WI. No Professional Sport.

Wayne Rooney can 'earn' £225,000 a week from running around for a couple of hours. How would things change if he and others from other sports if they were not paid wages. Would they have a day job and play 'for the love' of that sport.
Yes they could get expence's and make money from ad's and writting (but not in Rooneys case). So instead of £200,000 plus a week £100,000 a year? Would we like sport more or less, respect them more and want to be like them if the money was not such a big factor?

Hope you know what I mean, if so, over to you.
 
I don't think player payments is the problem in sport, it's the promoters who talk about branding and markets. They make rules affecting the play because they want the "brand" to project a certain image and they start new teams in places where they think they can make more money from merchandising. It's bullshit, and the fact that players can make a good living from it is maybe one of the few good things about it.
 
that 70s show

I guess if you look back to the 1970s and before that we see such a sporting world as you present. Sportsmen did play for the love of it and many held regular jobs, at least in Australia, UK and Europe (I'm guessing that there was more money in professional sport in the US in the 70's so you may have to go back a few years there to see a similar situation). Crowds were a bit bigger than we see today (less on TV), and our societies seemed to be just as in love with sport then as today. Administrators held more power then and sportspeople were often taken advantage of in terms of having little to no say, or money. The World Series Cricket revolution (for Australian, UK etc members) and start of the professional tennis circuit in the 1960s certainly showed the depth of resentment this engendered among sportspeople. To prevent the media driven and high salary sportsworld we have today you will probably have to have a fairer distribution of the spoils in some way otherwise I think there will still be a strong push by sportsmen and women to move to higher pay. Perhaps if you keep TV investment to a minimum as that's been a major driver for making sport richer, at least in terms of money?
 
(I'm guessing that there was more money in professional sport in the US in the 70's so you may have to go back a few years there to see a similar situation)

The situation started changing in the US in the 1970s because the players in the largest pro sports, major league baseball and pro football started to organize.

In baseball especially, there was a mechanism called the reserve clause, which bounded a player to a certain team for life. The team and the team owner had all the control over salaries, players movement, etc. The player had no recourse over their contract and salaries were kept artificially low because the owner had that lifetime binding.

A series of court decisions between 1969-1974 the changed this. At the beginning was 2-year case of baseball outfielder Curt Flood, who essentially sued to challenge reserve clause because his team traded him to another team and he refused to report to the team he was traded to.

Flood lost 2 years of his career fighting the clause, but his fight led to a decision in 1974 in a case involving MLB player Dave McNally and Andy Messersmith, who both sued for the right to decide who their employers would be after their contracts with the current team expired. That brought free agency to pro sports, and the salaries accelerated now that players had a great right of free movement.

But the situation we see today did not came to pass truly in the mid 1980s, when you had a situation where both Major League Baseball and the National Football League each suffered two work stoppages in the decade. The results of both eventually further opened up free agency and gave the players a greater margin of collective control of their labor.

Now different sports have seen a different evolution. Consider how motor racing changed, and that too didn't see what we have now into the 1980s. And in many ways the changes impired by drivers and team owner have made the sport more lucrative and safer, but on the downside the sport has a stratification and specialization today which, in my opinion, has taken away some of the magic and global scope of the sport. In the 1960s and 1970s it wasn't uncommon to see a Grand Prix star also show up in Indiana in the month of May. It wasn't uncommon to see teams of American dirt track aces and Indy superstars go two around the clock at LeMans. Today, unless you have a heavy lorry full of Pounds, you will not see Lewis Hamilton in the Indy 500, or a team consisting of Ryan-Hunter Reay, Marco Andretti and Kyle Busch taking on Tom Kristensen and Dindo Capello at LeMans.
 
I guess if you look back to the 1970s and before that we see such a sporting world as you present. Sportsmen did play for the love of it and many held regular jobs, at least in Australia, UK and Europe (I'm guessing that there was more money in professional sport in the US in the 70's so you may have to go back a few years there to see a similar situation). Crowds were a bit bigger than we see today (less on TV), and our societies seemed to be just as in love with sport then as today. Administrators held more power then and sportspeople were often taken advantage of in terms of having little to no say, or money. The World Series Cricket revolution (for Australian, UK etc members) and start of the professional tennis circuit in the 1960s certainly showed the depth of resentment this engendered among sportspeople. To prevent the media driven and high salary sportsworld we have today you will probably have to have a fairer distribution of the spoils in some way otherwise I think there will still be a strong push by sportsmen and women to move to higher pay. Perhaps if you keep TV investment to a minimum as that's been a major driver for making sport richer, at least in terms of money?

