THE COMMUNITY BEHIND SPORT COMPETITION

Besides the master frame of competition and the opponent dyad that are usually used in speaking about the dynamics of sport events, there is a complementary approach of sport event as gathering of sport community. From the complex repertoire of sport actors’ social roles, most studies tend to focused on the differences attached to their competing positions, minimizing the similarities of sport actors as part of the same professional community. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to analyze sport field from the perspective of community dynamics, pointing out those main elements which show that, behind the competitive orientation, there is a clear community feeling among sport actors. There are two types of arguments that are brought into discussion by this study: those regarding spatiality and those related to sport actors’ public discourses as an important symbolic resource in defining this intercultural community. The first ones cover the effects of athletes’ dual field of play: national teams versus club teams and the emerging category of transnational athletes as a product of sport global market. As for the discursive dimension, sport actors’ public discourses reveal significant insights regarding the existence of a global community revived with every new competition. The high level of familiarity between sport actors, the cyclicity of competitions as common experience, as well as the constraints of public exposure have proved to have a great impact on keeping together this type of ‘sport community islands’.