In the period 1875-1914 several major British sports became highly commercialised. This was acknowledged by contemporary observers. As early as 1885 horse-racing was seen as ‘becoming, everyday, more of a business than a sport’ and, less than a decade later, ‘Scottish football [could not] be described as anything else than a big business’. Its counterpart south of the Border was thought by one critic to be ‘as sordid a concern of commerce as Pears’ soap, or the electric light', and William McGregor, the founder of the Football League, acknowledged that early twentieth-century soccer was ‘a big business. The turnover of some of our clubs is considerably larger than the turnover of many an important trading concern. ’ Even cricket, considered by the run-making intellectual, C. B. Fry, to be ‘a cult and a philosophy inexplicable to … the merchant minded’, had ‘become more or less a gatemoney business’.

The question, however, is what sort of businesses had the firms in the sports industry become, or, more precisely, what were their ultimate objectives. There is a major debate among economists of modern sport on this issue. Almost without exception studies of North American sports clubs have argued that they were either profit- or wealth-maximisers, but in Britain many clubs, particularly in football and cricket, have exhibited long-term operating losses, which suggests that either they were highly inefficient profit-maximisers or that some other goal had priority over profits.