“…The last few years of inquiry have witnessed a broader range of empirical interests. Specifically, the nature of stadiums and their embeddedness in urban life have been central concerns (Bale, 1993a(Bale, , 1993b(Bale, , 1994Bale and Moen, 1995;Chase and Healey, 1995;Church and Penny, 2013;Davies, 2005;Edensor, 2015;Mason and Robins, 1991;Mason and Moncrieff, 1993;Van Dam, 2000;Van Houtum and Van Dam, 2002); the cultural, sustainability and political forces involved in their production, and their roles in broader national and international agendas, being particular critical interests (Gaffney, 2008(Gaffney, , 2009(Gaffney, , 2010(Gaffney, , 2014bGaffney and Bale, 2004;Gaffney and Mascarenhas, 2005). Beyond stadiums, research continues to explore the importance and nature of place but now includes attention, for example, to the role of sports and sports places in geographical education, memory and history (Bale, 2004;Shelley, 2004, 2006;Gaffney, 2006;Hague and Mercer, 1998), rurality, social conflict/change and sport (Matless et al, 2005;Milbourne, 2003;Palmer, 2010;Tonts and Atherley, 2005;Woods, 1998), human-animal relations in sport (Matless et al, 2005;McManus and Montoya, 2012;Milbourne, 2003), the legacies, reinvention and recycling of sporting venues (Alberts, 2011;Andranovich and Burbank, 2011;Waitt, 2005) and international sporting megaevents (Horne, 2004;…”