Modern history

The influence of British sports and their codified rules began to spread across the world in the late 19th and early 20th century, particularly association football. A number of major teams elsewhere in the world still show these British origins in their names, such as AC Milan in Italy, Corinthians in Brazil, and Athletic Bilbao in Spain. Cricket became popular in several of the nations of the then British Empire, such as Australia, South Africa and India. The revival of the Olympic Games by Baron Pierre de Coubertin was also heavily influenced by the amateur ethos of the English public schools.
Baseball became established in the urban Northeastern United States, with the first rules being codified in the 1840s, while American football was very popular in the south-east. With baseball spreading to the south, and American football spreading to the north after the Civil War. In the 1870s the game split between the professionals and amateurs; the professional game rapidly gained dominance, and marked a shift in the focus from the player to the club. The rise of baseball also helped squeeze out other sports such as Cricket, which had been popular in Philadelphia prior to the rise of Baseball. American football also has its origins in the English variants of the game, with the first set of intercollegiate football rules based directly on the rules of the Football Association in London. However, Harvard chose to play a game based on the rules of Rugby Union. Walter Camp would then heavily modify this variant in the 1880s, with the modifications also heavily influencing the rules of Canadian football.
Some historians—notably Bernard Lewis—claim that team sports are primarily an invention of Western cultures. The traditional teams sports, according to these authors, springs from Europe, primarily England. This ignores some of the ancient games of cooperation from Central America and the Indian subcontinent. The Industrial Revolution and mass production brought increased leisure which allowed increases in spectator sports, less elitism in sports, and greater accessibility. With the advent of mass media and global communication, professionalism became prevalent in sports. This further sports popularity in general. Perhaps in a reaction to the demands of contemporary life, there have been developments in sport that are best described as post-modern: extreme ironing being a notable example. There is also a move towards adventure sports as a form of escaping or transcending the routines of life, examples being white water rafting, paragliding, canyoning, BASE jumping, Parkour and more genteelly, orienteering. The history of sport education is an important topic of the political history.[