When Margaret Thatcher was Education Secretary under Heath (and he was always to feel that she should have remained ‘under him’, hence the record-breaking ‘great sulk’), she abolished free milk in primary schools. To us babyboomers this was a deeply symbolic act, bucking the ethos and thrust of the welfare state. It was a marker… Read More »
This third and final blog asks what next for football in England and elsewhere? The ‘super clubs’ have become mature businesses. But because of the sport’s regulatory structures they seem to be businesses with limited opportunities for expansion, either by horizontal integration (namely, by taking over other companies in the same line of business) or… Read More »
It has been estimated that there were 4740 professional players turning out for 158 English clubs by the outbreak of World War 1 in 1914. By this time crowd in excess of 100,000 were regularly attending FA Cup Finals at the Crystal Palace. The minimum price of admission for a League match was sixpence (2.5p),… Read More »
Football has a long ancestry, reaching back even to Neolithic times. Its early folk forms in Europe and the Americas are reasonably well researched. In medieval England it was often associated with violence. Players not infrequently drew daggers during matches in the 13th and 14th centuries. Contests often provided opportunities for the settling of outstanding… Read More »
A second overly long blog on the English game – sorry! The Second World War, 1939-45, saw cricket at all levels both as a readily adjourned pursuit and as a way of surviving, even resisting, personal suffering and total upheaval. In its aftermath first-class cricketers who had ‘served’ had to readjust to post-war circumstance. The… Read More »
As with most sports, cricket probably had numerous precursors, some of which doubtless remain unknown to us; but its true origins have never been nailed down. There is documentary evidence that a young man, John Derrick, was accustomed to playing ‘crekett’ in the environs of Guildford, Surrey, in the 1550s. By the beginning of the… Read More »
A grasp of contemporary Western sport might be attained via reflections on its parentage; and there is widespread agreement among historians and sociologists that the birth of modern sport, if not necessarily its conception, occurred in England from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Departing from the rather formal analysis of Guttman and others, Dunning… Read More »
Do financial capitalism and its accoutrements, extending to a distinctively postmodern culture, warrant a revision of the characterization of modern sport? Have things moved on? It will be remembered that modern sport was thought to justify unambiguously positive responses to each of Guttman’s original criteria of: secularism, equality, specialization, rationalization, bureaucratization, quantification and records. It… Read More »
The early or mid-1970 have commonly been regarded as transitional. The period since has been variously described as the era of high or late modernity, second modernity, postmodernity or dis- or re-organized capitalism; more graphic choices include predatory, casino and crony capitalism. The label of preference here is the less prejudicial and more evidence-based financial… Read More »
Sport as play, performance, work or fitness, or skilful preparation for inter-community competition or war has been around as long as humans, and conceivably before. But this has not always been sport that ‘we’ identify as such. This blog’s author’s and likely readers’ starting point for defining sport is in all probability the second decade… Read More »