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Reveals how modern sport produces systemic social harms and outlines practical reforms to strengthen integrity, accountability, and safeguarding.
Sport occupies a near‑sacred place in modern society. Across the world, it is treated as a dependable source of health, community, pride, and moral education. Politicians and commentators routinely claim that the values learned on the field translate into better schools, workplaces, and communities. Yet the everyday reality of contemporary sport often looks different: integrity scandals, doping and match-fixing, abuse and safeguarding failures, violent and exclusionary fan cultures, and repeated examples of discrimination, exploitation, and organizational cover‑ups.
This book argues that these outcomes are not anomalies. They are patterned social harms that arise from the way sport is organized, commercialized, governed, and culturally interpreted. Rather than asking whether sport is “good” or “bad,” Smith and Stewart show how benefits and harms are co-produced, and why the “force for good” story can obscure risks and weaken accountability. Across ethics, culture, and role‑model narratives, the book explains how incentives, media logics, institutional myths, and governance gaps can amplify harm even in well‑intentioned programs.
Sporting Systems and Social Harm is also solutions‑oriented. It closes with a reform agenda for policy and practice: stronger integrity systems, better safeguarding and participant protection, more realistic social impact claims, and evaluation standards that treat social value as something to be evidenced, not assumed. Written for scholars, students, policymakers, journalists, and sport leaders, the book offers a clear framework for rethinking sport’s social value in an era of heightened scrutiny.
"Sporting Systems and Social Harm is a hugely valuable book that should be read by undergraduate and postgraduate students, built on by future researchers, and used to shape policy decisions. It draws together evidence that is wide-ranging and international to convincingly argue that various problems of sport are deeply embedded within sport cultures and systems. Most importantly, the book distinguishes itself from other critiques in developing a new policy framework for change in sport. Bob Stewart and Aaron C.T. Smith are to be congratulated for a text rooted in realism, but that nevertheless offers hope that a better future can be worked for" —Iain Lindsey, Associate Professor in Sport Policy and Development, Durham University, UK.
"This book offers a well-researched, reader-friendly critique of conventional claims that sport is an intrinsically benign, even sacred, institution. The authors’ clear, evidence-based analysis of sport’s negative social, cultural, political, health and economic dimensions is supplemented by carefully considered, pragmatic proposals for reforming this powerful arena of global popular culture." —David Rowe, Emeritus Professor of Cultural Research, Western Sydney University, Australia.
"Stewart and Smith provide a welcome and much needed evidence-based and highly critical examination of the true social value of sport. The text is extremely timely, confronting the myriad of ethical and cultural failures that are inherent in contemporary sport design and delivery. This is surely an essential text for both students and scholars of sport". —Dr Paul Michael Brannagan, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.
"Challenging the enduring influence of the great sport myth, Stewart and Smith offer a highly accessible and timely critique of sport as an institution and its roles and responsibilities with respect to a wide range of contemporary social harms".—Professor Steve Jackson, University of Otago, New Zealand.
"I enjoyed this critical take on sport and its social impacts. It highlights uncomfortable truths that we are aware of but often ignore in favour of the spectacle and emotion of competition. Readers may be surprised to find themselves questioning the role and value of sport, particularly at the elite and professional levels. The practical recommendations offer a clear path to begin addressing these persistent issues." —Dr April Henning, Associate Professor and Head of Research, Department of Management. Edinburgh Business School, Heriot-Watt University, UK
Bob Stewart has been a teacher and researcher of sport studies for 40 years and has an international reputation for interrogating the structures and practices of both local and elite-level sport.
Aaron C. T. Smith is Professor of Management at Newcastle Business School, University of Newcastle, and a Professorial Fellow in Sport Business and Innovation in the Institute for Sport Business, Loughborough University London.
1 Promises and Realities: Sport’s Moral Aura and the Case for a Harm Reduction Lens; 2 (Un)Fair Play and Sport’s Ethical Failures: Integrity as an Interlocking Harm System; 3 The Dark Side of Sport Culture: When Harm Becomes Cyclical; 4 False Idols and the Cultural Failure of Sport: Sport Builds What It Rewards; 5 Reimagining Sport: Governance, Evidence, and Harm Reduction.