This book traces the relationship between sport and commercialization across 2,500 years of history, and offers readers a concise insight into sport as both a practice and profession.
In the early 2000s the international sports business had an estimated global turnover of over $500 billion – but when did the commercialization of sport begin? In this innovative volume Wray Vamplew takes readers from the emergence of the first major commercial sporting enterprises in Ancient Greece and Rome, through the expansion of sports tourism and teaching professionals in the Middle Ages, the beginnings of gate-money sport in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the development of leagues in the late nineteenth, and brings the scholarship up to the present day with its prevalence of mass spectator sport, often at the international level, professional sportspersons earning millions of dollars, and media involvement becoming the driving force behind sporting change.
Vamplew examines the interplay between the sports business and other factors – social, political and economic – such as the impact of industrialization, the growth in female sport, and the response to corruption in sport. To help guide readers, the work also offers definitions of sport commercialization, sport products, and sport entrepreneurship as well as explaining the terminology relating to commercialism and business. The result is a truly intersectional analysis of the relationship between sport and commercial ventures.
Overall this volume demonstrates how sport has depended on economic decisions throughout its history, but it also shows that profit-seeking has not always been the driving force behind sport commercialization.