Sport management and COVID-19: trends and legacies

One of the enduring questions gripping scholars is the nature of sport’s ubiquity. What makes sport so compelling for so many despite the many tensions surrounding its expression? To make the conundrum more complicated, we have witnessed a seemingly inexhaustible growth in sport’s reach and scope, including as a source of recreational pastime, organised participation, fanatical devotion, and media spectacle. At the same time, sport’s immense entertainment, recreation, and media fringes have exploded, spanning from competitive eating to esports. Sport undoubtedly occupies a non-trivial place in the economic, social, and cultural fabric of almost every part of the globe (Smith et al., Citation2021), as billions discovered when the COVID blackout struck.