ABSTRACT
There are many difficulties in approaching an understanding of the financial business of professional sport. These difficulties are the functions of two phenomena. The first such phenomenon – a point we have already made – is that professional sport is itself a relatively recent human activity. The second is that the academic disciplines that would seek to examine the business operations of sport are even more recent. Those disciplines, ranging from economics, accounting and marketing on the one hand, to sociology, political science and psychology on the other, are by and large the children of postwar education and research. That they are contemporaneous with the major growth period of professional sport is an accident, and one that has not been a necessary benefit. So while the two phenomena have grown at the same time and in great leaps, they have been more like two individuals growing in different countries than siblings in the one household. Only one of the disciplines mentioned above has any significant, long-term history in the examination of the sport business, and that is economics.
