘case in point ’ of recent overviews of international sport trends such as the socioeconomics of sport (e.g. Chantelet, 1999; Morrison, 1996; Taks et al., 1994) and the globalization of sport (e.g. Jackson and Andrews, 1999; Friedman, 1999; Maguire, 1996; Maguire and Stead, 1998). The focus in this article is on migration of athletes to and from Iceland. The international success of Icelanders in soccer, handball and chess is also accounted for to some extent. Soccer |
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