I have to confess at the outset here that I am not really one for motor racing; it strikes me as intensely repetitive (watching an improbably fast carI have to confess at the outset here that I am not really one for motor racing; it strikes me as intensely repetitive (watching an improbably fast car driven at high speed around the same circuit time and time again does little for me – although I get the appeal of being there, as with almost any sports event, there’s something about the place, the crowd, the noise, the experience – but not enough to attend). That said I grew up in a motor racing community, in my youth regularly attended events at my local circuit, and with some friends at one stage entered an old banger in a demolition derby one year – so even in my ‘don’t care’ state I see the appeal, and have some empathy for followers.
Yet, even without that there are some events in almost any sport that just stand out; that have a cachet beyond the sport or event itself, and the Le Mans 24 Hour race is one of those. Part of it is, I suspect, the endurance aspect; part is that much of the race is on public roads; part of it is that the cars are, while specialist, not the absurd technological indulgences that we see in things such as F-1; and part of it I also suspect is the cross-over character of competitors including professional race drivers, celebrities, and others all working is a team. For all its wealth and grandeur there is the hint of the democratic about the race.
Richard Williams brings the eye of a slightly sceptical fan, of the insider who has managed to maintain a degree of distance or at least dis-belief to his centenary history of the event. He also brings the pen and tone and turn of phrase of an experienced quality journalist. As a result, he combines insider knowledge with a degree of critical insight, a good journalist’s skill in story-telling, a long standing commentator’s access to the powers that be and other figures, and an ability to discuss both the people and technology of the event in a way that keeps those of us who don’t care for the vehicle engaged.
In addition to the action on the track, Williams is also good at the behind the scenes shenanigans and the wrangling between forces and figures in French motor sport, as part of what he sees as the particular French skill at turning a sport into a mass spectacle. It is the spectacle that he does best. It’s not that we can smell the petrol, but it is close…. And it all left me wondering about the place of motor sport in a post-carbon world, although it is, he implies, very much a work in progress. All in all, then, for this ‘no-longer-cares-a-jot-for-motor-sport’ reader 24 Hours was an enjoyable diversion well spent....more
Some time in the middle of the year when many of us stayed home – 2020 – avoiding a virus, an old friend of Ned Boulting’s got in touch to say he’d seSome time in the middle of the year when many of us stayed home – 2020 – avoiding a virus, an old friend of Ned Boulting’s got in touch to say he’d seen an item at auction that might be interesting. A couple of weeks later, Boulting found himself the owner of 2½ minutes of Pathé newsreel of an old cycle race (the seller thought the 1930s). All he had to go on for where and when was a map at the beginning of the film showing a route from Brest to Les Sables d’Orlonne, 412 km away and still in Brittany, and an intertitle naming the leader as the peloton crossed a bridge as Beeckman. This engaging and entertaining book is the story of Boulting’s trip down the rabbit hole investigating the what, where, and when of his newly acquired reel.
To put this in context, Boulting is a cycling commentator from British TV, regularly covering the Tour de France and other road races, and like many commentators a cycling fan with a penchant for the sport’s history. He is not an historian – or at least not professionally – and while many will read this book as an exploration of and uncovering of forgotten professional cyclist (and it is), I’m inclined to read it an exploration of an historian’s practice. Starting with his two knowns – the route cycled and a name – Boulting unpacks quite quickly that this the 4th stage of the 1923 Tour de France, and that Beeckman is the Belgian cyclist Théophile Beeckman, a good but never top of the pile cyclist.
Along the way Boulting, as we all do, finds that much of the story of this piece of film, and Beeckman – this becomes a quest for Beeckman – is filled in by snippets, provided by strangers, and marked by red herrings that take him nowhere. There is the helpful archivist in Beeckman’s home town in Belgium, the local historian in Brittany, the staff member at the Pathé archive, the woman who sells old maps, the film restorer, and the guy who owns the second hand book shop. These are the people we, as historians, rely on to provide unconnected pieces of information that we weave into the stories we tell, hoping against the odds to build a convincing narrative of an incomplete past.
But this story is also quite recent. It’s quite conceivable that there are still people alive who knew a young man competing in the Tour de France in 1923 and who died in the late 1950s. Much to his regret, Boulting doesn’t find any such person, but he does find Beeckman’s granddaughter (albeit, born a few years after he died). In doing so he also finds out that the family, let alone the town, know very little about him – so in a sense this is also a tale of the restoration to memory of someone who in his day merited civic parades to celebrate his sporting successes.
Alongside this Beeckman narrative, though, the real joy of this, for me, is Boulting’s diversions as he is led astray by news stories in the local papers, serendipitous events that coincide, tangential moments that open up vaguely cycling related ideas and items. These sit alongside biographies of other participants in the 1923 Tour, race organisers, the stories of the Tour’s development, and its place in a wider cycling culture in France and Belgium. Boulting is also adept at political contextualisation, so in places there are sharp and insightful observations on post-war Franco-German and Belgian-German relations, the continuing effects of the war in France, the path of the Tour through sites that had not yet recovered from their state as battle fields only a few years earlier – torn up landscape and rubble strewn villages. These detours and diversions, these trips down detours and paths that circle around the race’s route put the 1923 Tour into a rich context, and remind me the even a 2½ minute newsreel can provoke questions well beyond the obvious.
I’m not sure many others will get my ‘insights to the historian’s craft’, and it is admittedly idiosyncratic – but there’s a lot going on here, not so much of it about cycling, but I suspect enough to appeal to the cycling aficionado as well as to the historian’s methods geek. All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable summer read. ...more
That political leaders seek to associate themselves with sport should come as no surprise. There’s plenty of good reasons why they should, the most obThat political leaders seek to associate themselves with sport should come as no surprise. There’s plenty of good reasons why they should, the most obvious of which is that sports’ popularity helps humanise those politicians – a vital attribute in these times of mistrust and scepticism, but to suggest that is the only reason why is remarkably cynical. Some are long term committed fans (although we have seen embarrassing examples where claims of committed fandom have come back to bite people) or have long term involvement (George W Bush, for instance, formerly part-owned a major league baseball team). Sports interweaving with politics is ubiquitous however, well beyond claims to fandom and photo opportunity appearances at major sporting events – sports’ social significance, its ability to represent community and nation means it matters, in the way many other social and cultural practices matter, and political leaders would be foolish to by-pass those connections and associations.
Yet despite all that and years of scholarly and popular studies of sport and politics, studies that seek to unpack individual political leader’s sport associations are rare (although there are several studies of various US presidents), and this exploration of Bill Clinton’s engagement with baseball stands out as a serious scholarly analysis of one President and one sport. Birkett unpacks the Clinton-baseball story through five events framed against various stages of Clinton’s fraught Presidency. Drawing both on times of unpopularity and times of scandal, but also recognising that for the most part he faced not just a hostile House and Senate, but ones that were unwilling to compromise and negotiate, while the early stages of a right-wing culture war played out. Three of the five events centred on on-field activities or the lack of play, two were more historic.
