ABSTRACT
The phenomenon of large-scale organised sports, governed by international federations that make rules, regulate 'official' participation and produce sporting events as mass spectacles for a global audience, is a distinctive product of Western modernity. Literature is not historical evidence, but it is material that should be of profound interest to the historian. Sport would be poorer without literature and the other arts to celebrate it and put questions to it; human societies would be inconceivable without all the cultural forms, sport included, that give meaning and value to our lives. In fact the survival of sport may be threatened not so much by the invention of virtual substitutes as by the relentless pace of commercialisation and mediatisation, so that many who love sport are genuinely alienated by large-scale sporting spectacles. Followers of sport today appear to manage without difficulty the complex and multiple loyalties that contemporary sporting events elicit, transferring their affiliations from Real Madrid to Spain as needed.
