antecedent to

The antecedent to such change occurred in 2005, when the first Americans to buy a Premier League club — Malcolm Glazer and his sons, who owned the N.F.L.’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers — acquired control of Manchester United.

The Surrealists, beginning with Guillaume Apollinaire, had made a hero of “the divine marquis,” in whose life and work they saw an antecedent to their automatic, stream-of-consciousness writing style, their embrace of the libidinal unconscious, and their rejection of bourgeois morality.

There is no mythical antecedent to David smugly carrying his beer gut like a womb.

“The profound historical antecedent to this is the bounties that state governments offered that allowed slaves to be retrieved if they fled,” said Charles Derber, a sociology professor at Boston College.

One example of this is the experience of stress, which can be a toxic antecedent to many health problems.