Sport provides spaces for pleasure, freedom, solidarity, and resistance, but it has also reproduced class privilege, patriarchy, and racism. This special issue explores how and why sport, paradoxically, leads to empowerment and disempowerment, inclusion and exclusion, unity and division. It features cutting-edge research on gender and sexuality, sport in the Global South, neoliberalism, race and ethnicity, and stadiums as sites of urban politics and national identity. The issue also includes a reflection on sport and art, book review essays, contemporary analysis on #BlackLivesMatter and sport, and a forum of scholars who use sport to teach radical history.