Sports

All societies engage in sporting activities, but their motives for doing so vary substantially. From the end of the eighteenth century, first Britain and then the United States began to create sporting contests as commodities, to be bought and sold through the medium of tickets for entry. These societies were not the first to do this: almost 2,000 years earlier the Romans had created their own brand of sports in the amphitheater: chariot racing, mock battles, and, notoriously, gladiatorial contests. Moreover, in the eighth century b.c.e. the Greeks invented the Olympic games, a religious festival of sport which came to be seen also as a form of entertainment. No doubt the Egyptians, the ancient Chinese, Indians, Japanese, Maya, and Aztecs had sports that possessed an element of entertainment for the masses. What differentiated the development of sport in the early industrial period was the strictly secular emphasis of the games and the willingness to develop them as commercial activities.

EARLY MODERN SPORT IN BRITAIN

The first recognizably modern sports were golf, horseracing, and cricket, which all had organizing committees, rule books, and the obsessive gathering of statistical records in Britain by 1750. All of these sports had variants that could be identified in earlier cultures, but the formalism of the British made it possible to create a tradition that was more than merely oral and regional. Even today, for example, a cricketer can compare his or her feats against the great players of 250 years ago. Although golf was largely a private entertainment in the eighteenth century, cricket and horseracing developed as spectator sports largely because they were also vehicles for gambling. Gambling also created the first modern professionals, as promoters of cricket teams sought to ensure that they obtained the services of the best players. To this day, horseracing is a sport that is watched as much for the financial consequences to the spectator as for the outcome of the contest in itself. Cricket fell into disrepute by the early nineteenth century because of match-fixing scandals. What saved it was its adoption by the leading English schools as an embodiment of the virtues of "muscular Christianity," the notion promoted by British educators that healthy exercise went hand in hand with a healthy spiritual life. As a result, gambling was driven out, and interest developed in the game's aesthetic values, first from the point of view of the players, and soon from the point of view of the spectators. The first history of cricket was written in 1851, by which time it was well established as the embodiment of "Englishness." Watching cricket came to be seen as a reputable pastime, and Victorian businessmen capitalized by charging entry fees to grounds.

THE AMERICAN MODEL OF SPORT

Cricket had therefore developed all of the attributes of modern sports by the 1850s, and it was in many ways a model for subsequent professional sports. Baseball was played in England in the early eighteenth century, not least by royalty, but it failed to progress there mainly due to the dominance of cricket. Baseball reached the Americas by the time of the American Revolution, and was even said to have been played at Valley Forge. The myth of baseball's creation by Abner Doubleday (1819–1893) in 1839 has long been discredited. The most important event in the development of modern baseball occurred in 1842 with the creation of the Knickerbocker baseball club by Alexander Cartwright (1820–1892), who laid down many of the early rules. The Knickerbockers were in many respects similar to the aristocratic English gentlemen who ran cricket. However, a more entrepreneurial spirit entered baseball after the Civil War, and the foundation of the National Association of Professional Base Ball. In 1871 players marked a critical turning point, separating amateur from professional, with the latter left to pursue purely commercial goals. Following the British model of sport, commercialism was permitted within certain limits, so long as the leading role of aristocrats and upper-middle-class functionaries was acknowledged. In this the British modeled their sports on their empire; the Americans, by contrast, modeled their sports on business.

Not surprisingly, this meant that from the 1870s most important commercial innovations in sport came from the United States. In 1876 baseball organized the structure of competition with the creation of the National League, a concept emulated by the cricket authorities in 1891 and by the organizers of the new sport of football (soccer) in 1888. Baseball developed mechanisms for maximizing gate income, developed bigger stadiums and transport links to reach them, pioneered new forms of distributing knowledge about games (telegraph, radio, television, and the internet). It also created rules for controlling player mobility (so as to control costs) and limiting competitiveness (roster limits). U.S. sports which copied the baseball model (e.g., American football and basketball) became significant businesses in their own right. Individual sports such as tennis, golf, and boxing also began to develop their commercial potential in the United States in the early years of the twentieth century.

