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The folk-games of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were vastly different from the sports we play today in numerous aspects of their structure, style etc. One of the shifts observed by Guttmann (1979) and others has been the secularisation of sport. One significant feature of folk-pastimes was their link to the ecclesiastical calendar and religious events. Malcolmson (1973) notes that the principal games of folk-football often took place on Shrove Tuesday, Good Friday and Christmas Day. However scheduling of sport in contemporary times is generally unrelated to the church or religious events. Furthermore folk-pastimes were very simple in their organisational and administrative structure. As Malcolmson (1973) points out, often games began spontaneously with the venue being the environment the individuals were in, such as the streets of a town. Thus during these times bureaucratic structures did not exist. Organisation of activities lay in the hands of the participants and to a degree this was reflected in a more ludic sport form. In contemporary times a definite bureaucratisation of sport has occurred with networks of governing and overseeing organisations operating in every competitive sport, examples include soccer’s