Abstract

Sport can be a great leveller, bringing people of different creeds, classes and cultures together over the love of a game or a club. It can also drive and keep people apart, creating perpetual winners and losers in the process. The media plays a big, and ever bigger, role in how these forces operate. Sport media is characterised by its massive popularity as well as by the diversity of bodies it represents based on, for example, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, (dis)ability and social class. The combination of its mass appeal and its portrayal of diverse bodies makes sports media a powerful site for the (re)production of meaning-making of diversity in society (Van Sterkenburg, 2025). While some scholars have pointed out how this meaning-making process can sometimes lead to an appreciation of diversity and an increase in tolerance for people who are perceived as different from oneself, other scholars have shown how this is either conditional (Van Sterkenburg, Peeters & Van Amsterdam, 2019) or can result in social divides and exclusions (Bradbury and Conricode, 2025; Kavanagh et al., 2019; Kilvington, 2016; Kilvington et al., 2024) based on implicit and explicit mechanisms of discrimination. Trying to understand how all this works, why it matters, and how it could be improved, is in essence what this book is about.