The amateur rugby in England in s. XIX: philosophy or social manipulation?

Abstract

The August 27, 1995, Vernon Pugh, chairman of the committee of the International Rugby Board (IRB) for amateurism, said the Rugby happened to be a free sport. It thus ended more than a century of declared amateurism in this sport, and also ended a decade of discussions on shamateurism or concealed professionalism, in which the players were not paid to play but by work, whether real or fictitious, which gives the defending club. In that year, ended the anachronism of a late twentieth century sport governed by rules of Victorian England. How did he get to this situation? Dunning and Sheard argue that the phenomenon of amateurism in rugby in the nineteenth century was a complex instrument of social differentiation and must be analyzed from a historical standpoint and sociopolitical. In this line, Bádenas states that the British aristocracy in S. XIX used the growing interest in ancient Greek culture to assign values to the sport practiced at that time so that was conceptualized as a recreational activity characteristic of a social elite. To achieve this, extolled the values of a Greek amateur sports (which did not exist as such a concept) and enhanced those texts criticizing the professionalization of sports and its impact on sport. British theorists, as Mahaffy attributed to the ancient Greek sport values that matched the prototype athlete gentlemen of the Victorian era.