ABSTRACT

Case studies can illustrate clearly how particular sports have manifested the features pointed to by Guttmann, and Dunning and Sheard, how such features have been more or less characteristic of the amateur and professional forms of those sports, and how they must be located in their social and social-historical context. As John Bale has put it: ‘Sport, bound by rules, precision, quantifying, record-seeking and under bureaucratic control, increasingly came to mirror society at large’ (1989:42), and in this process the ‘transition from folk game to sport typically followed five stages’: (i) the folk game stage; (ii) the formation of clubs; (iii) the establishment of a rule-making national bureaucracy; (iv) the diffusion and adoption of the sport in other countries; (v) the formation of an international bureaucracy. In this chapter we offer four case studies cast in terms of this type of stage analysis, recognising its general applicability, but adding a more sociological and British-based emphasis, rather than Bale’s international and geographical dimension, in the consideration of later phases.