In Buenos Aires, for instance, British residents founded clubs for cricket and a dozen other sports activities, but it was the Buenos Aires Football Club, based June 20, 1867, that kindled Argentine passions. In almost each instance, the first to adopt football had been the cosmopolitan sons of local elites, lots of whom had been despatched to British schools by their Anglophile parents. Seeking status in addition to diversion, middle-class staff of British corporations followed the upper-class lead. From the gamut of video games played by the upper and middle classes, the commercial workers of Europe and Latin America, like the indigenous inhabitants of Africa, appropriated soccer as their own. Behind this epochal transition from Renaissance to trendy sports activities lay the scientific developments that sustained the Industrial Revolution. New video games, such as basketball, volleyball, and staff handball, were consciously invented to specifications as in the occasion that they had been new products for the market.

While the aesthetic factor survives in sports corresponding to determine skating, diving, and gymnastics, the modern emphasis is usually on quantified achievement. In reality, the transition from Renaissance to modern sports activities may be seen in a semantic shift; the word measure, which …