sports are different from those of ancient, folk, or medieval cultures.  "Specifically, these differences lie in the growth of bureaucracies, the focus on records and quantifiable performance, increased specialization of roles, increased equality in and for competition, and the move to standardize rules and techniques."  The most important aspect of both college and professional sports may be the counting of the money; they are multi-million dollar businesses; they are not played at but worked at and not by recreationists but by professionals.

Stephen Hardey, "Entrepreneurs, Structures, and Sportgeist: Old Tensions in a Modern Industry," in Donald G. Klye and G. D. Stark, eds., Essays on Sport History and Sport Mythology (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1990), 45-82.

John W. Loy and others, Sports and Social Systems: A Guide to the Analysis, Problems, and Literature (Addison-Wesley, 1978), 256, 257, 258, & 263-279.

In the early days of professional sports, you could forget about massive contracts and signing bonuses. Babe Ruth, in his heyday, getting a contract for $30,000 a year was a huge and unprecedented sum.  The leagues were smaller and the teams farther apart in all sports.  Teams played regionally instead of nationally and in many sports, there was no such thing as a real playoff system or championship.  Football players had leather helmets and no pads, pitchers always pitched complete games because relief pitchers did not yet exist, and basketball teams as well as all others were exclusively white.

Until the advent of radio, these sports were not nearly as popular either, with baseball and boxing really becoming national sports once everyone could listen to them for free in whatever city they were in.

Perhaps the most important distinction between modern and pre-modern sports is that the latter were regarded as a preparation for war. This was particularly true in Rome, where sports played a central part in military discipline, as Virgil illustrates in book 5 of the Aeneid. The Greeks, and the Athenians in particular, took a more holistic attitude to sport, regarding it as an essential part of education, establishing harmony between body and mind. Even in this case, however, it was young warriors who were being trained.

Modern sport is characterized by professionalism, bureaucracy and, most essentially, commerce. Although the spectator has always been an important part of sport, modern professional sports is a vast business—a state of affairs which only arose during the twentieth century. Charles Korr, a professor at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, points out in his monograph West Ham United: The Making of a Football Club (University of Illinois press, 1986) that in 1906, the average professional footballer in Britain was paid £2 and 10 shillings a week, about the same as a skilled manual worker or a train driver. Now, the average salary of a footballer in the premier league is £50,000 a week (approximately $3.3 million a year), with star players earning much more. In pre-modern sports, athletes acquired fame and glory but never vast wealth.