ABSTRACT
This chapter considers alternative traditions, directions and routes that have also provided sources shaping the institutional character of modern sport and the organisational forms that have sustained it: first, in the USA and second, within Europe itself. The case for a specific form of the development of modern sport in the USA has been convincingly proposed by Andrei Markovits, and, with Steven Hellerman, consolidated in their ground-breaking study of the place of association football/soccer on the edges or margins of the dominant sports culture of the US. The distinctive sporting culture of the US has also been viewed as the quintessential sporting embodiment, as Mark Dyreson puts it, of the core founding principle of the American nation: 'In making an American team, Americans invented a sporting republic'. Van Bottenburg identifies distinct mixes of influence, the primacy of a market model in US sports franchises for instance, and the varying balances of power between key actors from politics and the economy.