Birkett opens the analysis with Clinton’s support for Ken Burn’s major documentary series Baseball, which might seem an unusual starting point except that this TV series was a major cultural event of the mid-1990, becoming the most watched show on US public television. In doing so, Birkett draws out two primary strands of association: a White House vents associated with the launch, and Burns’ discourses around baseball as a unifying national practice, woven into the ordinariness of US life, society, and culture. These, given the series and Burns’ public profile, are powerful factors for political leaders to draw on.
Once he gets into the actuality of play and players, however, the story becomes more problematic – not in Birkett’s telling but for Clinton in that there are aspects that were beyond the power of anyone to control, and other that revealed the limits of Presidential power. The least problematic, and in some ways the most successful of the moments of worship in baseball church of civil religion is also for many the least memorable: Baltimore Oriol’s short stop Cal Rikin’s closing in on Lou Gehrig’s record of the most consecutive major league played – it’s a big number at over 3700 (around a decade and half of not missing a game). For Clinton this became a tale about the duty and dignity of going to work, and linked to his push for welfare reform as an aspect of ‘getting back to work’.
Elsewhere Birkett explores Clinton’s efforts to resolve the 1994-95 strike/lockout, where he was unsuccessful (exposing the limits of Presidential power), latter moves to build links between the image and experience of Jackie Robinson, desegregation, and affirmative action policies (which stumbled on the culture war and its early push against that policy approach), and the 1998 race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa to set a new record for home runs in a season and surpassing Babe Ruth’s record. It is this final association that Birkett unpacks most comprehensively and is most problematic. It was set against the inquiry into Clinton’s sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinski and the push to impeach him, and was then further unsettled by the subsequent (into the 2000s) unfolding story of the use of performance enhancing drugs in baseball, and both Sosa’s and McGwire’s problematic place in that story.
Birkett makes very good use of Presidential archives and several interviews with key Clinton advisors where he reads across the sources well to build a convincing narrative. Part of what’s convincing about it is that it is clear throughout that the baseball association was politically important, but also that Clinton was a fan – that he knew his baseball stuff and could join media commentary teams (as he did form time to time) and hold his own. Birkett also writes well – this is a flowing, engaging narrative that is both rigorous and accessibly insightful, and while as academic text I expect it is likely to resonate with those serious fans of the game also.
There’s no doubt, it’s a specialist text, but one with resonances well beyond the specific focus meaning that it should appeal to scholars of sport and politics, to the baseball aficionado, to those whose work focuses on political discourses, and to the American Studies crew. As academics, that’s more than most of us can hope for. ...more
**Shortlisted for the 2024 Lord Aberdare Literary Prize for the Best Book in British Sport History** A widely held view towards the end of the 20th cen**Shortlisted for the 2024 Lord Aberdare Literary Prize for the Best Book in British Sport History** A widely held view towards the end of the 20th century was that basketball, especially in its professionalised form most marked by the NBA was a conduit and carrier of US cultural imperialism and for the dominance of globalising US corporate power. We saw this in both popular and scholarly discussion, often focused on Michael Jordan as the synecdoche of this process, embodying in his play, his status, and his shoes, a unipolar world. Lindsay SarahKrasnoff, in this sharp and insightful exploration of French basketball both as a nexus of French metropolitan practice and residual imperial links in Africa and the Caribbean and as interwoven to the game in the USA points to a much more complex global dynamic. Crucial to the underpinning of her argument is a medium term process over the last 30 or so years where both the NBA and WNBA have internationalised, and with that international competitiveness has begun to equalise.
The focus on France is a solid one – not just because Krasnoff is a specialist in French sport history – in that the game is well established, with its earliest presence within a year or so of the game’s development. More importantly, although football is the dominant sport, basketball has a powerful regional presence and a strong presence in middle order towns and cities. This, she argues, is intensified by the growth after the 1980s of street ball, on the back of the globalisation identified in the later 20th century, but adapted to French style and conditions. The links and presence of the game were further intensified by the post-war presence of US troops (until the early 1960s) and the appeal of France to many in the USA, resulting in a small but significant US-sourced French population.
Krasnoff build her case around three strands – the first looks at the influence of the US game in France during the post war era, especially from the 1960s after some earlier exchanges in the mid-1950s. This deals with players, coaches, styles, and the full range of engagements. It is the era when the French state recognised the cultural significance of sport, especially during the 1970s, and began to build a state supported sport system. She also powerfully and convincingly weaves together the three spaces of the French world – the metropolitan, Caribbean, and African – as having a significance impact of the developing French game. The second strand then looks at the French presence in the US game, both at college and the professional leagues, stressing that it is both women and men whose presence is helping reshape the US game while also informing the developing French basketball prowess. Finally, she considers these two dynamics as shaping and influencing the current global shape of the game and puts them within existing contemporary networks and tendencies. All in all, this then is a well-grounded contemporary history of cultural interchange and global sport practice.
Krasnoff is on solid ground in this analysis – her wider work locates her approach in diplomatic history, and that helpfully informs her reading of system-to-system as well as person-to-person exchanges. That said however, she also has a tendency disturbingly common among scholars of sport in these kinds of international settings, to see all of this exchange and engagement as forms of diplomacy. To be fair, she distinguishes soft power from person-to-person and other more informal exchanges, but also includes the practices of those who, in her interviews with them, explicitly said they did not see themselves as doing diplomacy. It seems to me that tying these activities into such a tidy package means missing some of the key aspects of player and others’ subjectivities, weakening the power of insights and potential for work of this kind to better inform policy and practice. Equally significantly, if all of these exchanges are aspects of diplomacy, it seems that the notion of ‘sport diplomacy’ loses some of its explanatory potential – that is, diplomacy becomes so generic that it becomes less useful as a concept allowing us to make sense of what is going on. Again, to be fair, this is a problem of the wider field of ‘sport diplomacy’, not specific or unique to this exploration.
