The power of numbers: a plea for more quantitative sports history

Sport in Society, 2015

Abstract This article outlines my work as a sports historian and the people and events that have influenced my research and career. On route, I outline some of my thoughts, opinions and prejudices about academic life.

New Directions for Institutional Research, 1992

The International Journal of the History of Sport

Sports history is important for sports policy. No fully informed debate on sport can take place without reference to the historical dimension. If we want to know where we are heading it is useful to know where we have been. History is not just something that is behind us; it also follows us into the future. We cannot properly study contemporary sport without a sense of history. The sporting past has helped shape the sporting present and, by implication, also the sporting future. All sports have some inheritance from the past, be in rules, styles of play, competitions, equipment, or governing bodies, none of which are totally reinvented every time we go out to play. The role of the sports historian is to set straight the sporting record: not just what I term the basic ‘sportifacts’ of who won what, where, and when, but, more importantly, offering an explanation of why and when sport changed (and also why change sometimes did not occur) and thus how sport and its governance have arrived at a particular situation. History is an empirically based, interpretive social science. However, as with any contemporary evidence that is used to determine policy-making, the veracity of historical evidence cannot be taken for granted. Just because it is old and has survived does not mean that it is necessarily correct. Sources both today and historically are not neutral sites of information but ‘managed’ evidence open to manipulation and concealment. Historians should be aware that archives are sites of power that privilege some information above others. What evidence is collected and what is saved can be functions of power in past and present society. Subordinate groups – usually people who do not keep diaries, are not interviewed, and are too often nameless – do not always get their voice ‘heard’ in historical documents. Hence, it is imperative to know when it was produced, who produced it, why was it written, and what code was it written in. It is important to know if a document was contemporary to the event being investigated or one produced some time later with the benefit of hindsight. Moreover, ideas and philosophies can also change over time so when reading a piece of historical evidence it is essential to know the date at which it was produced, otherwise misinterpretation can occur. It is important to know if the author of the material had some expert knowledge or insider information and whether they were carrying any value judgements in their cultural baggage. It is possible that their standpoint is not a neutral one and the historian must be aware of this when assessing the value of their statements.

Sporting Traditions, 2022

This paper argues that by the nature of their training, economists and economic historians offer a different form of sports history from that of social and cultural historians. They bring a special set of tools to the study of sports history in their use of theories, models and theoretical concepts; taxonomies and typologies; and numbers. Yet, unlike economic historians, economists often have no real sense of history and are unaware of the source material and its pitfalls and unappreciative of its temporal context. Basically they do not do historical research but actually economics research and prefer to look at relatively modern periods with its time series. This could have implications for the future of the subject. However, behavioural economists are now challenging the standard economic approach that behaviour is driven by a conscious cost-benefit approach, and arguing that it is influenced by emotional, cultural or other factors. This too could have implications for sports history.

Making Sport History: Disciplines, Identities and the Historiography of Sport., 2013

It now goes without saying that sport is one of the most significant shapers of collective identities in the contemporary world and has been for quite some time. It is a powerful

SPORT TK-Revista EuroAmericana de Ciencias del Deporte

Sports are one of the important topics that are still included a sub-topic in the school curricula. Ball sports are considered one of the most important sports in our societies today because of their wide and enthusiastic audience. The aim of the study was to analyze the history of ball games, namely football, handball, basketball and volleyball, and to study them as a general historical follow-up study with a simple initial formula. It was also aimed to study the importance of sports to humans. There is a close relationship between ball games and environmental conditions. The place and the climate had an impact on the discovery of some of these games. Some of them have a wide and likable audience, and some were practiced by a certain aristocracy, and had an ethnic influence on their practice because of their popularity. Others derived from a second game played with new atmospheres and new laws. As long as there is a development in human life in general and in the sports fields in p...

International Journal of the History of Sport, 2019

The International Journal of the History of Sport began life in 1984 as the three issues per annum British Journal of Sports History but is now the world’s premier sports history journal publishing 18 issues a year. This paper traces its development under the direction of four Managing Editors.

2007

Respectus Philologicus

Sport in the Context of Social Sciences. W. J. Cynarski, J. Kosiewicz, K. Obodyński, Eds. 2012. Rzeszów: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Rzeszowskiego. 282 pp. ISBN 978-83-7338-813-0. Sport has been a very important component of human existence for ages. It is a complex and colourful phenomenon which arouses the intense interest of fans all over the world and which can be analysed from different points of view. Sport is definitely something more than pure entertainment. Anyone interested in sport should be­come familiar with the latest fruit of the work of the Polish scientists conducting research on different aspects of sports his­tory and sociology. It is worth emphasizing that in Poland there are numerous scholars who have put sport at the centre of their scientific interests.