ABSTRACT
As a social practice, sport occupies a contradictory position. On the one hand, it is associated with spare time, leisure, exercise and doing things for fun. On the other, it has become a multi-million dollar industry, with huge rewards for top performers, and a branch of both the entertainment and leisure industries. Clearly sport is part of the economic system and a potential means of generating profit. Yet so many of its key institutions, still marked by the formation of modern sport in the nineteenth century, are not simple examples of capitalist entrepreneurship. Readers of this book in the twenty-first century may be puzzled that commercialisation is even an issue – it appears taken for granted that sport is thoroughly commercialised. Yet for much of the period between 1960 and 2000, commercialisation was a key preoccupation both of sports administrators who sought to accelerate or to resist commercialisation, and of cultural commentators who were frequently critical of the commercialisation of sport. Equally, any readers younger than 40 may well be puzzled that the issue of amateurism remained such a crucial element in sport organisation right up till the 1980s. Yet these themes were central to the tensions and contradictions that underpinned the dramatic transformations of elite sport between 1965 and 1995. This chapter contains, first, an account of the economic development of sport and its transformation since the 1960s, then a review of analytic perspectives upon this development, and finally an outline of economic processes and relations in sport that require further investigation.
