sports industry increased greatly over the twentieth century, and in the
twenty-first century many sports are global. Labour restrictions have been
modified by forces of globalization, but they operate to differing degrees in
the major team sports of Australia; while soccer is completely integrated into
global labour markets, the Australian Football League (AFL) is almost com-
pletely sheltered. At top levels, individual sports such as golf and tennis are
entirely international, and the highest-earning Australian sports stars are
in international sports such as golf, tennis, and Formula 1 car racing, or
work overseas (Table 11.1). Overall, Australia remains distinctive in the
way in which domestic competitions are regulated and in the willingness of
Australian governments at all levels to providefinancial and other assistance
to the industry.
11.1 Historical Background
The popularization and commercialization of team sports was a direct conse-
quence of the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century. By the middle
of the 1800s, the benefits of economic growth were becoming more widely
spread as industrial workers’wages allowed discretionary spending beyond
food, shelter, and clothing. Factory workers and social reformers also suc-
ceeded in reducing working hours,first for children and then for adults. By
the 1840s and 1850s, skilled workers in New Zealand and Australia had
obtained a forty-hour week,^2 and similar changes would gradually be intro-
duced in Western Europe and North America. For working-class men with
leisure time, team sports became a popular pastime, both for playing and
watching others play.
The great sports innovation in the 1860s and 1870s in the cities and
industrial towns of Britain, North America, and Australia came from entrepre-
neurs who realized that by enclosing a ground they could charge entry fees
that could be used to pay professional players and perhaps also to make a
profit. People were paying to watch baseball in the USA in the 1860s, and the
National League, formed in 1876, was the world’sfirst professional sports
league. In England and Australia cricket became a popular spectator sport,
especially when representative teams from the two countries met in Test
matches, starting in 1877, but even games between English county teams
could attract 10,000 people. In English soccer, the FA Cup, established in
(^2) Average hours worked per week were higher, but fell rapidly in Australia after 1870, from over
fifty-five to under forty-five in 1913 (Huberman and Minns 2007; Shanahan and Wilson 2013).
A couple of reasons for the larger crowds at late nineteenth-century sporting events in Australia
were the lower average hours worked, and their faster reduction compared to the USA (from sixty-
seven tofifty-eight) and UK (fromfifty-seven tofifty-six).
Australia’s Economic Mores