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.