Sport and Crime

This comprehensive review of the relationship between sport and crime explains how the experience of sport can lead to behaviour that’s harmful to others and is sometimes self-destructive. It challenges the conventional idea of sport as wholesome and beneficial, arguing that sport is often a trigger for crime, in both history and contemporary life.

The book explores how murder, violence, bribery, sexual assault, matchfixing, corporate corruption, crowd disorder, hate crimes, drug offences, alcohol-induced transgressions and cyber-crimes are often caused or accelerated by sport, and it speculates on sports-related crimes of the future. The book’s narrative is driven by hundreds of case studies, and each chapter has summary points. There are also eight descriptive timelines that enable the reader to see at a glance how sport has, over the decades and centuries, been a catalyst for crime.

This is an essential text for any course on sport and crime and invaluable reading for anybody with an interest in the sociology of sport, sport history, sports law, sport management, sport development, criminology or cultural studies. Anyone seriously interested in the study of sport will be gripped.

Ellis Cashmore is the author of Making Sense of Sport, Celebrity Culture and The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson. Professor Cashmore has held positions in sociology at the universities of Hong Kong, Massachusetts and Tampa, USA.

Kevin Dixon is the author of Consuming Football in Late Modern Life. He is co-author of Studying Football, Online Research Methods in Sports Studies, Screen Society, and The Impact of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences at Teesside University, UK.

Jamie Cleland is the author of Online Research Methods in Sport Studies, A Sociology of Football in a Global Context and co-author of Screen Society. He has previously held positions at universities in the United Kingdom and is currently Senior Lecturer in Sport Management at the University of South Australia.