Sport was indeed at the core of this conference, and particularly association football and the ever-present, ever pressing gender issues; then again, sports as agents and facilitators of life choices, as well as the absence of choice due to structural factors in sports and in society, were the topics at the center of most of the discussions. While so much of contemporary research on sports focuses the performances – citius, altius, fortius – the CPS conference zoomed in on the ever increasing importance of sports at the micro, meso and macro levels of society.

When one of the participators at the conference, Cyprian Maro from University of Dar es Salaam, received a text message from his wife back in Tanzania with the half-time result in an EPL match, I realized the crucial hegemony of English football, totally eclipsing football’s often successful role as the Esperanto of sports. And we are reminded that individual and collective, man and technology, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, is perpetually created and recreated within sport and society.

It is tradition in transition, where history foretells the future and sports appears to play a more significant role, in the periphery as well as in the center – whomever you’re rooting for, in sports or in Academia.

We are presently planning the legacy of this conference, comprising the publication of papers, a remake of the website (of which this page is the start), a comprehensive conference report in Swedish (on idrottsforum.org) and in English (on this site). We will also be contacting the keynote speakers for permission to publish videos from their talks on the web.

So, from all of us in Malmö – thanks to all of you. We’ll meet again, if not in Malmö, then somewhere else, in real life or on a website near you.

Aage Radmann