Sport in Capitalist Society Tony Collins Chapter Nine Soccer’s Rise to Globalism ‘To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink.’ J.B. Priestley, 1928.1 In the early part of the twentieth century, an adage circulated among the European intelligentsia: 'One Englishman, a fool; two Englishman, a football match; three Englishmen; the British Empire'.2 Leaving aside the merits or otherwise of this assessment of the English male character, the maxim was soon overtaken by events. By 1930 - the date of soccer’s first world cup in Uruguay - it could almost be said that wherever two or more European or Latin American young men gathered, a football match would take place, or at least be the topic of conversation. Yet soccer’s rise to become the world’s most popular sport had little to do with the British Empire as it was formally constituted. Perhaps the greatest paradox in world sport is the fact that, despite being the major beneficiary of the sporting industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century, soccer was the last major British sport to to establish itself outside of the British Isles, Even today, soccer cannot claim to be the undisputed national winter sport of any English-speaking country beyond England and Scotland. Rugby was the first football code to spread beyond its original geographical location. This should not be surprising in view of the tremendous popularity of Tom Brown’s Schooldays across the English-speaking world. As well as being a primer for schoolboys and schoolmasters alike, the book also offered an uplifting moral tale for those seeking to justify or emulate British rule around the world. This can be seen clearly in Australia, where a form of organised football was first consistently played in Melbourne, inspired to a greater or lesser extent by former Rugby School pupil Tom Wills. Although its aficionados later claimed that the sport had sprung entirely from Australian sources, the laws of Victorian (later Australian) Rules football were entirely drawn from the varying forms of football played in Britain. In both Canada and the USA, versions of rugby based on the gridiron system emerged as the dominant form of football by the 1880s. The governing body of Canadian gridiron football even continued to call itself the Canadian Rugby Union until 1967, decades after it had abandoned all but the most vestigial links with the rugby union game. Canada’s undisputed national sport, ice hockey, owed much to rugby, both in terms of its early rules (originally the puck could not be passed forward) and in the fact that many of its early participants were rugby players, including James Creighton who consolidated the first set of hockey rules in the early 1870s.3 Despite its belief in its own exceptionalism, most of the elements of American football were present in the early years of rugby in Britain, including blocking and ‘downs’, until 1906 when the forward pass was introduced. In Ireland, the GAA’s own code of football mixed and matched elements from soccer, rugby and, one can assume on the basis of circumstantial evidence, Australian Rules.4 None of these codes of football would ever be sustained at an at elite level beyond their country of origin. The fact that the name of each was prefaced by its nationality explains their basic lack of appeal to the wider world. And, as they became popular and therefore culturally significant, they became entwined with notions of national identity and character, largely extinguishing their interest for the wider world. Moreover, these local versions of football were viewed by the non-Anglophone world as essentially subsets of a British sport known generically as ‘football’. As the world’s dominant imperialist power for the previous century, it would be to Britain itself that the rest of the world would look for sport, not its current or former colonies. This was tacitly acknowledged even by proponents of American sports, such as journalist Caspar Whitney, the U.S.A.’s most vocal supporter of amateurism, and right-wing US statesman Henry Cabot Lodge both of whom saw sport as a key element in the conquest of the world by the Anglophone nations. Conversely, it was this intertwining of national football games with national or regional identity that made it very difficult for rival football codes, especially soccer, to challenge these games in their native settings. The
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