Sporting Systems and Social Harm. A Global Analysis of Institutional and Structural Failure (en Inglés) - Bob Stewart;Aaron C.T. Smith

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.

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.

The book provides a critical, evidence-led account of how sport fails to deliver many of its promised social benefits, how it produces predictable social harms, and what policymakers, regulators, and sport leaders can do about it.

Reveals how modern sport produces systemic social harms and outlines practical reforms to strengthen integrity, accountability, and safeguarding