Floodlights and Touchlines: A History of Spectator Sport

Shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award2014

Spectator sport is living, breathing, non-stop theatre for all.
Focusing on spectator sports and their accompanying issues, tracing their origins, evolution and impact, inside the lines and beyond the boundary, this book offers a thematic history of professional sport and the ingredients that magnetise millions around the globe.

It tells the stories that matter: from the gladiators of Rome to the runners of Rift Valley via the innovator-missionaries of Rugby School; from multi-faceted British exports to the Americanisation of professionalism and the Indianisation of cricket. Rob Steen traces the development of these sports which captivate the turnstile millions and the mouse-clicking masses, addressing their key themes and commonalities, from creation myths to match fixing via race, politics, sexuality and internationalism.

Insightful and revelatory, this is an entertaining exploration of spectator sports' intrinsic place in culture and how sport imitates life - and life imitates sport.

Rob Steen is a sportswriter and co-leader of the BA (Hons) Sport Journalism course at the University of Brighton. He has written for the Guardian, the Independent, the Financial Times, the Melbourne Age, the Hindustan Times, the Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Times, where he was deputy sports editor. Winner of the 1995 Cricket Society Literary award and the UK section of the 2005 EU Journalism Award for ’diversity, against discrimination’, runner-up for the 1991 William Hill Sports Book of the Year, he has published over a dozen books and written for a multitude of magazines, including the Observer Sports Monthly, The Cricketer and India Today, and is also a longstanding columnist for Cricinfo.