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Asports club orsporting club, sometimes anathletics club orsports society orsports association, is a group of people formed for the purpose of playingsports.
Sports clubs range from organisations whose members play together, unpaid, and may play other similar clubs on occasion, watched mostly by family and friends, to large commercial organisations withprofessional players which haveteams that regularly compete against those of other clubs and sometimes attract very large crowds of payingspectators. Clubs may be dedicated to a single sport or to several (multi-sport clubs).
The term "athletics club" is sometimes used for a general sports club, rather than one dedicated toathletics proper.
Friedrich Ludwig Jahn'sTurner movement, first realised atVolkspark Hasenheide in Berlin in 1811, was the origin of the modern sports clubs.[1]
Larger sports clubs are characterized by having professional and amateur departments in various sports such asbike polo,football,basketball,futsal,cricket,volleyball,handball,rink hockey,bowling,water polo,rugby,track and field athletics,boxing,baseball,cycling,tennis,rowing,gymnastics, and others, including less traditional sports such asairsoft,billiards,e-sports,orienteering,paintball, orroller derby. The teams andathletes belonging to a sports club may compete in several different leagues, championships and tournaments wearing the same club colors and using the same club name, sharing also the same clubfan base, supporters and facilities.
Many professional sports clubs have an associate system where the affiliated supporters pay an annuity fee. In those cases, supporters become eligible to attend the club's home matches and exhibitions across the entire season, and have the right to practice almost every kind of sport at the club's facilities. Registered associate member fees, attendance receipts,sponsoring contracts, teammerchandising, TV rights, and athlete/playertransfer fees, are usually the primary sources of sports club financing. In addition, there are sports clubs, or its teams, which are publicly listed - several professional Europeanfootball clubs belonging to a larger multisports club are examples of this (namely, Portuguese SADs (Sociedade Anónima Desportiva) such asSport Lisboa e Benfica andSporting Clube de Portugal, or Spanish SADs (Sociedad Anónima Deportiva)Real Zaragoza, S.A.D. andReal Betis Balompié S.A.D., as well as Italian clubs likeSocietà Sportiva Lazio S.p.A.).
Some sports teams are owned and financed by a single non-sportscompany, for example the several sports teams owned byRed Bull GmbH and collectively known asRed Bulls.[2] Other examples of this are the several sports teams owned byBayer AG andPhilips corporations through theBayer 04 Leverkusen andPSV Eindhoven respectively, that originally wereworks teams, the teams owned by theSamsung Group (Samsung Sports), and the teams owned by theAnschutz Entertainment Group (AEG). They may compete in several different sports and leagues, being headquartered in some cases across several countries.
In the field of competitive club sports, an athlete will typically be registered to only one club for a given discipline and will compete for that club exclusively for the duration of a competition or season. Exceptions to this includeplayer trades and transfers,athlete loan agreements and unattached trialists. Where an athlete competes in multiple disciplines, or where club membership has social or training aspects such as local athletic clubs, then athletes may register with multiple clubs.
Multiple membership is more common in the case of individual sports, such as thesport of athletics, where a distance runner may compete for atrack and field team as well as aroad running team, and also have further membership at a local sports club for training purposes. Some national sports bodies require an athlete to state a priority order of their club membership, outlining which club has the higher, or first, claim on the athlete's services.[3]
In many regions of the world likeEurope,North Africa,West Asia, theIndian subcontinent orCentral andSouth America, sports clubs with several sports departments (multisports clubs) or branches, including highly competitive professional teams, are very popular and have developed into some of the most powerful and representative sports institutions in those places. In general, student sports can be described as composed by multisports clubs, each one representing its educational institution and competing in several sport disciplines.
In theUnited States major institutions likeThe New York Athletic Club andLos Angeles Athletic Club serve as athletic clubs that participate in multiple sports. Examples also abound of sports clubs that are in effect one sports team. Each team from theNFL (American football),CFL (Canadian football),NBA (basketball),MLB (baseball),NHL (ice hockey) orMLS (association football) North Americansports leagues, can be called sports clubs, but in practice, they focus solely on a single sport. There are some exceptions, especially when multiple such teams are under one ownership structure, in which case the club may be referred to as a "sports and entertainment" company; see, for example, theOne Buffalo sports club, which fields an NFL team (theBuffalo Bills), two hockey teams (Buffalo Sabres andRochester Americans), professional lacrosse (Buffalo Bandits andRochester Knighthawks), general athletics and fitness (Impact Sports and Performance), and evenprofessional wrestling circuits (such as theKhan family'sJacksonville Jaguars,Fulham F.C., andAll Elite Wrestling). Even in such circumstances,collective bargaining agreements and contract laws generally do not allow a player on one sports team within a sports and entertainment company to automatically play for another team in the same company. On the other hand, Americanvarsity teams are generally organized into a structure forming a true multi-sport club belonging to an educational institution, but varsity collegiate athletics are almost never referred to as clubs;"club sports" in American colleges and universities refer to sports that are not directly sponsored by the colleges but by student organizations (seeNational Club Football Association andAmerican Collegiate Hockey Association for two leagues consisting entirely of college "club" teams inAmerican football andice hockey, respectively).
In theUnited Kingdom, almost all major sports organisations are dedicated to a single sport. The exception to this isCardiff Athletic Club based inCardiff, Wales, which is the owner of theCardiff Arms Park site. It is responsible for much of the premier amateur sporting activities in city withcricket (Cardiff Cricket Club),rugby union (it is the major shareholder of the semi-professionalCardiff Rugby Club),field hockey (Cardiff & Met Hockey Club), tennis (Lisvane (CAC) Tennis Club) andbowls (Cardiff Athletic Bowls Club) sections. Catford Wanderers Sports Club is also a multisports organisation, withbadminton, cricket, association football and tennis facilities. In addition, like in several other countries, many universities and colleges develop a wide range of student sport activities including at a professional or semi-professional level.Fulham F.C. once ran a professionalrugby league team and rowing club, which other football clubs have emulated since. Many football clubs originate from cricket teams. Today, most major cities have separate clubs for each sport (e.g.Manchester United Football Club andLancashire County Cricket Club are based inManchester).
Many clubs internationally describe themselves asfootball clubs ("FC", "Football Club" in British English and "Fußball-Club" in German; "CF",Clube de Futebol in Portuguese andClub de Fútbol in Spanish). Generally, British football clubs field only football teams. Their counterparts in several other countries tend to be full multi-sport clubs, even when called football clubs (Futebol Clube do Porto;Fußball-Club Bayern München;Futbol Club Barcelona). The equivalent abbreviation "SC" (for "Soccer Club") is occasionally used in North American English (for example,Nashville SC andOrlando City SC), but most North American teams (somewhat ambiguously as "football" inNorth American English refers toNorth American gridiron-style football) still use "F.C." in their name instead (e.g.FC Dallas orToronto FC).
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