Most popular sports are British in origin (football, cricket, rugby and its derivatives like gridiron, tennis, golf, etc.), spread by the British empire. But France and Spain also had large empires at one time. So why are there not more wildly popular sports of Spanish and French origin that are played in their former colonies and in the countries themselves? Even the most popular sports in France and Spain are British in origin, with France being incredibly strong in both football and rugby, and Spain being football daft.
One might ask the same of Portugal and The Netherlands.
Moved Cafe Society --> the Game Room.
The “second British Empire” was around at the right time, when leasure playing became a bit more popular. British ships brought them around the world.
Tennis is of French origin, though spread worldwide after it was taken up in Britain.
In any case, I think it’s less the origin of the sports – I’m sure there were French versions of football – who created organized leagues of it. The British were leaders in the concept of organized sports being good training and exercise and thus usually codified the rules first (with the exception of baseball, which is of UK origin, but codified in the US).
Real tennis may be of French origin, but the lawn tennis (formerly sphairistike) that is what most people understand by the word “tennis” today, originated in Britain. It probably does derive from real (i.e., royal) tennis, but is a quite different game.
Furthermore, according to Wikipedia, now, over half of the world’s remaining real tennis courts are in Britain (not that that is very many).
I agree, except that I think there’s another element to it - Britain was ahead of the others in terms of developing a large middle class, who had leisure time to spare. In time, these people found organised sport more satisfying that just whacking a ball around the countryside. Formal sporting associations in the second half of the 19th century may in some cases have had their origins in public schools (i.e. elite schools), but the growth of the sports was due to the general increase in prosperity.
I wonder how much the concepts of muscular Christianity helped promote the spread of Ango-American sports.
In a recent Bill Bryson book I read - At Home - he postulates that most of these sports were pretty pan-European in various forms, but the British codified them first due to a Victorian insistence on rules. That codification embedded them into the culture of the Empire in ways that non-British sports didn’t, and they spread from there.