One of the most profound and
difficult insights of the economic way of thinking is that free association can
produce complex, rule-governed institutions and social orders that no single
person or small group designed. Professional sports illustrates this insight
dramatically.
Today professional sports is
an important business and a major social phenomenon. It is a staple of casual
conversation, a topic that most people have opinions about (even if only that
they hate it), and a large part of both television and print media. The Super
Bowl is America’s most-watched television program, and the World Cup and
Olympic Games attract a truly worldwide audience. There are many kinds of
organized competitive sports, with no fewer than seven widely played kinds of
football, for example. Most of these have formal governing bodies and elaborate
rules both for playing and for settling disputes. There is even a sporting
“world court,” the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne. Typically sports
have a complex technical language, which is often impenetrable to someone not
familiar with the game in question–as generations of Englishmen have discovered
when trying to explain cricket to baffled Europeans and Americans.
This vast array of practices,
institutions, and rules is generally taken for granted: Few ever ask how it
came about. The story, however, is fascinating. While there certainly was
purposeful action, and many rules and institutions were consciously created,
organized sports are not cases of straightforward, “top down” planning.
Take football. In the Middle
Ages most parts of Europe had a game that was usually called “football”; it was
played on major feast days such as Shrovetide. Typically there were no limits
on the number of players on either side or on what could be done with the ball;
the aim was to get the ball over an agreed line. The events were often
extremely violent and were closer to what we would regard as a melee or riot
rather than a sporting event. Sometimes variants had more precise rules, such
as Calcio Fiorentino in Florence. Generally speaking each locality or small
region had its own variant, and there was no code of rules applied over a wide
area.
Then a crucial innovation
occurred in England. From the later sixteenth century on, schools began to play
a more organized form of the game with specific numbers of people on each side
and more elaborate rules. These initially evolved informally, on a case-by-case
basis, but eventually were codified and written down. Thus in 1845 the famous
Rugby school had three of its pupils codify the rules of the variety of
football played there. Typically in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
each school would have its own set of rules. During this time, however, two
other things began to happen. First, more and more sporting clubs formed to
play varieties of football on a regular basis outside of academic institutions.
These were purely free associations. Again, each one would typically have its
own agreed set of rules.
Second, when the turnpikes and
railroad lowered the cost of transport, games were arranged between different
schools and clubs. But each side had its own rules. Games could have been
played according to one of the sets of the rules, but this was unsatisfactory
for more than occasional games. So quite spontaneously, on a local and ad hoc
basis, two solutions appeared. The first was for all teams involved to agree to
use the rules of an outside club or school. Thus the rules produced by the
Rugby school were widely adopted, leading to the appearance of “Rugby
football.”
The second solution was for a
number of teams to get together and voluntarily agree to a common set of rules
in what we might call a “sporting contract.” This happened in the case of
“Association football” (hence “soccer”).
Next came competition among
rules (“codes”). The more teams that agreed to adopt a particular set of rules,
the more incentive there was for others to do so because it increased the range
and number of possible competitors. On the other hand, since the precise
content of any set of rules would produce a particular kind of game, some
preferred one set over the others. So some school- or club-based rules became
widely adopted while others never caught on. At the same time, the variation
among different codes led to increased differentiation and eventually the clear
emergence of several distinct kinds of football.
The next stage of the
evolution was the formation of national or (in the United States) regional
leagues in which clubs would agree to play each other in organized competition.
This in turn led to the appearance of a permanent organization both to run the
competition and to define and enforce the common rules. Subsequently
international regulatory bodies were set up, such as FIFA in 1904. All of these
were created not by governments but by free association among the sporting
clubs or associations that agreed to be governed by the body they had
established.
Racket Games, Too
The same kind of story could
be told for other sports, including racket games, hockey in both its major
forms, and cricket. The development of each shares some noteworthy features: It
was spontaneous, unplanned, and bottom-up, with large, complex organizations
produced by free association and agreement–and with a secession option. There
was competition among different rule systems. In many cases a key role was
played by particular entrepreneurial individuals or organizations. Thus the
distinctive American form of football came about largely because of the
innovations made by the Yale football coach Walter Karp. Innovation in the
rules of the games, their organizational structure, and the tactics employed
within those rules have remained a constant feature. One of the most striking
phenomena is the way that rule changes can have dramatic and unexpected
effects. Thus, the introduction of the forward pass in American football in
1906 led to a radical change in the nature of the sport, which was not
anticipated or intended when it was introduced.
Sport is a major part of many
people’s lives today all over the world and a significant social phenomenon. It
is perhaps the biggest simple example of social order based on and produced by
free spontaneous processes. Is it any wonder that, generally speaking, modern
sport is far better run than the political order?
No comments:
Post a Comment