These niggles do not undermine the substance of the argument, even if they do weaken some of its power, and this remains a really useful, insightful, and important contribution to a rethinking of the character and form of global commercial, professionalised, sport in late capitalism. It paints a rich picture of a sophisticated, if flawed, talent identification and development system, of a global multi-ethnic France, of players’ challenges in balancing obligation to team and country, of the precariousness especially of women professional athletes as they juggle less than full time jobs in several leagues and usually countries, and of a global sport where balances of power and dominance are shifting. Krasnoff’s skill as a scholar weaving these tendencies together makes this a complex but engaging and clear analysis. That serves it make it well worth diving into. ...more
**Shortlisted for the 2024 Lord Aberdare Literary Prize for the Best Book in British Sport History** 3½ Sports uniforms, especially national uniforms, **Shortlisted for the 2024 Lord Aberdare Literary Prize for the Best Book in British Sport History** 3½ Sports uniforms, especially national uniforms, are complex things, standing in for all manner of being and identities – but the over emphasis on the semiotics of the nation can obscure the significance of the club and other uniforms – especially shirts. What’s more, the very ubiquity of the club shirt – football (as in soccer), various of the other codes (especially American football), but also other sports – can also obscure the specific past and present of the sport shirt. As Alex Ireland reminds us here, the uniform is quite recent in sport, and the ever changing, multiple shirt designs a year we see in some codes very recent, and marked especially by football.
Ireland is a football shirt collector, working to a specific framework, but like many fans has a deep knowledge of his fandom – enhanced by his work as an academic. In this exploration of a rather Brit-centric (which he concedes as a consequence of sources and his language abilities) he traces to emergence of the football shirt, its design features, exploring both the impacts of commercialisation and technical capabilities especially printing and fabrics. Yet it is very much on for the fan; I was hoping (which probably reflects my non-fan interest) in a more analytical discussion of the semiotics of the football shirt, of its shifting social and cultural meaning and context. Some business history and discussion of the design and production process perhaps – and it’s there, but wrapped up in the detail of what in places seems like lists of examples. And yet unpacking those issues might have given the book the more critical edge hinted at in the opening few pages.
This makes it seem like a missed opportunity, or perhaps an unbalanced discussion where Ireland recognised his shirt-fan-cognoscenti but didn’t really push them to consider some of the complexities of sports clothing. For instance, there is a short but valuable discussion of environmental costs and production ethics including workers’ rights in the industry, but I can’t help but think by including it in the section on replica shirts he allows us to side-line the way those issues are inherent in the industry as a whole, not a consequence of replica shirt industry specifically. It would be wrong to think that early 20th century textile workers in the UK, France, the USA or elsewhere had it comparatively good, for instance. The focus on corporate heads and company turnover and contracts rather than the production process in the early years leaves these questions unasked let alone answered.
Similarly, as an insider – a serious collector and an academic – I would have hoped for a slightly more critical unpacking of the culture, practice, and organisation of collecting. This might have included, for instance, the problems of authenticity – I can’t help but wonder, for instance how many shirts Maradona wore during the ‘hand of God’ game; an awful lot seem to have been claimed as the one. Some of these things are hinted at, but left barely considered. It feels, again, like a missed opportunity.
Even so, I quite enjoyed it, although it feels very much like one for the aficionado. ...more
I really like the idea of this book and really wanted to like the book more, but it doesn’t quite gel. Clemson sets out to weave together family, urbaI really like the idea of this book and really wanted to like the book more, but it doesn’t quite gel. Clemson sets out to weave together family, urban, industrial, and sport history. In doing so she is on to something we all too often forget or fail to make clear, which is the fundamental place of sport in the profound social and cultural changes of the late-19th through the mid-20th centuries in Britain. These changes, the consequence of the particular form capitalism took within the UK – she largely sidelines Empire as not a major direct factor in the family story she is telling – reorganised social and cultural life, and to a large degree reshaped working people’s lives in unimaginable ways.
The strength of the book lies in the narratives of family, urban, and working lives as she traces through maternal and paternal heritage at three notable periods – the late 18th century, the turn of the 20th century, and the mid-20th century. The family experience is also geographically dispersed although mainly south east and south west Scotland, and in the west Midlands around Birmingham. This gives Clemson space to develop diverse social and cultural narratives unpacking localities. She also makes sure to focus on men and women in the discussion and grants considerable insight to gendered differences, and to an extent generational (or at least age-based) difference also. This adds to the social and cultural insights. She also has a good sense of class distinction as the various family members she traces move standing – at least within working and lower-to-mid middle class strata.
Alas, where the book undercuts itself is in the exploration of sport, mainly because she does not have much evidence of the family involvement so the discussion is more general and generic, and based around the (reasonable) expectation of sport connections linked to the shifting and various class locations of the kin-folk she is investigating. This is to be expected, in some senses, in that for many, especially the class fractions that Clemson is exploring, sport engagement was so profoundly mundane, so ordinarily everyday, that many people left no record of their practice. It is only the handed fan or those who took on some formalised form of participation, as a player or official of some kind, that is likely to have left any substantive record or evidence. So in the later cases Clemson does have some of this evidence in the form of a collection of wartime match programmes, but for the most part the family sport association is by conjecture – of the ‘they would have done….’ kind. This, sadly, weakens the text as a whole in part underlines the richness and specificity of the rest of the narrative.
As a result, we have a good family history exploring the everyday, that is undermined by the ambition to weave in recreation and sport. I don’t doubt her argument that sporting engagement was a mechanism for cohesion and togetherness; unfortunately for the most part the evidence is not strong enough to demonstrate that directly. ...more
**Shortlisted for the 2024 Lord Aberdare Literary Prize for the Best Book in British Sport History** 4½ Rachel Hewitt’s impressive and engaging explora**Shortlisted for the 2024 Lord Aberdare Literary Prize for the Best Book in British Sport History** 4½ Rachel Hewitt’s impressive and engaging exploration of women’s outdoor physical activity both bridges important gaps in understanding and builds compelling commonalities in women’s experiences of the outdoors across 140 or more years. Grounded in her family tragedy were she returned to running in the wake of the deaths of several relatives, she was driven to reflect on the hostility of many men to her presence and the range of threats they posed to her and other women runners. This led her to wonder about the historical bases of this hostility – after all these were not activities constrained as team sports by number, space, and time, but running in public places. Although circumstances changed with constraints imposed by Covid-19 public health rules, the narrative of exclusion she unravels is consistent, compelling, and insightful.
The focus of her historical inquiry is an Anglo-Irish woman, landowner, and mountain climber called, throughout, Lizzie Le Blond (although that was her 3rd husband’s name). Although three times married, Lizzie spent most of her life living apart from successive husbands climbing in Switzerland, where her closest relationships tended to be with other women climbers and guides (most serious climbers, and Lizzie was a serious climber, necessarily and understandably have close and long term relationships with specific guides, often inheriting (or being inherited by) subsequent family generations). Lizzie’s climbing career was marked by many ‘firsts’ – first ascent, first by a woman, first British, and so forth – as key markers of climbing standing. She was a keen athlete in other contexts – skating, tobogganing, sailing, and the like, as well as a highly accomplished landscape photographer. Yet the officialdom of mountaineering refused to recognise her standing, denied her membership of the Alpine Club (because she was a woman), and subtly and not so subtly denigrated her capabilities. It’s a common image of the Victorian era.
