Sport and Entrepreneurship combines perspectives derived from business history and sports history, focusing on the important but relatively unexplored relationship of entrepreneurship and sport.
This important volume offers clearer definitions of both sports products and sports entrepreneurship, gives due regard to social entrepreneurs, and assesses the continuing relevance of Hardy’s pioneering study from the 1980s. Hardy himself provides an introduction to the volume, and chapters by Wray Vamplew and Dilwyn Porter supply an overarching theoretical framework, offering new ways of identifying and describing sports-related entrepreneurial activity. Each chapter explores a particular case study, focusing on specific examples of entrepreneurship as it has been practised in a variety of sporting contexts from the nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries, ranging from 19th century equestrianism, to 20th century ice hockey, and football in the 21st century and covering entrepreneurship in North America, Europe and the United Kingdom. Each, in its own way, adds depth and complexity to the discussion.
Bridging the gap between sports history and business history, too often seen as separate spheres, Sport and Entrepreneurship will be of great interest to scholars of sport history, business and sport, business history, and entrepreneurship. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of The International Journal of the History of Sport.
Preface: Three Decades Later: Reflections on Historians, Entrepreneurs, and the Sport Industry
Stephen Hardy
1. Entrepreneurship, Sport, and History: An Overview
Dilwyn Porter and Wray Vamplew
2. Opportunistic, Parasitic, Strategic, Symbiotic: Entrepreneurship and the Business of Sport
Dilwyn Porter
3. The Commodification of Sport: Exploring the Nature of the Sports Product
Wray Vamplew
4. The Patricks’s Hockey Empire: Cultural Entrepreneurship and the Pacific Coast Hockey Association, 1911–1924
John Wong
5. Entrepreneurship in an Amateur World: The Gaelic Athletic Association in Ireland
Mike Cronin
6. Sport and the New Culture of the ‘Second Golden Age’: Amsterdam’s Sporting Entrepreneurs in the 1880s and 1890s
Nick Piercey
7. New Competitions and Contracts: Sports Entrepreneurs and Litigation from a Historical Perspective
Steve Greenfield
8. Designing Diana: Female Sports Entrepreneurs and Equestrian Innovation
Erica Munkwitz
9. Opportunities for all the Team: Entrepreneurship and the 1966 and 1994 Soccer World Cups
Kevin D. Tennent and Alex G. Gillett
10. Social Change, Astro-Turfs, and Entrepreneurial Activities in the Context of German Non-Elite Football: The Example of Lower-Division Club BSV Bielstein
Kristian Naglo
Biography
Dilwyn Porter has worked extensively in business history and sports history and is a former editor of Sport in History. His research activities now focus mainly on amateurism and on entrepreneurship in sport. He recently co-authored English Gentlemen and World Soccer: Corinthians, Amateurism and the Global Game (2018) with Chris Bolsmann.
Wray Vamplew is Senior Special Projects Editor for the IJHS and a General Editor of the forthcoming Bloomsbury Cultural History of Sport. His research focuses on economic aspects of sports history.
