ABSTRACT
According to Norbert Elias, the establishment of an academic discipline involves three closely related developments: a) the recognition of the relative autonomy of a certain field of science in relation with other fields of science; b) the development of a relatively autonomous body of theory concerning this field of science; and c) the development of specialized academic departments and professional groups devoted to the scientific study of the field.1 The trouble with history writing is that it was practised for a very long time outside the university; it was practised even before the rise of universities – think of Herodotus, Thucydides, Josephus, Tacitus and later Gibbon. People who made history sometimes also wrote it: Julius Caesar and Sir Winston Churchill are eminent examples. For a very long time the past has been recognized as a field of study. The formulation of special theories and the establishment of academic departments are, compared with the long standing interest in the study of the past, only relatively recent developments. This is also the case with the history of sports. Even if one limits oneself to modern sports, the competitive pastimes that became organized and standardized on local, national and international levels during the 19th and 20th centuries, one can recognize a long tradition of non-academic history writing. The other phases in the establishment of an academic discipline of sports history are much more recent. In the Low Countries, since the end of the 19th century, veteran sport practitioners,
journalists and other amateurs produced many histories of sports. Most of these histories were published as jubilee books or as memorial books for special occasions. From the viewpoint of academic professional historians this sort of book may have many shortcomings. In some cases they are nearly useless, especially when the history of a sport is just considered as a succession of matches or races, without attention to the backgrounds and motives of the athletes and the officials and organizations that facilitated these competitions. However, many of these publications do contain these elements. A good example for the English-speaking world is The History of the Football Association,2 which was published in 1953 on the occasion of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Especially for historians from other countries, who do not have easy access to the archives of the Football Association, it gives a wonderful overview of early English soccer (football) history. In the first part of this chapter, I will deal with this non-academic tradition of sports historiography in the Low Countries. I discuss it until the 1960s, though that does not mean that it does not exist in more recent times. However in the second part, for the period after the 1960s, I concentrate on the academic tradition of sports history writing.
