ABSTRACT
The Football Association (FA) was founded at a meeting in London in 1863. International sports administrators might have had good political reasons to mask or confuse the English origins of their sports, but the truth is that modern sport is predominantly and influentially English in origin in the same way that Islam is Arab, however widespread the sports have become and however universal their pretensions. The ethics of internationalism involve a norm of toleration for regimes which would otherwise be considered intolerable. Allen Guttmann'ss groundbreaking and influential study From Ritual to Record identified seven 'distinguishing characteristics of modern sports', features, indeed, constituting the 'uniqueness of modern sports': secularism; equality; specialisation; rationalisation; bureaucracy; quantification; and records. The development of modern sport at the international level, then, beyond national boundaries and borders, generated the growth of international federations, increasingly mediated by, as appropriate, the influence of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and its umbrella world championship, the Olympic Games.