THE MODEL OF SPORT OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES

Sports that did not fall under U.S. control were commercialized much more slowly. The Olympics, revived by the anglophile Baron de Coubertin (1863–1937), notably eschewed commercialization for many years, insisting on a strict amateur code. Association Football (soccer), which grew from its creation in England the 1860s to became the world's most popular game by the mid-twentieth century (FIFA, its governing body, has more members than the United Nations), was still an amateur game in many countries by the early 1960s, and even where it was professional, the sums of money paid to players was small. Commercialism was downplayed, and emphasis was placed on playing the game for its own sake (although such traditions can also be found in many collegiate sports in the United States). It was the advent of competition in European broadcasting in the 1990s, where previously television had been controlled by state monopolies, which led to a rapid escalation of soccer revenues; today the income of each of the largest thirty soccer teams in Europe is as great as the income of many teams in the American majors. However, soccer has so far preserved the competitive structure it inherited from the British: balkanization of leagues based on nationality, the parallel existence of international representative competition (playing for your country) and playing for your club, and the mechanism of promotion and relegation (whereby poorly performing teams are automatically demoted each season to lower leagues). These mechanisms, although hugely popular with fans, have proved to be an obstacle to the commercial development of the large European clubs, which, despite their large followings and incomes, struggle to maintain profitability.

GLOBALIZATION

Until recent years most countries practiced their sports with a certain degree of insularity. Americans paid little attention to the sports of other countries. Although sports such as soccer had international competitions such as the World Cup, most fans concentrated on their domestic leagues. Even cosmopolitan festivals such as the Olympics generated domestic interest primarily through the medal table, by which national prestige could be measured. Television and the new media (internet, broadband, mobile telephony) are beginning to create global markets. Americans can now watch European soccer and Europeans can watch baseball's World Series. Fans of stars from developing markets, such as China's Yao Ming (basketball), can watch his performance in the NBA from their own homes. This globalization of sports viewing presages international competition for talent. Talented teenagers usually have several sporting options, and are increasingly drawn by the highest rewards. This in turn may affect the ability of sports to attract audiences in the long term. Nations of the formerly British Caribbean, traditionally a stronghold of cricket, basketball has come to be a serious competitive threat thanks to U.S. television. Soccer has become an increasingly popular sport in the United States thanks to promotional events such as the staging of the 1994 World Cup in that country, while stars such as Michael Jordan (basketball), Tiger Woods (golf), and David Beckham (soccer) have developed popular appeal that transcends the traditional sports audience.

Globalization has allowed multinational brands to supplant traditional local products, largely thanks to the ability of those brands to exploit economies of scale in production and marketing. There is no reason in principle why the same should not be true of sports. Soccer is already a truly global sport, and if it continues to make inroads in China and the United States its cultural and economic dominance is likely to increase.

SEE ALSO China; Information and Communications;United Kingdom;United States.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Guttman, Allen. Games and Empires. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Henderson, Robert. Ball, Bat, and Bishop: The Origin of Ball Games. New York: Rockport Press, 1947.

Mason, Tony. Association Football and English Society, 1863–1915. Brighton, U.K.: Harvester Press, 1980.

Seymour, Harold. Baseball: The Early Years. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960.

Szymanski, Stefan. "The Economic Design of Sporting Contests." Journal of Economic Literature 41, no. 4 (2003): 1137–1187.

Szymanski, Stefan, and Zimbalist, Andrew. National Pastime: How Americans Play Baseball and the Rest of the World Plays Soccer. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2005.

Underdown, David. Start of Play: Cricket and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England. London: Penguin, 2000.

Vamplew, Wray. Pay Up and Play the Game: Professional Sport in Britain, 1875–1914. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Stefan Szymanski