George Orwell on Sport: “War without the guns”
“Sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will”
That, at least, is what George Orwell wrote in the ‘The Sporting Spirit’, an essay published in Tribune in 1945. When it came to sport, as with so much of society, Orwell was a pessimist.
In this brief two-part series of articles, I will first explore Orwell’s views on sport and then attempt to present sport, and in particular football, in a much more optimistic light.
Orwell wrote about Britain and the west in the 20th century in a way few else could. He observed what he saw as the contradictions and failings at the heart of both the countries in which he lived, and the movements that tried to change them.
It is not surprising, then, that he was not a fan of organised sport.
For Orwell, sport was no more than a facet of nationalism on an international level, an expression of regional hatred domestically and a matter of pointless pride on a grass roots level.
Whilst it was possible to play simply for fun on the village green in games where you ‘picked up’ sides, as soon as feelings of “local patriotism” and the question of prestige and pride arose, any game descended into a brutal animosity in which “the most savage combative instincts are aroused”.
Cricket was not innocent but, in his view, more ‘leisurely’ than others, while boxing was the biggest offender.
But it was football he reserved much of his disdain for. He wrote ‘Sporting Spirit’ following the end of Dynamo Moscow’s tour of Britain, thirteen weeks after Japan’s surrender ended the second World War.
That tour is infamous for several reasons. In that post-war spirit of peace and the ‘goodwill’ the cooperation of the Allied forces fostered, the Russian’s were invited to send a team to Britain. Dynamo Moscow played Chelsea, Cardiff, Arsenal, Rangers and did not lose a single game. They drew with Chelsea 3–3, defeated Cardiff 10–1 and drew with Rangers 2–2. The Arsenal result is still contested.
In their impressive performances, the Russian league Champions smashed the British, and Russian, belief that theirs was the greatest of all footballing nations.
Orwell focussed on some of the fallout of the tour to reinforce his points about sport. “If the visit had any affect all on Anglo-Soviet relations”, Orwell wrote, “it could only be to make them slightly worse than before”. He is unsurprised that the Arsenal game, he is told, “came to blows” and that the match against Rangers “was a free-for-all from the start”.
The tour served to prove his view that sport is simply “mimic warfare”. Players must defend their and their nations pride and honour by kicking, punching and beating the opposition, all while crowds of spectator’s jeer and shout.
Ideas of fair-play and other “blah-blahing about the clean, healthy rivalry of the football field” are a fool’s errand for Orwell. Spectators shout and cry to “see one side on and the other side humiliated” caring not if that comes about through cheating or foul-play; for most people, winning is all that matter in Orwell’s view.
Orwell tracks this trend throughout history. Whilst the Romans, the Byzantines and people in middle-ages Europe played sport and games, it was not “mixed up with politics not a cause of group hatreds” in the same way it emerged in the twentieth century.
He says this comes from the English Public school system, which built them up into “heavily-financed activity” which attracted huge crowds and roused “savage passions” which infected America and the west.
It is easy to see contemporary evidence supporting Orwell. Merely scroll through social media for five minutes on a football-related topic, and you will find violent and coarse language blasted at opposition players, fans, and teams. Even a supporter’s own players are not exempt from their zealous crusade of abuse.
Orwell’s pessimism allowed him to articulate things in a manner few others have done, such as his vivid and emotive description of poverty in the north of England and the lives of miners in The Road to Wigan Pier.
But it also, at times, blinded him.
I think it did so with the positives of sport and especially of football; its expression of identities and dreams, its place as entertainment and as a unifying force.
In my next article, I will attempt to justify this.
Post-match thoughts
George Orwell is among the best writers of the 20th century. A variety of his literature is available freely online and I particularly recommend The Road to Wigan Pier.
I took his essay ‘The Sporting Spirt’ from a short book of Orwell’s essays called ‘Notes on Nationalism’, part of Penguin’s ‘Penguin Modern’ series. It is also commonly available in other collections of his essays.
On the Dynamo Moscow tour of Britain, this BBC article runs through it and the surrounding events.