Yet, Hewitt uses Lizzie’s case in two important ways. First, and less surprisingly, she explores the ways that Lizzie’s late 19th and early 20th century experiences link to and illustrate the commonalities in women’s early 21st century experiences. A sizeable part of the book is drawn from Hewitt’s running life and her shift during the 2010s from local ‘jogger’ to fell runner completing runs of up to 40 miles across northern England’s hills and moors. Woven through this, Lizzie’s story reflects and reflects on those contemporary experiences. Second, and more innovatively, Hewitt uses Lizzie’s life to explore the changing Victorian attitudes to women’s outdoor lives and physicality, showing that the exclusions we associate with the era were not an ahistorical static phenomenon, but developed shifting from tolerance, sometimes begrudging, to active exclusion by the early 20th century. In doing so, Hewitt draws a subtle and nuanced picture of shifting attitudes, approaches, and outlooks in ways that inform the contemporary while also maintaining the distinctiveness of the past. That said, there is a little more contextualisation to do here to make this Victorian trajectory clearer, but that might have made it a different book.
Hewitt, however, does not simply leave it at one story. She locates Lizzie in an active network of women climbers and other outdoor activities, complementing this historical awareness with a solid engagement with contemporary sociological explorations of the gendering of sport, respectfully recognising the fraught character of some questions, while being clear about her inclusive approach. That makes for a sophisticated socio-cultural exploration of histories of women’s outdoor physicality, alongside a carefully historicised grasp of contemporary experiences. On top of that, she writes well, with a sophisticated grasp of her craft (I’d hope so, she teaches creative non-fiction writing), making for a flowing and engaging text.
Don’t be put off by its length, it’s a fabulous, important, and elegant read. Highly recommended....more
**Shortlisted for the 2024 Lord Aberdare Literary Prize for the Best Book in British Sport History** To look at the 1980s in British social, cultural, **Shortlisted for the 2024 Lord Aberdare Literary Prize for the Best Book in British Sport History** To look at the 1980s in British social, cultural, and political history is to unpack a period of profound change, of heightened passions, of convention and continuity, of moments of beauty, and of events marked by tragedy and horror. In a sense, this makes them like any other decade – a random series of events taking place during a ten year period to which we attach a sense of coherence because of the artificiality of the dates we ascribe to a block of time. Yet there is a coherence about the era, largely linked to Margaret Thatcher’s term as Prime Minister, and the changes that brought about as well as perhaps more significantly the social and political struggles that marked that period (Thatcher’s term was 1979-1989).
Roger Domemghetti is less obviously concerned with the political history of the decade than he is the social and cultural history. As such he bookends his narrative with two events that mark key aspects of the changes in and transformations of sport – with wider cultural resonance – or more especially sport spectatorship. What’s more, these two events – in one sense profoundly different, in another closely interrelated – were only a month apart in 1985: their juxtaposition and symbolism is profound, and a marker of the insights woven through this valuable, engaging book.
The book’s opening event is a snooker match in April 1985, a world championship game that captivated huge TV audiences (18.5 million people) into the early hours of Monday morning, Conventionally a sport of smoky rooms, bars, and gentlemen’s clubs (although billiards had more cachet there), televised snooker was one of the cultural markers of changing leisure habits, growing in popularity since the 1970s (helped by the spread of colour TV) with the game’s players becoming widely known and celebrated. It was also a sign that sport spectatorship was changing, becoming more mediated. For the closing event, Domeneghetti shifts from Sheffield’s Crucible theatre, 35 miles up the road and a month later the Bradford Football Club’s stadium for an end of season match where a stadium fire killed 56 people; an avoidable tragedy and the first of three stadium disasters involving English clubs that resulted in profound changes in the ways people watched football, leading to associated changes in the class composition of football audiences, all in the context of the game’s changing economics and culture.
Domeneghetti’s treatment of both these events, his ability to weave together sporting and other social and cultural developments, his attention to shifting political cultures, and ambience all mark the quality of this as a scholarly exploration of the era. He builds a case that is episodic, where events and moments speak to contexts, and where those dialogues inform both an understanding of the era and provide rich insight to shifting sporting practices and cultures. An excellent example of the quality of this case is the way his discussion of boxer Barry McGuigan plays out against the background of ‘The Troubles’, but is not limited to the Northern Irish context as Domeneghetti also unpacks the interwoven character of British and Irish football (soccer), given further depth by his framing with both rugby and Gaelic football. This framing does not seem exploitative – McGuigan stands in for both developments in boxing but also as a metonym of the complexities that is the continuing British colonial relationship with Ireland.
This humane and humanising approach is a feature of the book. Domeneghetti shapes and explores the fraught British-Argentinian relationship (and with it a shifting global identity for Britain) in part through a narrative the centres Tottenham’s Argentinian player Ossie Ardiles, highlighting the personal and the human(e) amid the global.
The book’s episodic form – this is no year on year linear narrative – provides ways into the era, making meaning and giving insight to both socio-cultural shifts and changes in the form, shape, practice, and context of sport as a cultural phenomenon. This is also no narrowly focused exploration of the big team sports, and sport as a masculine space. Domeneghetti pays close attention to shifting gender expectations and sexualities. Women’s growing if hotly contested sporting presence is seen in activities as diverse as football, gym-based exercise, running, athletics, and sailing, while the tragedy of Justin Fashanu marks the fraught place of gay male athletes in British sporting cultures and gay men in Britain more generally. Similarly, the racialisation of sporting identities is elegantly teased out through cases such as Linford Christie and Frank Bruno. Domeneghetti does well manage the balance between stories of the personal and the wider issues they inform, reflect, shape, and reveal.
I seem to have reached an age where the era of my adulthood has become the subject of historical writing – and while I didn’t live through the British 1980s I did watch them from afar, engaging with the cultural shifts and closely linked in some ways to the politics of the era as my world underwent the sorts of Thatcherite evisceration that Britain also experienced. What I got from Domeneghetti was a sense of era, its cultural, social, emotional, and political feeling that sport, as an emotional as much as a physical pastime, is so good at revealing. It’s an excellent, accessible, informed way into the era....more
**Winner of the 2024 Lord Aberdare Literary Prize for the Best Book in British Sport History** If we read global sports history with a slightly sceptic**Winner of the 2024 Lord Aberdare Literary Prize for the Best Book in British Sport History** If we read global sports history with a slightly sceptical eye it looks something like this: before Britain, there was no sport but in the 19th century the smart Brits invented a whole bunch of sports that they exported around the world to everywhere except America where those headstrong ex-colonials tweaked the glorious British games and called them their own inventions. In those other places where the British sports took hold there was either no existing sport culture (most people’s view) or it was so weak it was easily replaced. There’s a few out of the way places, like Uzbekistan, where the glorious Brits didn’t get to, so they have been able to hang on to their weird pastimes – but they’re not real sports…. While I’ll admit this is overstating it, there’s also more than a grain of truth to the idea that the British exported football (in its several forms), cricket, polo (passing over that they nicked it from South and Central Asia), and a bunch of other activities by sending out the military, school teachers, missionaries, and administrators.
