Introduction: Sports heritage and sports history: theory and practice

This special issue was conceived as an opportunity to showcase work produced under an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) scheme of collaborative doctoral partnerships (CDP) initiated in 2012 by the UKRI. Applying as a consortium of seven sports museums in the second round of awards, The Sports Heritage Network (SHN) made a successful bid to oversee museal and university partnership working in 2015 under the title ‘Unlocking the unique sporting heritage in our collections.’ This factual statement belies the years of ongoing networking and relationshipbuilding necessary to secure success in such an application; it is something which must be acknowledged as easing the pathway for academic sports historians to avail themselves of 12 funded supervisory opportunities which were otherwise unlikely to happen in a funding climate more favourable to contemporary issues in sport than their historical antecedents. Beginning in 2016, several projects are now completed, and those researchers recruited into later cohorts are coming close to the end of their research journeys. The ‘holding organisation’ for the award was the National Football Museum (NFM) and its founding Director, Kevin Moore, was listed as the application’s Principal Investigator. Recognition of the consortium by the AHRC can be viewed as a significant breakthrough for Moore who had been advocating for stronger representation of popular culture within the sector over many years, most notably through his seminal book Museums and Popular Culture, its convictions most obviously brought to fruition via his work at the NFM. He also wanted to see academic sports historians consistently researching in and sharing their research through museum spaces, a perspective underpinned by the belief that the dominance of written documentary sources hosted in ‘the archive’ represented a broader neglect of material culture within the writing of sports history. Institutional positioning within higher education also meant that academics had not generally found effective means of connecting research with public audiences. The demonstrable capacity of sports museums to do so, focused as they are to the