From the creators of the award-winning State of the World Atlas series, this beautifully designed and fully illustrated atlas profiles the world's major competitive sports, from American football to wrestling.

Alan Tomlinson paints the big picture of international sport, combining in-depth commentary on significant sporting moments with revealing analysis of the global political and business force that sport now represents - the commercial sponsorship that underpins it, the million dollar gains to be made from it, and the successes and failures of its celebrity superstars.

Packed with facts, figures and infographics, this fascinating book is an indispensable educational resource as well as essential reading for all sports fans.

Topics include: Olympics, Paralympics, Gay Games, Drug Abuse, Sports for Development, Media Coverage, Sponsorship, Merchandising, Spectators, Gambling and Tourism.

Why sports matter - from the introduction by editor Alan Tomlinson

"The cultural profile and the global sports economy have massively increased, mainly through ever-expanding media coverage, and ever-larger international events, which transform cities, indeed countries, and boost their 'brand'. This has generated serious issues concerning the integrity of sports, as our coverage of gambling and the use of performance-enhancing drugs shows. The fans of sports from cycling to track and field, American Football to baseball, have had to accept that some of their sporting heroes are flawed champions. But outright cheating in sporting competition is rare, and the spirit of genuine competition - if not pure 'fair-play', a term and ideal from a golden age of amateurism - appears overall to prevail. Sports continue to matter as long as the integrity of the competitive sporting spirit is upheld.

Sports also matter at the level of the individual and the community. For the individual they provide a source of identity, and a promise - if carefully managed - of a healthier life. For the group or the community, sports clubs and activities can be an expression of a buoyant civil society, a life between the market and the state, and lived in public rather than the privacy of the domestic setting. But in more advantaged societies the trend at the end of the last century ... was to move away from such collective activities, in societies characterized by decreasing social bonds and increasing forms of individualism. This tension - or balance - between the values of the traditional team-game and the more individualized, in some senses narcissistic, body cultures of our time is illuminated in the selected case-studies.

Whilst many of the sports covered in the atlas embody, and in turn reinforce, globalizing trends, we know how much sports are also a matter of local tradition, or of regional cultural affiliations and identities. In this opening part of the atlas, then, we follow this introduction with some coverage of sports that have little - or at least limited - aspiration to dominate the global sporting calendar. These are vignettes and colourful portraits of counter-currents, reminders of the idiosyncratic or distinctive nature of physical cultures and practices away from the mainstream."