European and North American Sports Differences (?): A Quarter Century on

I first met Rod Fort in 1997 at a conference organized by FIFA in Neuchatel, which aimed to bring together people who studied sports economics/law/sociology on either side of the Atlantic. At the time, it would be fair to say that most researchers were not deeply familiar with the organizational frameworks that governed sports outside of their own region. We came to listen and to learn, and out of that meeting emerged many fruitful exchanges. For me, one of the most fruitful has come working alongside Rod at the University of Michigan for a decade. Lunchtime, preferably at the Brown Jug, was always a great opportunity to discuss the mechanisms underlying the systems of rules and norms that determined the structure of sporting competition or just to chew over last night’s game. Rod’s approach has always been consistent. He believes there is a logic to the organization of economic activity, much of which has been explained by economic reasoning over the years. When faced with new circumstances, his instinct is to use existing paradigms to understand what is going on first and only resort to novel explanations once it has been convincingly shown that they do not work. In order to progress further, any novel paradigm is required to pass the test of logical consistency. I happen to agree with this approach, which is one reason why I always found discussing these issues with Rod so rewarding. This chapter harks back to the paper that came out of our first encounter in Neuchatel and the paper he subsequently published which I believe was largely based on that initial interaction—“European and North American Sports Differences(?)”—which was published in the Scottish Journal of Political Economy in 2000. In it, Rod set out his approach to something that was new to him back then, and indeed a concept which had only recently been articulated for the first time, the European model of sport (European Commission, 1998). In evaluating this paper, almost 25 years on, I think many of his observations were prescient and encapsulate the challenges that the European model faces today.