When the Rogers Place arena opened in downtown Edmonton in September 2016, no amount of buzz could drown out the rumours of manipulation, secret deals, and corporate greed undergirding the project. Working with documentary evidence and original interviews, the authors present an absorbing account of the machinations that got the arena and the adjacent Ice District built, with a price tag of more than $600 million. The arena deal, they argue, established a costly public financing precedent ...

This book examines the political debates over the access to live telecasts of sport in the digital broadcasting era. It outlines the broad theoretical debates, political positions and policy calculations over the provision of live, free-to-air telecasts of sport as a right of cultural citizenship. In so doing, the book provides a number of comparative case studies that explore these debates and issues in various global spaces.

A THOUGHT-PROVOKING LOOK AT THE BIG BUSINESS AND IMMORAL PRACTICES BEHIND PROFESSIONAL SPORTS BY ACCLAIMED SPORTSWRITER DAVE ZIRIN, HAILED AS THE “CONSCIENCE OF AMERICAN SPORTSWRITING” (THE WASHINGTON POST )The fastest-growing sector of today’s sports audience is the alienated fan. Complaints abound: from inflated ticket prices, $6 hot dogs, and $9 beers to owners endlessly demanding new multimillion-dollar stadiums funded by public tax dollars. Those sitt...

With a labour fight looming, and the NHL's participation in the Olympics hanging in the balance, The Instigator looks at how two decades of lockouts, soaring ticket prices, and on-ice tinkering have convinced many hard-core fans that the NHL's long-time commissioner Gary Bettman is the devil in disguise. In 1992, the gross revenue of the National Hockey League was US$400 million. This season, the figure will be closer to $2.8 billion-a seven-fold increase. Even if that were the only criter...

Since its beginning, when its predecessor, the Bank of Toronto, was founded by a group of flour millers and grain dealers, TD Bank has evolved into one of the most proactive financial institutions on the planet. Today, it is a cross-border colossus. The bank’s expansion into the United States could yet prove to be one of its most successful ventures, with the familiar TD logo and its green background lighting up buildings in Manhattan and other major American cities. The bank is also the l...

“An exacting look at gentrification” (New York Times Book Review)—and the lives devastated in the processThe term gentrification has become a buzzword to describe the changes in urban neighborhoods across the country, but we don’t realize just how threatening it is. It means more than the arrival of trendy shops, much-maligned hipsters, and expensive lattes. The very future of American cities as vibrant, equitable spaces hangs in the balance....

A critical look at the tension between the larger role of the university and the commercialization of college sportsUnwinding Madness is the most comprehensive examination to date of how the NCAA has lost its way in the governance of intercollegiate athletics—and why it is incapable of achieving reform and must be replaced. The NCAA has placed commercial success above its responsibilities to protect the academic primacy, health and well-being of college athletes and fallen into an e...

The National Hockey League -- born in a Montreal hotel room on November 26, 1917 -- has much to celebrate as it approaches its centenary. Millions of fans from Montreal to Miami and Edmonton to Anaheim attend NHL games leach year, millions more watch on TV and the league pays its best players multi-million annual salaries.Over the course of its first century, the NHL's fortunes have ebbed and flowed. It has experienced setbacks and triumphs and innumerable crises. The league has awa...

The decline and fall of the Montreal Expos. In 1969 the Montreal Expos played their first game. Thirty-two years later the team that once boasted baseball’s best farm system is nearly dead. In this book former Expos president Claude Brochu gets to the bottom of the Expos’ story. From his successful marketing career at Seagram’s Claude Brochu was thrust into the role of Expos president in 1986. Back then the Expos were a team with terrific potential. But as the years went by attendance bega...

Across America, universities have become big businesses—and our cities their company towns. But there is a cost to those who live in their shadow.Urban universities play an outsized role in America’s cities. They bring diverse ideas and people together and they generate new innovations. But they also gentrify neighborhoods and exacerbate housing inequality in an effort to enrich their campuses and attract students. They maintain private police forces that target th...

“How can the NCAA blithely wreck careers without regard to due process or common fairness? How can it act so ruthlessly to enforce rules that are so petty? Why won’t anybody stand up to these outrageous violations of American values and American justice?”In the four years since Joe Nocera asked those questions in a controversial New York Times column, the National Collegiate Athletic Association has come under fire. Fans have begun to realize that the athl...

The reasons behind Detroit’s persistent racialized poverty after World War IIOnce America's "arsenal of democracy," Detroit is now the symbol of the American urban crisis. In this reappraisal of America’s racial and economic inequalities, Thomas Sugrue asks why Detroit and other industrial cities have become the sites of persistent racialized poverty. He challenges the conventional wisdom that urban decline is the product of the social programs and racial fissures ...