The material culture of sport

In parallel with growing academic interest in, and research on, the history of sport in the past three decades, there has been a developing interest its material culture. But what exactly is the material culture of sport? How can it be understood and analysed? How have academics approached this? And what can we learn from the wider public interest in sport’s material culture? The material culture of sport is too vast a subject to cover in one chapter – a previous paper focussed on one sport, Association football (Moore, 2017). Indeed, this study is split into two chapters. This first chapter considers sport’s material culture in terms of the typology developed by Hardy et al (2009). This chapter reviews the key literature, both academic and non-academic, on the subject.