Matthew Brown’s fabulous history of sport in South America until about 1930 debunks this fantasy convincingly. He does so first by showing that there was a rich and complex sporting culture well before the British cultural forces arrived. Not only was there an impressive set of Indigenous sporting activities, but the colonists – mainly Spanish and Portuguese descent – had sophisticated sporting and body cultures also. What’s more, in many cases those pre-existing sport cultures provide the basis for those built from the newly globalised sport practices of the later 19th century.
In building this case he unpicks the three great institutions of diffusion – the school, the club, and industry – to argue that while they all existed, and that there was a notable British presence in many settings, to claim that they were the British instruments of a British sports culture does not stand up to inquiry. Here he draws on a growing body of recent South American scholarship, much of which is available only in Spanish or Portuguese (but increasingly in English, via journals such as the International Journal of the History of Sport – in which I declare an interest as an editor) that shows the ways that much of the continent’s sport practices and institutions were the consequence of local activities, decisions, and agency. This is a delightfully revisionist argument in that it does not deny that British presence, it just makes clear that the situation was more complex.
In the second part of the discussion he shifts focus from the process of growth, development and expansion of sport to look at what sports were played, by whom, why, and what sorts of social significance they may have had. Here he groups this discussion, in its first stages, into sports marked by beauty (as in style, motion, ugliness, and more), endurance (allowing discussions of cycling, climbing, running, and long distance swimming), controlled violence (boxing, football, and so forth), and technology (such as motor sports, flying, but also institutionalisation and records, and mediated audienceship via radio). Beauty and endurance allow for rich discussions of the gendering of sport, while the ‘controlled violence’ discussion includes insight to discourses of race and questions of Blackness and Whiteness. This is a sharp and insightful classification of sport and body culture practices that unsettles conventional typologies of sport while also avoiding the code-by-code approach understanding sport practice.
He then closes out the analysis with an exploration of the growing discourses of nationhood and nationalism in South American sport, and with a close reading of the 1930 football world cup dominated by South American teams. In doing so he draws together the earlier strands, locates South American sport institutions and athletes in a global context, and teases out the uncomfortable, in places antagonistic, relationship in sport between local and global histories, significance, and standing. This, then, is a powerful and insightful multilingual, multinational continental history of sport – and therein lies its more subtle strength; this is a continental history so includes evidence and analyses of French, British, and Dutch activities in Guiana, but does not draw in the former Spanish colonies in Central America – it is a history contained by its geographical space and as such also disrupts the dominant nation-state basis of nearly all sport history.
Brown quite explicitly sets out to unsettle the colonial framing of South American sport. He achieves that and more, giving us a superb decolonisation of South American history accentuating sport and body cultures that pre-existed football and other Euro-modern sports. In ‘reading against the grain’ of dominant approaches to the field and the continent, Brown challenges us to think the field differently. In doing so has given us one of the best sport histories I have read in years and book that merits close study well beyond its specific geographical and subject focus. It is an extremely sophisticated analysis that wears its sophistication lightly. Simply, outstanding.
August 26: delighted to hear that the Portuguese version is out soon, and that a Spanish version is in preparation....more
One of the givens of sport is that its use as a marker of nationhood, of national identity is widespread to the point of ubiquity; one of the paradoxeOne of the givens of sport is that its use as a marker of nationhood, of national identity is widespread to the point of ubiquity; one of the paradoxes of that ubiquity is that it is often the same sport – football (soccer) – that is claimed as in some way marking the nation. In many cases also this claim is made for more than the idea that a team of eleven, who in the words of Eric Hobsbawm seem more real than the abstract notion of the nation; that is to say, this is a claim made for a style or form of play. We hear this repeatedly in popular discussion, in talk of ‘samba football’ in Brazil, or ‘machine football’ as played by the German national team.
One of the places where this claim of a distinctive, almost unique, national style is rigorously made is Argentina, with its notion of La Nuestra, as a product of the country’s distinctive culture, history, and geography, projecting Argentina to the world. La Nuestra as a distinctive style and spirit is imbued with nationalist claims, including that it marks the separation of Argentine football from its English, or rather British, origins, asserting an identity beyond empire, or Britain’s informal empire given that Argentina was never formally colonised. Mark Orton does not deny that the idea of La Nuestra carried an image of the nation to the world, and into global consciousness. Not only does he not deny this, but he builds a solid and forceful case that this is so.
Where Orton differs from the orthodoxy of La Nuestra as projecting the nation to the world is in the distinctive, or rather the specificity of, the national origins of the style, of the spirit. He builds his case on three significant bases. The first, and compelling, strand is his clear case that that while the mythology alludes and refers to the complex immigrant nation, it draws its primary power from a narrow, gendered and classed view of the nation. La Nuestra then is an inclusivist myth that serves to exclude all but upper and upper middle class men as the origin of the style.
The second strand, paradoxically, is his emphasis on the place of the Other(ed) in and around the game. In this strand the masculinist, classed, criollo nation not only made space for but assimilated, partially, the migrant, the people of the provinces and inland regions, workers and the poor, Indigenous Peoples, and Black Argentinians. Even so, this assimilation, this incorporation of the Other to the nation was on the terms of the elite who shape, frame, and expand on this national mythology. That is to say, the Other is admitted, partially, to the nation but have no way of shaping or recasting it. These two strands are strong and compelling revisions of the myth of La Nuestra as some form of pure, inclusive Argentinianness.
It’s in the third strand that the argument gets wobbly. Orton seems to read, or at least understand, the idea of Britain’s ‘informal empire’ as only, or rather, primarily cultural allowing him to make a case that the diversity of cultural forms and identities in late 19th and early 20th century Argentina means that the idea it was part of an informal British Empire is unsustainable. So despite the power of his critique of ‘nation’ in this nationalist mythology, he argues that La Nuestra cannot be based in a rejection of British cultural dominance because the informal empire was too weak, if it existed at all. This seems to me to be a profound misreading of the idea of an ‘informal empire’, which in the Argentinian case is powerfully economic. Swathes of the investment in developing Argentina’s infrastructure was British – railways and shipping, agribusiness, and so forth – while Britain was also a major trading partner. Here the notion of an informal empire suggests that Argentina was very much within Britain’s economic sphere, much as other parts of Britain’s empire were, but without the formal political incorporation. Unfortunately this failure of political economy weakens the power of Orton’s critique of nation in the case against the specificity of the national origin of La Nuestra.
