Soccer's Rise to Globalism.Pages

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 "1 Sport in Capitalist Society Tony Collins answer to the question why was there no soccer in the United States - or Canada, or Australia or New Zealand, for that matter - is simple. Other football codes emerged and won mass spectator appeal before soccer was seriously established. In the United States, the number of people going to college gridiron games by the 1890s dwarfed even baseball crowds. In Melbourne, the Australian code of football was attracting five !figure crowds as early as the 1870s. Both styles of football quickly became associated with dominant ideas about national identity, giving them a social resonance that rendered discussion about the comparative aesthetics of other codes immaterial. Of course, soccer existed in all English-speaking countries, yet beyond the British Isles it remained weak and !puny, with the exception of the following it gained among the black population of South Africa. It is this identity of sport with national culture that also explains the failure of baseball to become a global sport, despite the determined efforts of A.G. Spalding. In 1888-89 his world baseball tour visited New Zealand, Australia, Ceylon, Egypt, Italy, France and Britain in pursuit of this goal. It failed despite the business acumen of its initiator, considerable public interest and the presence of future Hall of Famers Cap Anson and John Montgomery Ward in the team.5 Beyond its immediate colonies, and its unique relationship with its developing junior imperialist rival Japan, America before 1914 was not generally perceived by the wider world as offering an alternative cultural or moral sporting framework to that of the British Empire. !Baseball therefore had little of the emulative appeal of British sports.6 Soccer alone became a truly global sport. Yet its rise to worldwide pre-eminence was neither simple nor pre- ordained. Today, most historians of soccer attribute its global expansion to what they believe to be its intrinsic qualities. Some believe that it advanced simply because it is ‘the beautiful game’. David Goldblatt, among others, has argued that its success is due to ‘the game's balance of physicality and artistry, of instantaneous reaction and complex considered tactics, [which] is also rare’.7 But in sport as in love, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and aficionados of other sports also make similar arguments for their objects of !admiration. As in most debates about aesthetics, such arguments largely consist of selecting the attractive features of one sport and constructing an argument that supports the desired conclusion. Nor does such an argument fit the historical record. Up until the 1880s, the differences between the association and rugby codes of football were not as distinctive as they are today, as demonstrated by both Preston North End and Burnley easily switching from rugby to soccer and subsequently becoming founding members of the Football League when !it was formed in 1888. A related, yet no less erroneous, argument suggests that soccer is more ‘natural’ to play than rugby or other codes of football, because it involves kicking and not handling the ball. But this is a circular argument. Soccer appears to be more natural only because the sport is now so popular and ubiquitous - familiarity with a practice does not imply that it is natural. In fact, soccer is unique as the only type of football that does not !allow outfield players to handle the ball at all. Moreover, many saw soccer’s insistence on the exclusive use of the feet as a novelty or an innovation. When the writer Yuri Oleshare explained soccer to his father in Russia in the early 1900s, his father was incredulous: "They play with their feet. With their feet? How can that be?’8 Indeed, soccer’s very !“unnaturalness” may have been one of its appealing features. This also tends to undermine the argument that soccer’s supposed ‘simplicity’ gave it an advantage over other sports. The exclusive use of the feet make soccer a difficult sport to master. And, as anyone who has tried to explain the subtleties of the off-side rule will know, its rules are not necessarily straight forward. This argument is based on modern examples of today’s highly developed codes types of football - such as the now fiendishly complex American football - and ignores the historical similarities between the football codes !in the late nineteenth century. Nor was soccer less dangerous to play than rugby forms of football. In 1894 and 1907 the Lancet, the journal of the British Medical Association, carried out surveys of injuries sustained in soccer and rugby. On both occasions it concluded: ‘everything seems to show that the degree of danger incurred by players is greater in !the dribbling than in the carrying game’.9 So if the global expansion of soccer was not due to its perceived intrinsic merits, what did propel it around the world? "2 Sport in Capitalist Society Tony Collins ! The key is to be found in the development of professsional team sports in Britain in the late nineteenth century. Until the 1880s, rugby was the more popular code of football in Britain.

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