The increased absorption in sports and games in Britain during the nineteenth century – a phenomenon of the greatest social importance – was paralleled and reinforced by the rise of sports journalism. In the early years of the century colourfully written weekly sporting journals such as Bell's Life in London were published primarily to cater to an interest in traditional sports like shooting, fox hunting, yachting and angling, as well as to more popular sports like horse racing and boxing, which were linked to gambling. From the middle to the latter years of the century the dissemination of a specialised sporting press became widespread, mostly in England but also in Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Dozens of such journals were published in succession and the price dropped from about a shilling for a monthly periodical to one or two pence for a weekly or daily paper. At the same time, attention increasingly became focused on cricket, rugby and the newly popular sport of association football (and, in Ireland, on Gaelic football and hurling).

As these spectator sports became more professional towards the end of the century, so too did those who wrote about them: over time, a new breed of full-time, paid journalists evolved who developed expertise in the games they covered. And as with some of the more popular sporting journals, near the close of the century the writings of these journalists gradually became integrated into daily newspapers. Both the playing of games for commercial purposes and the journalism linked to it began to comprise an essential core of the modern press, one encompassing the wider information preferences of the general population, however ‘trivial’ these may have seemed at the time.

Bell's Life in London, founded in 1822, was the most important British sporting journal published during the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, although it was preceded by a host of others including the Sporting Magazine (1793), which appeared monthly, Bell's Weekly Messenger (1796), a sixpenny Sunday newspaper that extensively covered country sports, and Pierce Egan's Life in London and Sporting Guide (1824).