The voting system ’one nation, one vote’ is used in most international sports federations, but it leads to challenges to good governance. In this article, we present new research to stimulate debate about alternatives to ‘one nation, one vote’.

It was not primarily the athletes that drove the radical change of the sports agenda in the decade we leave. But there are signs that athletes will be at the heart of the agenda of the 2020’ies, writes Play the Game’s international director in a wind-up of ten turbulent years in world sport.

At the start of 2019, it was fair to say there was no single transnational anti-mega-event movement. In a matter of months, this changed as anti-Olympics organisers from Rio de Janeiro, Pyeongchang and Seoul, Tokyo, Paris, and Los Angeles came together in Tokyo in July with the goal of solidifying their transnational connections into an active movement against the Olympic Games.

Analysis: In 2013, then-FIFA Secretary General Jérôme Valcke stated that “less democracy is sometimes better for organising a World Cup”. He reasoned that a “strong head of state” reduces organisational costs. Economist Matthias Fett looks at the numbers and tests this hypothesis.

There is no single global anti mega-event movement. There is, however, a globalized way of protesting against mega-events that adapts to local conditions, and anti-Olympic protesting is a ‘new normal’. This is how researchers John Lauermann and Dennis Pauschinger sum up the article series on public protests and mega-events.

Although anti-Olympics activists face an uphill struggle against Olympic intransigence, Jules Boykoff points to areas that could help convert the many moments of anti-Games activism into a full-throttle movement. This is the sixth article in a series looking into protests and the Games.

The historical roots and deeper conditions of the 'demonstrations cup' in Brazil in 2013 are essential for the understanding of the movement’s consequences, says Erick Omena. In this essay, he looks into the genealogy of the public protests in Brazil leading up to the FIFA Confederations Cup, the first of three mega sporting events held in the country from 2013-2016.

American cities have not had much tradition for anti-Olympic movements in spite of a series of Olympic bids in recent years. This might be changing, writes Greg Andranovich and Matthew J. Burbank in this article that analyses the current anti-Olympic movement in Los Angeles, which is based on public awareness and social justice.