Sporting Systems and Social Harm: A Global Analysis of Institutional and Structural Failure

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.