Photos Showing The Evolution Of Popular Sports Over Time
The evolution of big-time pro sports can be a tricky story to tell. Changes in rules, equipment, and the general sporting landscape can lead to significant changes in an individual sport, making it look drastically different than it did in years past.
However, some of the most popular team sports in the world have co-evolved throughout the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Here’s how it happened.
Pro basketball barely existed for many years.
Basketball’s origin story dates back to the 19th century, but for the first example of a viable pro league, one needs to look to the late 1940s.
While people had paid to watch basketball in the past – the Harlem Globetrotters are just one example – it wasn’t until the 1940s that the Basketball Association of America (the predecessor to the NBA) was founded.
It was largely a regional sport at first.
The early NBA was a fairly regional league, with most teams concentrated in the northeast – not just in big markets like New York and Philadelphia, but also in smaller cities like Syracuse and Rochester.
In the 1950s and ’60s, the league started to expand westward, eventually gaining a coast to coast foothold and moving out of its smaller markets.
The NBA truly emerged in the 1970s.
Thanks to stars like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the NBA eventually started to earn a higher profile in the American sports scene.
The ’70s gave way to legendary rivalries of the ’80s, which in turn led to Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls dynasty of the ’90s. These are the decades in which many of the best players in history played the game.
The modern NBA is dominated by stars.
As a sport with small rosters, basketball lends itself well to individual performances. Thanks to the legacy of stars like LeBron James and Steph Curry, the modern NBA is a star-studded affair indeed.
While basketball stars of the past were more likely to spend their entire career with one or two teams, modern basketball is marked by blockbuster trades and big contract signings.
Baseball’s legacy goes back to the Civil War.
Rudimentary early forms of baseball were played before and during the Civil War, but the first pro team wasn’t founded until the Cincinnati Red Stockings were established in 1869.
Professional baseball flourished for the last few decades of the 19th century, and eventually solidified with two leagues – the American and National – playing for one championship, the World Series.
Stars like Babe Ruth helped to popularize the game.
Baseball was easily America’s favorite pro sport even before Babe Ruth, but the Bambino’s slugging exploits helped elevate the sport to another level.
It was during Ruth’s era that the sport changed from “small ball” with few home runs to sluggers swinging for the fences. This is also the era when many of baseball’s most beloved stadiums were built.
Later, baseball struggled against football.
Baseball has remained popular through the years, but in the 1960s and ’70s, a shift occurred where football became America’s most popular sport.
Matters weren’t helped by the fact that baseball dealt with various scandals related to betting and performance enhancing substances, along with a lockout that cancelled the 1994 World Series.
Modern baseball is a global game.
In recent years, Major League Baseball has made efforts to connect with younger fans by implementing rules to make games faster-paced and more exciting.
The emergence of generational stars like Shohei Ohtani has also helped raise the profile of the sport in general, particularly in international markets.
Hockey was an outdoor game that moved inside.
Hockey was born in cold northern climates, where strapping on a pair of skates to glide across frozen ponds was second nature.
Even before the establishment of the NHL in 1917, pro and semi-pro hockey teams competed for the sport’s most important trophy, the Stanley Cup.
Slowly but surely, the league grew.
The NHL experienced early growing pains, expanding and contracting until the 1940s before arriving at a six-team league.
The “Original Six” era lasted for a quarter of a century, until 1967. That’s the years that the NHL doubled in size with six expansion teams. This helped establish the league’s presence in California for the first time.
Growing pains would continue.
The NHL saw some of its most legendary dynasties and players in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, and aggressive expansion in the ’90s added a slew of new teams.
However, the league also struggled with finances and saw instability with several franchises. During the ’90s, three teams relocated to new cities.
The modern NHL is full of star power.
While hockey is the least popular of the “Big Four” North American sports, the game has made great strides in its appeal.
The development of home-grown American stars from non-traditional hockey markets has boosted the game’s popularity, and high-profile international play has created a new stage for hockey’s biggest stars.
Soccer has an ancient history.
Soccer (football for non-Americans) has a history so long that its earliest chapters have been effectively lost to time.
It emerged from a medieval sport known as town ball, in which towns would violently compete against each other to be the first to carry a ball (generally an inflated bladder) to a goal. These loosely-organized spectacles could involve hundreds of people.
In the 19th century, the modern game began to take shape.
It was in the mid to late 19th century that soccer emerged as a distinct sport, after branching off from rugby and other games with a similar lineage.
During this era, the first professional teams emerged in England, and governing bodies – most notably the Football Association – were founded to help formalize the game.
It became the most popular sport in the world.
Soccer has never been the most popular sport in the United States, but it’s generally the most popular sport everywhere else in the world.
The World Cup, first played in the 1930s, was an important stepping stone towards bringing the best players in the world together. After a hiatus during World War II, the event has been held every four years ever since.
Soccer’s popularity is enduring.
With a tightly integrated league structure that allows teams from different countries to play one another in various tournaments, along with scheduling that permits breaks for international play, soccer is effectively a year-round sport.
The biggest league in the world is the Premier League, featuring teams from England and Wales.
Football had a rough and tumble past.
Football – the American variant, that is – is the most popular sport in the United States today, but for much of the 20th century, pro football was largely an afterthought.
After emerging as a sport distinct from soccer and rugby in the late 19th and early 20th century, American football was largely a collegiate pursuit in the early years of the 20th century.
The pro game eventually found its footing.
College football had enduring popularity right from its genesis, but it took some time for pro football to gain in popularity.
In the midcentury years, the emergence of the National Football League and American Football League made pro football challenge baseball for supremacy in the American sporting landscape.
The modern game is a far cry from the football of old.
Football was, and is, a rough and tumble sport, but players have become more athletic in recent years, adopting more streamlined equipment than their predecessors.
Increased awareness surrounding the risk of head injuries in contact sports has led NFL officials to implement rules that protect quarterbacks and kick returners, a move that has made the sport significantly less violent.
Things took off in the Super Bowl era.
The NFL and AFL agreed to pit their respective champions against one another in the first Super Bowl at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, a historic milestone for the sport.
A few years later, the two leagues would merge. While the Super Bowl was a big game right from the start, it slowly grew to become a multimedia behemoth that encompasses far more than just football.
