The sports literature has shown that sport can be used as an instrument for reuniting ethnically and religiously divided societies. The Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot communities in the island of Cyprus have been brutishly separated as a result of Turkey's invasion in 1974 and a subsequent proclamation of the occupied land as an independent state. Because of the latter, the Turkish-Cypriots have been facing political exclusion, such as being denied participation in international football matches. Their 'independence' has detached them from the Cyprus Football Association, which remains the sole representative of Cypriot football in international governing bodies. The two sides have attempted unsuccessfully to resolve the problem, which has political extensions, and the question remains whether football can indeed loosen that 'Gordian Knot'. Placing the problem within an international relations framework and based on digital media reports and secondary analyses, this paper includes elements of three levels of analysis and argues that for the time being there are very dim hopes that football can act as a re-unifying agent in the divided society of Cyprus.

This article examines the local politics around a new private football stadium construction project in Southern Europe, within the frame of urban regime theory. The project aimed at demolishing a recently renovated municipal stadium in Turin, Italy and building a new one for Juventus FC. This new stadium project was the product of an urban regime that governed Turin for some years, an outcome that raises an important issue as, in the US, the explanatory power of regime theory for most stadium projects is in doubt. Using this evidence, the article adds to the ongoing debate on whether US urban politics theories can explain urban affairs in European cities and draws some similarities and differences between European and US urban politics.

Urban politics is a US-dominated field, and since the late 1990s there have been academic discussions with a view, on the one hand, to better understanding the British/European case and what distinguishes it from the US one and, on the other, to develop a better comparative theory much of which subsequently went down the path of studying neoliberalism. This article follows an urban politics perspective and the qualitative case-study method to explore Everton Football Club's 20-year-long unsuccessful struggle to relocate to a new modern stadium of its own in the Liverpool city-region. Although this paper has limitations stemming from the fact that it is a single case study, its contribution to the field is threefold. First, it adds to the scant literature on new private sports stadia in the UK. Second, it shows that US-based urban politics theories beyond regimes may remain alive in the UK. Third, it supplements the neoliberalist-financialized city statecraft literature by adding sports stadia as infrastructural projects never before incorporated.

This paper examines local initiatives for a sports stadium-centered economic development project in Athens, Greece within the framework of urban political theories. This project was not successful for the proponents, which in itself makes a crucial issue as most stadium projects are successful in the US, where most stadium research has been conducted. The local growth coalition (LGC) concept is used as a template for understanding this Athenian project. In this case, the coalition was strong yet ineffective. In any LGC, ineffectiveness may result from various structural factors that are unrelated to the coalition's internal organizational or institutional composition. In this case, the key structural factor was a judicial decision by the Supreme Administrative Court of Greece that severely impeded the LGC's ultimate goals. This paper also briefly compares judicial decisions in the US and Greece regarding new private sports stadia as projects for the "public good."