The power of the case is also weakened by aspects of the writing. It seems very much as if this is a PhD thesis worked up into a monograph – this is usual, especially in history and other social sciences. In this case, however, Orton needed a more rigorous editor – this is a shortcoming of the publisher; increasingly academic publishes are paring back their services of this kind. The effect is a degree of tendentiousness about the writing, often marked by a rejection of other scholars’ arguments, perhaps in an effort to assert the power and insight of this one, rather than a more generous approach that recognises their strengths and builds on those. This problem, however, is more one of frustration at the presentational style, whereas the question of the ‘informal empire’ is more serious.
Even so, there are important aspects to this case, especially in the critique of nation as narrowly based and with the partial assimilation of Others without transformation of the state or national imaginary. On top of that, this critique of La Nuestra as a nationally specific sourced style of play should push us to think harder about national mythologies and the image of nationhood in sport. For those reasons it is a valuable and important if flawed contribution to the scholarly field. ...more
There’s little denying that the Thatcher years were, for most of northern England, a bleak time with rising mass unemployment on the back of rapid deiThere’s little denying that the Thatcher years were, for most of northern England, a bleak time with rising mass unemployment on the back of rapid deindustrialisation culminating in the evisceration of communities that resulted from the intensity of struggle around the miners’ strike in 1984/85. Anthony Broxon’s exploration of the state of and changes in rugby league, the quintessential sport of the north, during this period doesn’t shy away from those problems, and the immiseration of the population and their communities as rates of joblessness rose rapidly. Yet even with his recognition of those circumstances he paints a distinction between tradition and entrepreneurial dispositions as the primary tension and driver of change.
This isn’t to deny the richness of the narrative, the stories told, the insights to experience in those communities, but even with that this is very much a tale of victory of the enterprise culture, and of the entrepreneur as hero – up to a point. Rugby league, like many sports, was transformed in the final quarter of the 20th century, as the sport and leisure sector became increasingly commercialised and financialised. In many ways this drive was at odds with the game’s convention image as based in community owned and organised clubs. When we add to that the game’s cultural marginalisation by the more upper class based rugby union, league’s parlous state as both its sector and communities were transformed is fully understandable. Despite this, and his attempts to engage with condition in the north however, we get little insight to those conditions – aside from Broxon’s use of Featherstone in west Yorkshire as the representative town of the ‘old north’.
The result then is a well-crafted, engaging story of a game that is transforming for the modern global era. Broxon highlights the growing sense of the game as part of an entertainment culture, with the rising celebrity of some of its stars, woven into other entertainment and cultural industries, with, as noted, a group of younger entrepreneurial types driving change. It’s hard, in this sense, not to see this as a New Labour version of rugby league’s history, right down to the conclusion where fan power defeats global capital (and with it a celebration of community – so not unfettered Thatcherite capitalism but more like a Blairite neoliberalism).
That’s also not to say it’s not a good read – it is, and it trips along entertainingly – but keep its ideological message in sight, and remember there were clubs the newly commercialising League left behind; more about them would have been a welcome addition....more
This is a gorgeous small primer introducing us to sports-related writing in British literature – although overwhelmingly English – from Shakespeare toThis is a gorgeous small primer introducing us to sports-related writing in British literature – although overwhelmingly English – from Shakespeare to Orwell. It’s mainly literary, with some journalism and reportage but dominated by fiction and poetry. A delight to dip into, and perhaps the perfect gift for that sporty type who plays round in literary pasts, or for the back pocket for those of us who that description fits. ...more
One of the more significant developments in historical analysis in the last 25 or so years, at least for those of us who explore colonialism and diaspOne of the more significant developments in historical analysis in the last 25 or so years, at least for those of us who explore colonialism and diaspora, has been the rise of what we might think of as ‘ocean history’. At its heart has been an increasing awareness of the existence and actuality of human engagements with their environments and across territorial and geographic boundaries. It was this latter tendency that saw a shift in Pacific history that rejected the colonial approach that consigned island communities to small parcels of land, ignoring their rich engagements with the sea, and justifying their denigration as small world, ‘primitive’ peoples. Pasifika scholars in return began to argue that the sea was not a barrier but a vital component of a ‘seamless culturescape’ (Dawson’s words) that is, in the widely invoked words of Tongan historian Epeli Hau’ofa ‘a sea of islands’.
Kevin Dawson’s exceptional exploration of aquatic cultures in the African diaspora in the Americas and in parts of the continent where those diasporic peoples originated, the West and Central Western areas, draws on this approach and locates a strong aquatic and maritime culture across the Atlantic. Just as the anthropologist Nicholas Thomas argues that Oceania is a Pacific people’s world, Dawson makes a compelling case for understanding riverine and maritime Americas as a Black as well as its more commonly seen Indigenous space.
Dawson builds his case through two strands. The first focuses on swimming, making the point forcefully that the water was a space of fear and danger for Europeans, very few of whom could swim, unlike many if not most of the people along Africa’s west coast and its inland rivers. Furthermore, the absence of good harbours along that long coastline meant that in most cases visiting Europeans, including slavers, were dependent on local watercraft to get to and from the shore. Ships row boats were not suited to the shore breakers, and non-swimming Europeans were dependent on African swimmers to save them in the event of capsize. Not that this skill undermined racist hierarchies – being land-bound was considered a marker of being ‘civilised’.
The second strand explores canoe building and use, demonstrating clearly the falseness of the widely repeated claim that diaspora Africans learned canoe building from Native American populations. This debunking builds on two bases; first that the parts of Africa that were home to many of those enslaved had rich canoe building cultures, and second the canoes diasporic Africans built in the Americas resembled those west African canoes, not those of the Indigenous Americans. Dawson further supports his analysis by noting that at least in the British Americas many of the Indigenous peoples had been driven out or killed by the time substantial African-descent populations built up.
This diffusionist, trans-Atlantic analysis is a key aspect of the argument Dawson makes for the significance of aquatic cultures, in that he demonstrates that diasporic including enslaved African water cultures were brought with them, not inherited or developed in the diaspora. He further develops his analysis to highlight the place and significance of those aquatic worlds in diasporic African settings. He makes a powerful case for the importance of swimming skills as economically valuable as diving. In the very early stages of Spanish colonisation pearls provided a large part of the Caribbean coast’s economic value where Indigenous divers were replaced by Africans. More valuable diving skills however were associated with salvage and recovery work. Here Dawson argues that divers came to occupy a position of comparative privilege in their captivity, showing also in some cases evidence that those divers used that position in the interest of bettering the conditions of others in their wider communities.
