This chapter provides a general and partial history ofsports affected by issues of crime, social controland criminal justice. It is illustrated by specificinternational examples, chiefly from the UK and theUS. Examples from a variety of sports over a broadspan of time illustrate the close connectionsbetween sport and crime/law. Britain often boasts ofgiving football to the world and cricket to many ofits colonies. Attempts to bring baseball to the UKhave largely been unsuccessful, but the sport hasachieved a certain foothold in Cuba and Japan. Thetraditional Japanese sport of sumo has a long andmythic history tied up with national identity, butthe money to be made from it has attractednon-Japanese participants and a degree ofscandals.

No sport has been free from scandal and history shouldrule out any presumption of a ‘Golden Age’. HerePearson's (1983) Hooligan: AHistory of Respectable Fears isreimagined as Cheat: A Historyof Entirely AnticipatableDisappointments. To sum up, sport in thepast, as now, is variously seen as ‘good’ or ‘bad’depending on who was participating and where. Evenif it seen as ‘good’, the attendant issues ofgambling, large spectator crowds and alcohol alwaysthreaten to turn it ‘bad’.

This chapter notes the illegal or unruly history ofmany mass participation sports and attempts by theauthorities (of sport and of society) to use rulesand law to exercise control. This introduces some ofthe discussion in later chapters of howcriminological theories might be applied to sports.Sport has a history: its organisation, itsrelationship to wider society and the changes madeto its rules/laws and internal governance. Socialhistories of sport often feature these matters, butsometimes gloss over the contested socio-politicalnature of ‘folk’, and even organised, sports andmiss the criminological significance. Those ‘menfighting’, introduced in Chapter One, may beupperand middle-class men seeking to controlworking-class men, while retaining the right totheir own violence. Gender and race too affect one'scapacity to argue that one's violence is but sport.As Huizinga notes, ‘Ever since words existed forfighting and playing, men have been wont to call wara game’ (1949: 89).