Institutional dynamics in sports – how governance, rules and technology interact

In this chapter, we examine institutional characteristics of technology-driven sports – that is sports that require some reasonably sophisticated equipment. We explore the notion that a sport is an intersection between a set of rules and a technology and that the sustainability of said sport will be determined in large part by the institutions that govern it. How a sport forms and spreads and the strength or weakness, and global cohesion of the rules governing that sport and the bodies that emerge to govern them will be highly influential on the long-term success of the sport. Sports economics and sports management are, for the most part, concerned with efficient resource allocation and valuation in mature (professional, team) sports modelled as a competitive entertainment industry. In this chapter, we explore a different way to understand how sports evolve in culture, society and the economy through ‘evolutionary sports dynamics’. We consider a taxonomy of ‘technology-first sports’, that is sports that start as a recreational activity based on a novel item of equipment, such as a bicycle, sailboard, motor car or even computer system or network as we find in eSports, that evolves into a competitive pursuit with the development of rules and the emergence of some coordinating body to facilitate competition, enforce rules, manage media rights and so on. We explore, through case studies, the trajectory by which a sport originates, grows and variously stabilises or collapses and how the efficacy (or lack of it) in their emergent governing institutions plays into those evolutionary dynamics.