Amateurism In British Sport

The ideal of the amateur competitor, playing the game for love and, unlike the professional, totally untainted by commerce, has become embedded in many accounts of the development of modern sport. It has proved influential not least because it has underpinned a pervasive impression of professionalism - and all that came with it - as a betrayal of i

The pressures and demands of professionalism and commercialization have transformed Britain's sports. At the end of the 20th century sports have been packaged and marketed as mass entertainment for a national or even international audience. This volume explores different facets of this phenomenon.

We often decry "amateurism", yet one can do things "for the love of it" rather than for money. It can also show that an economic system which has more voluntary, unpaid activity is a more efficient system. This work examines amateurism's rationale, its history, ethics and economics.

In the essays collected here, amateurism, both as ideology and practice, is subject to critical and unsentimental scrutiny, effectively challenging the dominant narrative of more conventional histories of British sport.

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,3, University of Potsdam (Institut für Anglistik / Amerikanistik), course: Sport in the Making of Britain, language: English, abstract: The significance of sport as a means to explain dynamic processes in society has increasingly been acknowledged by scholars in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Vice versa it would be difficult, if not impossible, to understand the development of sport if contemplating it isolated and not on the broader background of society in general. This text concentrates rather on sport as a product of other areas such as the working world or politics, but also attempts to outline its initiating role for some changes in British culture. The time to be examined will be the Victorian era, which lasted from 1837 until 1901 and in which Britain underwent remarkable processes of modernization in all areas. It was also the period when sport became subject to remarkable transformations, largely acquiring the features of its modern twentieth century appearance. However, the attempt to describe contexts as multi- facetted as possible will make it necessary to also take a look into the time after and especially before those sixty-four Victorian years. Accordingly, the first chapter deals with sport in Early Modern Britain, emphasising especially the eighteenth century. It is concerned to present an overview, from which more or less universal features of the sports exercised in that time can be derived and which in the later course of the text shall be contrasted with the characteristics of Victorian sport. Those characteristics and its origins will be worked out in the second chapter, when sport is predominantly described as a product of technological modernization and shifting social attitudes. Here also the role of the rising middle classes as the new “Trägerschicht” (Eisenberg, 1999, p. 47) of sport will receive attention. The third chapter more technically deals with the most common and most popular sports exercised in Victorian Britain, whereat a distinction between upper- and middle class disciplines will be employed in order to present a more differentiated picture. The fourth and last chapter finally recapitulates the way of the middle classes, who managed to become the dominating influence in sport, while contrasting them to the higher and lower orders. With regard to the lower, focus lies on the amateur rule, which emerged in all sports, and which in Guttman’s (1979) words “war eine Waffe in der Auseinandersetzung zwischen sozialen Schichten” (p. 40).

At the London Olympics in 2012 Team GB achieved a third place finish in the medals table. A key factor in this achievement was the high standard of contemporary British sports coaching. But how has British sports coaching transitioned from the amateur to the professional, and what can the hitherto under-explored history of sports coaching in Britain tell us about both the early history of sport and about contemporary coaching practice? A History of Sports Coaching in Britain is the first book to attempt to examine the history of British sports coaching, from its amateur roots in the deep nineteenth century to the high performance, high status professional coaching cultures of today. The book draws on original primary source material, including the lost coaching lives of key individuals in British coaching, to trace the development of coaching in Britain. It assesses the continuing impact of the nineteenth-century amateur ethos throughout the twentieth century, and includes important comparisons with developments in international coaching, particularly in North America and the Eastern Bloc. The book also explores the politicisation of sport and the complicated interplay between politics and coaching practice, and illuminates the origins of the structures, organisations and philosophies that surround performance sport in Britain today. This book is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in the history of sport, sports coaching, sports development, or the relationships between sport and wider society.

At the London Olympics in 2012 Team GB achieved a third place finish in the medals table. A key factor in this achievement was the high standard of contemporary British sports coaching. But how has British sports coaching transitioned from the amateur to the professional, and what can the hitherto under-explored history of sports coaching in Britain tell us about both the early history of sport and about contemporary coaching practice? A History of Sports Coaching in Britain is the first book to attempt to examine the history of British sports coaching, from its amateur roots in the deep nineteenth century to the high performance, high status professional coaching cultures of today. The book draws on original primary source material, including the lost coaching lives of key individuals in British coaching, to trace the development of coaching in Britain. It assesses the continuing impact of the nineteenth-century amateur ethos throughout the twentieth century, and includes important comparisons with developments in international coaching, particularly in North America and the Eastern Bloc. The book also explores the politicisation of sport and the complicated interplay between politics and coaching practice, and illuminates the origins of the structures, organisations and philosophies that surround performance sport in Britain today. This book is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in the history of sport, sports coaching, sports development, or the relationships between sport and wider society.

This book provides a lively study of the role that Australians and New Zealanders played in defining the British sporting concept of amateurism. In doing so, they contributed to understandings of wider British identity across the sporting world.