Showing titles in Sociology of Sports

Sports fandom isn’t what it used to be. Owners and executives increasingly count on the blind loyalty of their fans and too often act against the team’s best interest. Sports fans are left deliberating not only mismanagement but also political, health, and ethical issues. In Rethinking Fandom: How to Beat the Sports Industrial Complex at Its Own Game, sportswriter and lifelong sports fan Craig Calcaterra outlines endemic problems with what he calls the sports-industrial complex.

South Africa revels in its reputation as a sport-loving country. Yet just beneath the surface lurks a dark underbelly that reeks of cheating and illicit shenanigans, where shady characters and willing athletes are prepared to do whatever it takes to come out on top. South African sport is awash with steroids, a habit that formed in the late 1980s and continues unabated today, with participants and champions alike opting to play dirty. 

The Sports Parents Solution gives you the strategies and methods you need to transform the parent culture in your team, allowing you to better support each athlete’s growth, improve your team’s performance, create an extraordinary experience for all involved—and take your program to a whole new level.

The Premier League is the most watched sports league in the world, broadcast into 188 countries and watched by 3.2 billion people worldwide. It revolutionised football, transforming the beautiful game into a multi-billion-pound business and making its biggest stars millionaires. Fever Pitch tells the inside story of the formation of the league, from the early discussions with Rupert Murdoch about how Sky could be at the heart of this new league, to the bitter rivalries and radical new managers who changed the face of football forever.

As Nazi Germany launched its campaign of racial terror and pushed the world toward war, three misfits banded together to challenge Hitler’s dominance at the apex of motorsport: the Grand Prix. Their quest for redemption culminated in a remarkable race that is still talked about in racing circles to this day - but which, soon after it ended, Hitler attempted to completely erase from history.

Addressing both collegiate and professional sports, the updated edition of Fair Play explores the ethical presuppositions of competitive athletics and their connection both to ethical theory and to concrete moral dilemmas that arise in actual athletic competition. A major new section in chapter four examines the ethics of genetically enhancing athletic abilities. Other new material covers the analysis of sports and games according to influential philosopher Bernard Suits; the morality of cheating and the ethics of strategic fouling; and more.

For the past year, John U. Bacon has received unprecedented access to Jim Harbaugh’s University of Michigan football team: coaches, players, and staffers, in closed-door meetings, locker rooms, meals, and classes. Overtime captures this storied program at the crossroads, as the sport’s winningest team battles to reclaim its former glory. But what if the price of success today comes at the cost of your soul? Do you pay it, or compete without compromising?

As a leading political and intellectual historian and a certified fitness instructor, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is uniquely qualified to confront the complex and far-reaching implications of how our contemporary exercise culture took shape. She explores the work of working out not just as consumers have experienced it, but as it was created by performers, physical educators, trainers, instructors, and many others. For Petrzela, fitness is a social justice issue. She argues that the fight for a more equitable exercise culture will be won only by revolutionizing fitness culture at its core.

Some 75% of American families want their kids to play sports. Athletics are training grounds for character, friendship, and connection; at their best, sports insulate kids from hardship and prepare them for adult life. But youth sports have changed so dramatically over the last 25 years that they no longer deliver the healthy outcomes everyone wants. Instead, unbeknownst to most parents, kids who play competitive organized sports are more likely to burn out or suffer from overuse injuries than to develop their characters or build healthy habits.

In Against Football Steve Almond details why, after 40 years as a fan, he can no longer watch the game he still loves. Using a synthesis of memoir, reportage, and cultural critique, Almond asks a series of provocative questions: Does our addiction to football foster a tolerance for violence, greed, racism, and homophobia? What does it mean that our society has transmuted the intuitive physical joys of childhood--run, leap, throw, tackle--into a billion-dollar industry?

Are you a young athlete looking to compete with the best? How about a seasoned professional wanting to stay at the top of their game? One of the toughest aspects of being an athlete is consistency; not just performing well at one event, but being the best every time you enter a competition. No matter how hard you train or tweak your diet, you might feel like you’ve hit a plateau. You might not be making any more progress at all. You aren’t alone!

Radical gender activists are using a pseudoscientific theory of human biology to hijack sports and subvert the long-established concept of fair play - forcing women and girls to risk their safety, pushing them aside for male athletes using the excuse of “inclusivity”.

From the number-one best-selling author of This Town comes a thrillingly raw and hysterical account of the billionaires, crooks, charlatans and scoundrels that own and run the NFL. American Football - with its celebrity players, billionaire owners, and cheerleaders with flawless teeth - is more American than apple pie. Which is why celebrated New York Times journalist Mark Leibovich has chosen football as the vehicle through which to examine the troubled state of Trump’s America.

The Premier League is the most commercially successful football league in history, the self-proclaimed 'best league in the world'. But success has come at a cost, unbalancing the English game to a profound and damaging degree. In this revealing and eye-opening analysis, leading economist Mark Gregory reveals the breadth and depth of the problems facing our national men's game, and shows us a way to bring football home for good.

Drugs in sport are big news and the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sport is common. Here, Chris Cooper, a top biochemist at the University of Essex, looks at the science behind drugs in sport. Using the performance of top athletes, Cooper begins by outlining the limits of human performance. Showing the basic problems of human biochemistry, physiology, and anatomy, he looks at what stops us running faster, throwing longer, or jumping higher. Using these evidence-based arguments he shows what the body can, and cannot, do.

Are you ready to join the club? If your desire is to build a stronger and well-chiseled body naturally without steroids; then this is the book for you! It will not only enable you shape the body of your dreams, but it will also empower you to stay the course. 

Every decade brings change, but as Michael MacCambridge chronicles in The Big Time, no decade in American sports history featured such convulsive cultural shifts as the 1970s. So many things happened during the decade—the move of sports into prime-time television, the beginning of athletes’ gaining a sense of autonomy for their own careers, integration becoming—at least within sports—more of the rule than the exception, and the social revolution that brought females more decisively into sports, as athletes, coaches, executives, and spectators.

Si può mentire su tutto: sulle opinioni, sui giudizi, sui desideri e persino sui sentimenti, ma mai sulle passioni. E quale passione più vera e nobile può esserci di quella che abbiamo per la nostra squadra del cuore? Quando poi la prescelta è l’Inter, i ricordi delle undici partite che hanno cambiato la vita dei tifosi nerazzurri, assumono i contorni di una insonne nostalgia. Educazione ambrosiana racconta l’Inter del mago Herrera, quella dei record del Trap, quella di Ronaldo “il Fenomeno”.

Few people watch sport for its politics. Yet what happens on the field of play often reflects the problems in our society. Such was the case in the '80s, when black footballers emerged from the dressing room to find bananas being hurled from the stands, and racially motivated attacks and police harassment were the norm. Today, things have improved. Crowds are less hostile and stars like Anthony Joshua and Sir Mohamed Farah are among our most revered sporting heroes. But for athletes of colour, success on the field seldom converts to power away from it.

From Jackie Robinson to Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe, African American athletes have been at the center of modern culture, their on-the-field heroics admired and stratospheric earnings envied. But for all their money, fame, and achievement, says former New York Times columnist William C. Rhoden, Black athletes still find themselves on the periphery of true power in the multibillion-dollar industry their talent built. Provocative and controversial, Rhoden's Forty Million Dollar Slaves weaves a compelling narrative of Black athletes in the United States.