Has anyone read the above title, written by Tony Collins? I've seen a review, here, in a cycling site and am probably going to give it a go but am interested to see what others think.
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Sport in Capitalist Society
I'm encouraged to hear that it's by a guy who isn't an anti-sport snob. Most commentaries on sports in culture seem to come from people like that who just do not understand sports at all.
As our own EIM once said "football isn't really about football." That's profoundly dead-on and yet conceals a whole lot of complexity and competing interests and ideas that live together in tension in every sporting organization, every team, and, in some cases, within every competitor.
But 178 pages? That seems way too thin for such a broad and complicated topic. I could probably riff for at least 100 pages, Kerouac style, on what I know about sports and capitalism and I'm neither an economist nor an historian. Or at all interested in writing a book. -
Sport in Capitalist Society
The thesis seems very reductive. I don't think the Laws of Cricket or the concept of muscular Christianity can just be reduced to capital. Moreover, sport of course preceded capitalism; and The Olympics resisted professionalism for a long time.
Infact some aspects of sporting history read like a prolonging of feudalism rather than a birth of capitalism: professionals were being treated like shit in cricket as late as the 1950s.Comment
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