The presence of canoes in the African diasporic world also became, in his telling, a place of comparative opportunity or release. They provided mobility, opportunity for trade and access to markets, in being water bound they also provide spaces relatively separate from the dominant white world. The opportunity is however not only in the diasporic communities, but the skills required for canoe building Dawson suggests were shared between ‘home’ communities leading to cross cultural skill recognition, community building, and the emergence of common identities ‘in country’. That is to say, those skills provided the enslaved with bases for common identification and development across language and other cultural barriers. Furthermore those skills were valuable in the white economy where canoe transport allowed cheaper and speedier access to markets than anything on land. Dawson then reinforces this case for an African sourced maritime and riverine canoe culture by looking at songs across the southern USA, Caribbean, and into northern South America, arguing that although canoe songs became increasingly sung in colonial languages they retained a form distinct from field songs, with characteristics of rowing songs seen in source regions in Africa.
The book seems to unsettle conventional views of the African diaspora in two significant ways. First, it shows convincingly that there is a powerful African sourced set of cultural practices that make up a rich set of aquatic cultures in the diaspora and amongst the enslaved. In this it is a potent reminder that the Middle Passage did not annihilate the cultural forms, insights, understandings, and ways of being of those forcibly shipped. Second, he also makes clear that diasporic Africans in the Americas were not land-bound but that many actively lived in water cultures and practices. In the final few pages he brings his focus back to the USA, reminding us that the water world was principally an African cultural space until late in the 19th or into the early 20th century, and that it is only with the rise of Euro-American leisure cultures that aquatic spaces are claimed as principally white zones – be they beaches, pools, or other water worlds.
The book resonates on many levels. It is valuable for and vital reading in African American studies, it enriches insights for those of us working in Ocean histories, it extends notions of the Black Atlantic well beyond its initial associations with modernity and modernism, and it is essential for those us in sport and leisure history to remind us of the socially invented character of those practices and their inclusions and exclusions. Finally, it is a methodologically rich reminder of the need to and value of reading the traces, the silences, and against the prejudices of the archive creators.
Quite simply, this is a superb book that deserves attention well beyond what might be seen as a narrow audience of direct relevance. ...more
There has in recent years been a welcome shift in historical studies of South Africa, as the end of the apartheid regime in the early 1990s underminedThere has in recent years been a welcome shift in historical studies of South Africa, as the end of the apartheid regime in the early 1990s undermined those whose analyses sought to explicitly justify and protect colonialism’s hierarchies. In the last thirty years or so cultural histories have been marked by a growing power of a dissident tendency in that earlier research that highlighted the presence of the racialized oppressed majority in various cultural sectors, such as sport, and more significantly in the organisation of those sectors in ways that actively resisted the structures of the apartheid era. A key aspect of this shift has been a growing focus on non-racial sport that became increasingly important in the 1960s and 1970s as the apartheid state sought to embed its divisions and hierarchies in the banalities of everyday life. More recently there has also been a shift in sport studies away from the games that carried particular cultural weight in that racist, masculinst world.
This analysis of tennis, framed by a four month visit to the UK and Europe by a team representing South Africa’s non-racial tennis organisation (the Southern African Lawn Tennis Union) in 1971, is a valuable contribution to that emphasis on cultural dissent. Badat brings a valuable insider’s view to the events, in his youth he was a member of the SnALTU, played in its competitions (including against at least one of the touring party), and was embedded in non-racial sport. He builds his discussion around three key aspects. The first, and a substantive part of the first half of the book, is an exploration of sport in general and tennis in particular in the apartheid state. Here he is explicit not only about the racialized character of the game, but the class and gender dynamics of tennis. This provides the frame for other aspect of the opening half of the book, the experience of the team – six young men, in the language of apartheid, coloured and Indian, joined once in the UK by a woman, also coloured – as they played in tournaments in the UK and the Netherlands (mainly). This wider discussion is given further depth in the second half of the book, made up of player biographies of the six men in the ‘official’ team.
In that opening section Badat keeps a good balance between the wider question of apartheid sport and the focus on tennis, alternating between discussion of the structures of apartheid sport, sport in social justice struggles, and the role of international sports federations in maintaining the apartheid regime on the one hand, and the narratives of non-racial tennis and tennis in oppressed racialized communities. As the discussion develops he tightens his focus to the 1971 tour before stepping back to consider its wider significance. It is a well-crafted approach that both explores the event in its context, assumes little of readers’ pre-existing knowledge and yet still manages to extend the field for specialists. The biographies then deepen an understanding of non-racial tennis. Although not an official member of the touring party, I was disappointed that he did not include a biographical study of Charmaine Williams, who joined touring party once they got to England. She was clearly a more than competent player winning several mixed doubles SnALTU national titles (as we learn from the biographies of her playing partner). This omission is more perplexing given Badat’s criticism of the absence of women from the official team.
The tour was clearly a challenge for the players, and came with some considerable costs. The team captain, Jasmat Dhiraj, did not return to South Africa having been advised that the security police were ‘showing an interest’ in him. One of the team, Hoosen Bobat, had made the cut for Junior Wimbledon, only to be excluded after an intervention by the (white, apartheid complicit) South African Lawn Tennis Union and the International Tennis Federation, on the spurious ground that he was not a member of the SALTU-affiliated organisation. This exclusion seems to have contributed to a slump in form that he never really recovered from. Badat builds these event affecting both Dhiraj and Bobat into the analysis in ways that highlight effectively the politics of apartheid era sport.
The perplexing maintenance of the gendered exclusivity of the event aside, this is a valuable piece of work, unpacking and granting rich insight to the experience of racialized and non-racial sport in apartheid era South Africa. Its value is enhanced by the exploration of tennis rather than the more usual focus on male dominated codes, especially rugby, cricket, and to a lesser extent football/soccer. We can but hope it inspires further analyses – of tennis and of a wider range of sports....more
One of the great fantasies of sport history is the ‘diffusionist myth’, the idea that the presence of a sport in a particular locality – region or couOne of the great fantasies of sport history is the ‘diffusionist myth’, the idea that the presence of a sport in a particular locality – region or country, for instance – is attributable to some form of cultural missionary. The major problem with this myth, aside from the search for a single point of origin for something as ordinary hitting, kicking or throwing a ball, for running, riding a horse or whatever is that it is concerned only with one side of the equation, and tends not to take any account of what was there before these ‘cultural missionaries’ arrived.
