Thomas Wentworth Wills is the most important figure in the origin and early evolution of Australian Rules football. His life was shaped by intersecting forces: the sporting journey of the gifted athlete, the relationship between father and son, the tensions between colonial and Aboriginal societies, the everchanging place of colonial society within Empire, the impact of impaired mental health, and the damaging influence of alcohol in sport. His story extends well beyond the sporting boundary. The full extent of his role in the formation and early development of the Australian game reveals the more contentious disputes that his recent prominence has ignited, a prominence that has seen his life story resonate as a staple of Australian culture and history.

The fourth Women’s World Games (WWG) began on August 9, 1934, at the White City Stadium in London. Despite extensive press coverage in 1934, London’s WWG have been neglected by historians, either assimilated into a narrow Olympic trajectory or considered an established and uncontroversial event on the independent women’s athletics calendar. In fact, they were an important moment in the history of sport and gender, both in Britain and internationally. In examining the geo-political and social significance of the 1934 WWG, a new perspective on the shifting understanding of gender performance and bio-medical knowledge about sex during the 1930s, and how these changing ideas were applied to women’s athletics, is revealed. More than just the fourth and final edition of a short-lived independent international women’s athletics movement, the 1934 London WWG and their media coverage were sites of contest, both physical and ideological.

In 1969, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) began to focus on sports as a means of internal political mobilization and as a tool for public diplomacy within its national liberation project. The PLO’s involvement in sports peaked during the 1970s, when it achieved international breakthroughs, including broad recognition by continental and international sports federations, alongside Israel’s isolation and expulsion from those federations. In the 1980s, after leaving Beirut, the PLO concentrated on supporting sports institutions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. These institutions played a significant role in political mobilization and in building structures that helped manage the first Palestinian Intifada (1987–1993). Across both diaspora and occupied territories, Palestinian sports between 1969 and 1993 strengthened collective national identity while advancing the PLO’s paradiplomacy until the Oslo Peace Accords’ signing in 1993.

Although relatively rapid from the late 2010s onward, the inclusion of organized video game competitions – commonly known as eSports – in the Olympic world did not happen overnight. Three phases are distinguished. After an initial phase marked by indifference or rejection, several experiments were conducted in a second phase by international sports federations (IFs) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC), ultimately leading to the IOC decision to announce creation the Olympic eSports Games in 2023, a new cycle of Olympic competitions in the making. The inclusion of eSports in the Olympic system is explained by two main strategic reasons (economic and political). Olympic public documents on the subject, media articles and discussions with key decision makers highlight the salient facts of each of these three phases and their motivations, providing a better knowledge of the origins of the Olympic eSports Games and enabling stakeholders to follow and understand their future development from 2026 onwards.

A photo of the Austrian politician Bruno Kreisky participating in fitness sports demonstrates the potential of visual sports history. Kreisky was one of the most important Austrian politicians in the twentieth century. However, he was not a great athlete. Nevertheless, during his time as chancellor, he did sometimes exploit the potential of sport photos for political purposes. The question is asked what meanings are attached to the athletic visual representation of the politician Bruno Kreisky and how these can be interpreted in terms of visual history. Clearly, the nature of the portrayal and its associated meanings differ significantly from those of other well-known images, such as that of the hypermasculine Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Kreisky presented himself as a health- and body-conscious politician, and thus as a modern figure. It has been demonstrated that the ways in which politicians use sport to present themselves vary greatly in terms of their formal, structural, and content-related aspects, as well as their respective historical contexts. Taking sports photography more seriously, i.e. improving ‘visual literacy’, therefore enhances the understanding of the intersection between sport and this particular political arena.

Between the 1950s and 1990s, Israeli football existed in sustained institutional limbo—expelled from the Asian Football Confederation yet repeatedly denied Union of European Football Associations entry. International sports federations sustained this prolonged uncertainty through procedural delay and improvised compromise rather than principled resolution. Managed liminality, a condition of institutional in-betweenness produced by strategic deferral of politically contentious decisions, shaped Israeli debates over national belonging and regional orientation. Cold War-era sports governance prioritized organizational cohesion over definitive action, transforming political conflict into administrative drift. Israel’s two-decade search for continental affiliation reveals how postwar institutions negotiated the boundaries of international inclusion through sustained ambiguity rather than fixed geography or formal rules.

Drawing on Hobsbawm and Ranger’s concept of the ‘invented tradition,’ this paper argues that the post-1994 framing of Anzac Day football obscures a longer and more complex history dating back to 1960, when the Victorian Football League (VFL) first scheduled games on the occasion. It examines how Anzac Day football evolved from a rotating, inclusive fixture shared among all clubs into what quickly became recognized as a singular ‘tradition’ centred on Collingwood and Essendon from 1995. Despite the longer history, the earlier decades have been simplified or ignored in prevailing accounts and in public memory. The paper also examines how the VFL, initially reluctant to participate, was drawn into Anzac Day football under pressure from the RSL (Returned & Services League of Australia) and the Victorian Government, and how its relationship with the RSL remained tense at times in the decades that followed. Through detailed engagement with archival records, contemporary reportage, legal documentation, and other primary materials, it sheds new light on the largely overlooked and underappreciated history of Anzac Day football spanning over six decades, with 1995 serving as a dividing line between past and present practices.