New Zealand did not really go properly professional until the 1990s, led I think by the rise of pay tv. Rugby League competition also helped push Rugby Union to go professional. Now we have semi pro rugby union (all pro at highest levels), along with league, basketball, netball and cricket.

Not being much of a sport fan I don't really have a view if it is better or worse. I know that my local major team has suffered declining attendance roughly in line with the rise of professional high level rugby. Whether or not they are linked is another question
 
Wayne Rooney can 'earn' £225,000 a week from running around for a couple of hours. How would things change if he and others from other sports if they were not paid wages. Would they have a day job and play 'for the love' of that sport.
Yes they could get expence's and make money from ad's and writting (but not in Rooneys case). So instead of £200,000 plus a week £100,000 a year? Would we like sport more or less, respect them more and want to be like them if the money was not such a big factor?

Hope you know what I mean, if so, over to you.


Go to ireland. Dulin is host to the 4th largest stadium in Europe Croke Park the home of the Gaelic Athletics Association.Hurling, Irish Football and the other GAA sports are still all amateur.

All-Ireland finals can still pack out Croke Park. It'sposible to remain amateur but perhaps this is because Gaelic games are just that: played only in Ireland at a properly competitive level.
 
On another thought I wonder if the 2012 FA cup final would see Old Etonians playing Wanderers at the Kennington Oval one more time:D
 
Thank you for the detailed information on the American situation Chipperback. I agree that the loss of diversity we see now is a shame, in some ways we have lost the age of innocence and playing for the sheer joy of it in sport. Or perhaps I'm remembering events through rose tinted spectacles?
 
"Not being much of a sport fan"

A Kiwi who isn't a sports fan? I'm surprised they haven't run you out of the country Mr Vogel. :)

Well, I ran myself out, to London.

In London no one ever talks of sport or the like. It is poetry, rum, the weather, trains, whether or not high school exam rates are too low or too high etc. With these weighty matters, no one has time to talk about sports
 
I'm in Manchester. Here we speak of beer, whippets and how soft Londoners are with their fancy ways. Oh, and the weather (it's about to rain again!), trains (don't get me started) and the devaluation of A-levels so there may be some common ground.
 
You'd need a PoD back in mid 1880's or 90's (if I recollect correctly) which was when sportsmen (in particular footballers) first started getting wages. And keep in mind that in many ways it was a liberation for the working classes. Previously only the wealthy could take sport seriously enough to be good at it. The split between Rugby Union and Rugby League in the 1890's was over rugby clubs compensating their working class players for missing work.
 
You'd need a PoD back in mid 1880's or 90's (if I recollect correctly) which was when sportsmen (in particular footballers) first started getting wages.

Long before that - boxers began fighting for money before 1800. There were also professional jockeys and racehorse trainers.

As for team sports, there were professional American baseball players in the 1870s, and professional cricketers in the 1820s.
 
maybe if sports stayed local with leagues/codes being unstable and strictly regional. You could have a continual string of start up attempt at union that failed due to everyone wanting their particular rules to be adopted and not being willing to compromise.
 
I'm in Manchester. Here we speak of beer, whippets and how soft Londoners are with their fancy ways. Oh, and the weather (it's about to rain again!), trains (don't get me started) and the devaluation of A-levels so there may be some common ground.

It is good that men can talk with other men about matters of import, viz. trains and the rain that may fall on these trains, then whether this will disrupt the annual migration to Spain.

Of course my soft London hands, would, in the normal course of events be particularly difficult to wring uselessly, but this cyber-conversation is a different matter.
 
I think the "professionalization" of sport was inevitable once sports went from being mainly a self-rewarding activity by and for athletes to an entertainment for spectators willing to pay to see a game or contest. Also, from the US perspective, I would include major college athletics as "professionals" in that the "student athletes" are provided free tuition and related educational expenses to complete in front of thousands of people who pay millions of dollars to university athletic departments to see the contests. About the only non-professional athletes left at the top of their sport are in the individual stamina events that rarely draw large paying crowds or television contracts.
 
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