We can see his myth in all manner of places – in the sort of colonial and imperial studies I work in I often get the feeling that there is an assumption that there was no sport, movement or physical culture in the places European colonisers occupied. Yet it is not just in those racialized environments that this myth has a hold; we can also see in for instance in British myths of the spread of cricket. There is a powerful version of the story that grants all manner of cultural power to a set of professional touring teams in England during the mid-19th century, especially the so called ‘All England Eleven’ – yet no missionary practice of any kind falls on a sterile environment; there are always belief systems, forms of play and movement, or other forms of cultural expression.
Jeremy Lonsdale’s discussion of cricket in Yorkshire before the mid-19th century is a little more subtle than the case we make in the kinds of colonial cases and Indigenous Peoples the kind of work I do often deals with. While not doubting the importance of the All England Eleven’s touring profile in the 1840s, he argues, and demonstrates, that in Yorkshire at least cricket was well developed, had an extensive presence, and a well-developed local culture by the early-19th century.
He does this convincingly, showing a widespread, uneven, in some places quite deep-seated presence for cricket, despite the difficulties in travel, in the changing world of work and the decline in flexibility in working hours, and the uneven distribution population distribution across the county. He paints a strong picture of close links in the south to competition with teams from neighbouring counties – Nottingham, Leicester, Derby and so forth with some recognition in the game’s established southern areas. Further north, where the county becomes more rural with smaller towns the story is different, with fewer clubs and less competition, while the lesser population density in the east was compounded by topography that included more marsh and wet moorland.
But it is not a linear development he shows, but uneven development with the rise and fall of localities suggesting a relatively shallow sporting presence – although this seems more intense in areas with smaller populations, which is a pattern we still see. Conversely, poor performances by teams from larger population area – Leeds and Sheffield – seem often to be attributed to a lack of practice and play, rather than capacity and capability. He makes a powerful case for the importance of Sheffield, perhaps (although Lonsdale does not develop this possibility) because of its economic and social profile as well as its relative proximity to strong southern teams.
The key difficulty with works of this kind, and one that Lonsdale struggles with, is sources and records. He repeatedly and carefully notes where the newspaper reports he is heavily reliant on suggest that the game is better established than the at times spasmodic reporting might suggest. He notes, for instance, the labelling of clubs and ‘old’ and ‘new’, or where local players are granted a particular reputation – suggesting individual profile and sporting presence. It’s a careful reading of sources.
The more difficult problem, and one that he cannot resolve through subtle reading of sources, is that he is left to conclude the infrastructure of the game – club existence and so forth – from reports of matches played. Aside from a few newspaper announcements and some subscription evidence, the only evidence of the game is some evidence of it having been played in a relatively organised form, with some implications of an underlying structure. As a result, much of the book turns around discussions of specific games, and repeated match reports is a hard form to keep engaging. To his credit, Lonsdale is able to trace some key players through various places, matches and styles of game, including what seems at least for a time in second quarter of the century to be a strong culture of single wicket cricket.
As useful and insightful as the book is in places, however, the close focus on Yorkshire and the emphasis on specific matches make this one for the aficionado, the specialist. I would have liked to have seen a little more attention to social setting and context. In places Lonsdale makes some very general comments about social and economic circumstances, but does not really or explicitly link these to the kinds of developments he is exploring.
Even so, it is clear that the All England Eleven found themselves in a well-developed and rich cricket culture in Yorkshire. The contemporary southern commentators seeming surprise at the growth and strength of Yorkshire cricket and its culture in few years after the AEE tour tells us more about southern prejudice than it does the situation on the ground. All in all then, this is a valuable if perhaps under-developed contribution to the literature....more
We don’t often think about football as a site of revolutionary struggle – at least not on the left, where in recent years it has more often been assocWe don’t often think about football as a site of revolutionary struggle – at least not on the left, where in recent years it has more often been associated with fascist and other forms of hard right organising. Yet as Carles Viñas shows in this engaging, highly readable, short book football finished up being a significant site of social and political practice in the years around the Russian revolution and the early Soviet Union. Yet it is not a straightforward football-built-the-revolution fantasy. Instead Viñas shows that the new state’s revolutionary leadership was a reluctant engager with football, viewed it with suspicion, and yet found that it was a useful tool.
Viñas takes his case through three broad chronological stages, exploring the game’s development in late Imperial Russia, arriving with British (mainly northern English and Scottish) industrialists. Many of these were managers brought in to help modernise the Tsarist economy in the wake of the economic crisis resulting from events such as the Crimean War and the social transformations linked to the abolition of serfdom that crisis provoked. During this era, to a large degree, the game was a migrant’s game – with many British and other foreign players and with clubs and other organisations controlled by those same upper middle class groups.
Drawing on a combination of already published material and some original evidence, Viñas shows how the revolutionary forces tended to view the game with suspicion – both for its class associations and for the fear that it would distract workers from the struggle, a fear no doubt sustained by the ways some employers encouraged teams with precisely this goal. Yet, Viñas also points to the growing presence of Russians in the game, in its strongholds in Moscow and especially St Petersburg, while also noting the growth of the game in other regions – Ukraine, Belorussia, and central Russia.
As his narrative develops, Viñas keeps hold of his balance between local, national, and international forces, noting that a key moment of change was the outbreak of World War One and with it the return of many of the British industrial workers to sign up for their home armed forces. An outcome of this was that Russian football nationalised – that is Russians, mainly middle class, filled the posts left by the British and other nationals. While the game became Russian run it retained its sense of class exclusion, so that there developed alongside the official leagues a partly organised ‘wild’ football where working class teams played independent of the official game. Even so, there still developed a popular following for the game, even as the war continued.
It is in the second half of the book that this begins to change, as Viñas shifts his focus to the revolutionary era, reading the ways various political forces engaged with the game during the revolution and civil war. More significant is the post-civil war era of nation/state building, where the popularity of football and other sports made it unavoidable, as the new Bolshevik regime sought to bring the game in class structures (factory and other occupation- and work-based teams for instance became very important). At the same time the analysis draws out the tensions in the early Soviet era between health, fitness, sport for health and sport for military training, and physical culture. Viñas also pays close attention to the ways that football helped undermine the Soviet Union’s isolation, and the way the USSR managed to circumvent FIFA restrictions on internationally representative play with non-FIFA members (the USSR did not join until after WW2) highlighting a clear form of sports diplomacy.
Viñas balances narrative, biography, and historical and political analysis (although for some readers his occasional very long footnotes might be distracting) to build a sharply insightful without being burdensome piece of politically informed sports history, although it sits uncomfortably between the scholarly and popular (to the extent those distinctions have meaning in history writing). It’s a largely synthetic analysis drawing primarily but not exclusively on other scholarly literature, making for a good introduction to the issues, with a useful bibliography for those who want to read more. This makes it all the more valuable. ...more
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