ORIGINAL ARTICLE Where extremes meet: Sport, nationalism, and secessionism in Catalonia and Scotland Mariann Vaczi 1 | Alan Bairner 2 | Stuart Whigham 3 1 Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno, Reno, NV, USA 2 School of Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK 3 Department of Sport, Health Sciences and Social Work, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK Correspondence Mariann Vaczi, Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, Reno, Reno, NV, USA. Email: mvaczi@unr.edu Abstract In this essay, we trace the symbolic conundrums of belong- ing and of the reconciliation of identities, in the context of Catalan and Scottish sport and politics. Our discussion will commence with a necessarily concise consideration of past academic contentions regarding the national “psyches,” which have been argued to shape contemporary notions of identity and politics in Catalonia and Scotland, before turn- ing our attention to the specific role of sport vis‐à‐vis these psyches and the growing clamour for greater political auton- omy for each of these stateless nations. On the basis of the evidence drawn from the interaction between sport and pol- itics in the two nations, we argue that secessionism is a lim- inal field of transformation as it includes what is seen as mutually exclusive sets of relationships (Catalans vs. Span- iards, Scottish vs. British, and secessionists vs. unionists/ centralists), which at the same time allows subjects to pass from one state to another and occupy them nonexclusively. KEYWORDS Catalonia, nationalism, secessionism, Scotland, sport 1 | INTRODUCTION The aim of this paper is to examine the intersection between sports and the respective secessionist movements in Scotland and Catalonia. In the case of the former, organised sport has played a significant role in helping to maintain Scotland's separate identity on the global stage despite being an integral part of the U.K. nation state with both the Scottish Football Association (SFA) and the Scottish Rugby Union (SRU) being formed in 1879. In Catalonia, sport also ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- © The author(s) 2019. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2019 Received: 4 December 2018 Revised: 15 May 2019 Accepted: 19 June 2019 DOI: 10.1111/nana.12569 Nations and Nationalism. 2019;1–17. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/nana 1