ABSTRACT
Over the last two centuries, sport has developed from occasional, loosely organised physical folk play to a globally interconnected, rationalised sociocultural institution and industrial apparatus that can be called the “media sports cultural complex”. Sport is technically defined by the disciplined-yet-spontaneous movement of bodies and objects in space and time, but as it professionalised its practitioners became geographically mobile as part of the “new international division of cultural labour”. They had been preceded by the movement of people, frequently through military conquest, who transported and transplanted sporting forms and practices, which could also be locally customised. As flows of people proliferated in various directions, sporting dispositions and tastes accompanied them, sometimes finding an easy place in new environs where preferred sports were established, and at other times struggling to take root. This mobility of people and cultural forms was accompanied by imaged sport texts, meaning that, especially after the development of satellite and digital media technologies, sport culture could flow into multiple spaces across the world, and especially into the home environment. By this means, sport is deeply insinuated into everyday life, both banal and spectacular, articulating in a range of ways with social subjectivities and identities.
