ABSTRACT
Introduction Even when Michael Smith published his seminal early volume, Violence and Sport, in 1983, it was the case that violence had been studied from, as he put it, ‘the spectrum of academic disciplines from anatomy to zoology’ (p. 1). While we are in the fortunate position today to benefit from a far greater, and still expanding, body of research on violence, most of it conducted within the disciplines of sociology, psychology and criminology, what remains baffling is that so little of it has attempted to define and explain violence related to sport. Almost all of the sociological research on sports violence emanates from the subdiscipline of the sociology of sport; the parent discipline has basically ignored it.
