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Sport is widely celebrated as a “force for good,” credited with building health, character, community, and social cohesion. Yet many of sport’s most visible successes sit alongside persistent harms: corruption and match-fixing, doping, abuse and safeguarding failures, violence and bigotry, exploitative labor arrangements, and organizational cultures that normalize injury and silence. Sporting Systems and Social Harm reframes these problems as systemic rather than exceptions. Drawing on interdisciplinary research and contemporary cases, the book explains why harms recur across sports and countries; how they are enabled by incentives, governance gaps, commercial pressures, and cultural myths; and why the default “sport is good” narrative makes harm harder to see and fix. The book concludes with a practical reform agenda, offering principles and policy options to improve integrity, protect participants, and evaluate social value more honestly.
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.