ABSTRACT
Steven Conn is referring above to museums in general, but his sentiments can be extended to the specifi c genre that is the focus of this book: the sport museum. Sport museums seem to be ubiquitous. Canada has at least 39 sport museums ranging from the Canadian Ski Museum, to the Manitoba Sports Hall of Fame and Museum, to the Olympic Hall of Fame and Museum in Calgary.2 Austria, with a population of approximately 8 million people, has 97 institutions. These range from sport exhibitions, to specialist sport museums, to sports as represented as part of folklore, local history and culture displays.3 In Britain there are national museums dedicated to cricket, football, golf, horse racing, lawn tennis, rowing, and rugby union as well as smaller institutions specialising in other sports.4 It is football, however, that is represented most commonly in museums: in London there are the Arsenal, Chelsea and West Ham United Museums, in Ambleside there is the Homes of Football, in Glasgow there is the Scottish Football Museum, and in Manchester there are the Manchester United and Manchester City Museums as well as the National Football Museum that has recently moved from Preston.5 In Australia, there are historical sporting artefacts, objects and material culture in mainstream museums, museums dedicated to sport history, and over 22 sporting halls of fame.6
