You are here: News » BBC History Magazine features » The link between sport and money
The link between sport and money
Pundit from the past: C.B. Fry
What would a supreme all-rounder have made of sports stars' earning power today?
Click here to skip to our pundit.
Summer has traditionally been a season of great sporting events. But what seems less traditional to many observers is the way in which the commercial side of sport is, these days, so much on display too. Whether it is corporate hospitality at Wimbledon, Test cricketers wondering whether the new Indian Premier League (IPL) will transform their sport (and their bank balances), or Premiership footballers signing lucrative deals for the new season, money clearly matters in sporting life.
And many assume that this is the culmination of a relentless move away from what used to be more innocent ideals of sport, where games were played not with a ruthless desire to win and make money, but where the amateur was revered, and supporters remained loyal to local teams rather than switching to commercial 'brands'.
But is professionally driven sport, and the link between money and sporting life, really such a recent development? I've been discussing this with Professor Robert Colls of the University of Leicester, author of Identity of England, who is currently researching the idea of the hero in British sporting history.
Has sport and money always gone hand in hand?
Robert Colls: Sport has always been closely related to wealth in all its manifestations - as cash in hand, as time and opportunity to do things, as health and fitness, as cultural capital in the widest sense. To 'sport' used to mean to have fun, and those who had the most money usually had the most fun.
The aristocracy loved to sport of course and had the horses and acres to prove it. The poor loved to sport too, though in their own way. What they called hunting, the magistrate's bench called poaching.
The English middle classes came to sport late, but they came full of ideas. Somewhere between the 1860s and the 1890s they invented 'modern sport', more or less, in a generation. Those they called 'amateurs' - or 'lovers' of sport - did not play for money because they were gentlemen. However, the only reason a gentleman could be an amateur was because he had money in the first place. Actually, that's not quite true. Most people played for the love of sport. What's more, in many cases, middle-class amateurs came to clean up sports that were corrupting under the influence of betting and patronage. Only where the gentlemanly ethic was strongest - in rugby for instance, or in rowing - was there a chasm between amateurs and professionals. These days, at the top level, amateurism has completely lost its battle with money.
Has money's influence grown with sport's globalisation?
RC: Yes. The crucial point is the difference between professionalism and commercialism. One represents being paid for doing something well. The other represents the opening of our world to a business model where all identities, cultures, and economies are stripped to their lowest possible common denominator in order to allow corporations to buy and sell sports events in the widest possible market.
In English football, for example, the Premiership was not just a reflection of this, it was the vanguard institution. Clubs moved grounds, switched sponsors, changed owners, and didn't play a single local or even English player and still, somehow, claimed to remain what it said on the badge. In less than a generation football went from yet another decaying Victorian industry to a global business in a new market (the Premiership) where you were entitled to anything you could get and anything you could get away with, on and off the field.
How has money affected the way fans identify with their favourite sports?
RC: Usain Bolt is paid to represent Puma. David Beckham is the face of so many brands we almost forget he is real. In the Indian Premier League every six is sponsored as a 'DLF Maximum' and every catch a 'Citi Moment of Success'. Fans are encouraged to commit to the brand through the sport, which is itself being turned into a brand.
Fans identifying with a local team was perhaps understandable when clubs and players were part of the community. Alan Ball, a member of England's World Cup winning team in 1966, once remarked that in his day footballers lived in the same streets as the supporters. Not now. They ride in blacked out limos.
Half of humanity watched the last World Cup final. Given the commercial pressure this represents, it's amazing how much genuine love of sport remains. But when the Premiership's 39th game idea is accepted - playing an extra fixture abroad - you will know then that the love affair is over. Money has finally won over fairness.
Pundit from the Past: C. B. Fry
What would a supreme all-rounder have made of sports stars' earning power today?
Charles Burgess Fry played cricket for Sussex, scored 94 first class centuries and captained England. He was good enough at football to play for Southampton and, on two occasions, to represent the national side. Just for good measure, while at university in Oxford, he equalled the world record for the long jump. Little wonder that Robert Colls considers him "the greatest all round sportsman".
But sport was not all he did. Fry, who was born in Croydon in 1872, was a figurehead for the ideal of the accomplished all-rounder, with sport merely part of a very full life. He found time to excel as a classical scholar, writer, journalist, and diplomat, was a lifetime advocate of training ships for boys, and stood three times for parliament in the early 1920s. As Professor Colls says: "At Oxford, he was the outstanding athlete of his generation but his love of sport was such that it had to take its (rightful) place among all the other fine things in life".
Professor Colls points out that in Fry's autobiography, A Life Worth Living (1939), "he never mentions money once. Not once". And this was not because he was rich anyway. Worries about his finances were believed to have contributed to a nervous breakdown he suffered while still a student. And when he died in 1956 he left a few pence over £9,197.
Sport, for someone from his background, was simply not seen as a way of making a living; that was neither its ethos nor its purpose. As the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography suggests, Fry took to writing in the 1890s as "he found that… was the most agreeable way of subsidising his chosen career as an amateur cricketer".
So Fry championed the superior status of the amateur, even if he lacked the wealth that usually made such amateurism painless. He would have found the wages paid to modern sportsmen bewildering, but he would have found their lives immensely boring. However, today's tensions between cricket's more traditional authorities and the new commercial kings of, say, the Indian Premier League, might have seemed a more familiar story.
In 1920 Fry was offered the crown of Albania and in 1934 he met Adolf Hitler. But that's another story in the very rich life of a great amateur sportsman.
August 2009
Robert Colls of the University of Leicester's School of Historical Studies is author of Identity of England (OUP, 2004)