Sports information and odds comparison; a site dedicated to the online sports betting community as well as those fans who just want to know everything about their teams.

It ins interesting to think a little about the origins of fanaticism as related to sports. Call them 'fans,' 'hinchas,' 'tifosi' or whatever, as extreme sports fans are known around the world, it is perhaps true to say that in the case of very popular mass entertainment sports like football (we are talking about the original, English football that people in the U.S. call soccer because someone robbed the word 'football' in order to identify their national sport,) they form a true subculture. Moreover: it would be naïve to think that wagering and betting didn't take place back then.

In the case of medieval tournaments, we positively know that knights tried to attract the attention of the public. In Rome, gladiators sometimes became super-stars and received freedom as a gift from the emperors in special occasions (they were usually slaves), and even Seneca wrote a little - not without contempt - about the fans cheering their preferred fighters as they killed each other.

However, we have to dig deeper in time to try to find the origins of sports fanaticism: during the Olympic games in ancient Greece, everything stopped while the tournament was going on, even war, so this is a pretty trustworthy indication that fanatics already existed them. True: there was a lot of religious undertones related to the Olympic games, but that's fanaticism anyway.

And even before, around the year 1.800 B.C. it seems that there were tournaments and people cheering in Mesopotamia and among the Aryans of northern India. These were events for the local aristocrats, and we don't have much information about the activities of the common public; however, betting and wagering was already quite common.

Shops, Auctions and Malls

Articles

Similar Sites

Related Web Pages

Books

Forum