ABSTRACT
As a social practice, sport occupies a contradictory position. On the one hand, it is associated with spare time, leisure, exercise and doing things for fun. On the other, it has become a multi-million dollar industry, with huge rewards for top performers, and a branch of both the entertainment and leisure industries. Clearly sport is part of the economic system and a potential means of generating profit. Yet so many of its key institutions, still marked by the formation of modern sport in the nineteenth century, are not simple examples of capitalist entrepreneurship. One striking feature of much sport is precisely the way that it is not organised as a business. Even the most potentially profitable English sport, football, has been, until very recently, largely owned and run by people who do not necessarily have profit as their main motive.1 Sport does, however, provide means by which significant profits can be generated in peripheral activities (sport agencies, the clothing industry, etc.) and clearly aids the process of profit generation (advertising and sponsorship). One common means of making sense of this is to distinguish between state, commercial and voluntary sectors of sports provision. While this can be of analytic value, it has to be remembered that in most lived sports practices there is a complex combination of all three.
