ABSTRACT
Until the early 1960s, sport in the United Kingdom was dominated by amateur ideals. However, from this time onwards, sport began to be transformed from an amateur pastime to a ‘professional spectacle’ as increasing numbers of businesses began to see the potential of sport as a tool for marketing their products (Allison 2001). Professional sports such as association football have also changed dramatically since that time. While amateurism was the dominant sporting model in the British Isles and the Commonwealth, not all parts of the globe were under the same amateur spell. Certainly the United States of America, while adopting many English Victorian sports, had transformed them into commercial enterprises by the turn of the twentieth century. Television coverage of sporting events has increased since the 1960s at a staggering rate (Rowe 1999), and as a result, companies realise that there is commercial benefit to be gained by their involvement in sport. Commercialism in this context should be seen as an influx of money that initially was channelled into those sporting federations and/or clubs that allowed themselves to be associated with certain products. This enabled these clubs and federations to collect advertising revenues. It is commercialism, and the money that has accompanied it, that has provided the catalyst for the transformation from amateur to professional sporting concerns (Howe 1999), since sporting participants wished to share the money that was ultimately the fruit of their labour.
