Politics in sport? It's not as new as wannabe culture warriors would have you think

In 1895, rugby clubs in the north of England made the decision to break away from the Rugby Football Union (RFU) to form the Northern Union. What they created became rugby league. And the reason for the split?

Well, most of the players worked for a living, in the mills and pits. To play rugby competitively, they had to forgo some of their wage.

The northern clubs wanted to make this up to them in the form of what were called broken-time payments. In other words, not some sort of profit, but compensation for wages lost.

 

However, the RFU was having none of it and in 1893, voted against a move to allow such payments.

 

Two years before that, Leeds president James Miller had noted: “It is unreasonable to expect the same ‘amateurism’ from the wage-earning classes as from public school men. It is unfair to expect working men to break time to play football without their being remunerated.”

But the cult of amateurism remained in place in rugby union until 1995 – a century of spiteful, vindictive, petty behaviour that saw players barred from union for as much as playing a single, unpaid game for an amateur rugby league club.

For instance, if someone had played the game recreationally in the north of England, while working as a doctor, and then moved to the south west of the country, they wouldn’t be allowed to play recreational rugby union.

I recall, from my own days as a sports editor (so pre-1999), a pompous ass of an ex-British Army officer defending this, intoning that if someone with such a past wanted to play recreational RU, they could jolly well ‘join the armed services’.

But the point of mentioning this now is that we find ourselves suddenly hearing the cries of ‘keep politics out of football!’ – including from, err, politicians trying to whip up a culture war in the UK.

The cult of amateurism was a political one, because class is political.

To be a successful amateur athlete, you needed time to train – and working-class people didn’t have that luxury since they had to do actual jobs in order, as old Charlie Marx might point out, to keep a roof over their (and their families’) heads and food in their bellies.

Amateurism was not exclusive to rugby. It was dominant in the UK (particularly England) in many sports. For instance, in rowing, Steve Redgrave’s achievements are all the more remarkable given that he came from a working-class background and didn’t go to public school.

In 1882, the Amateur Rowing Association (ARA) was founded and, a year later, it set out a definition of an amateur. To give just a single example of its exclusionary criteria, anyone who had ever been “employed in or around boats, or in manual labour for money or wages, was not an amateur”.

 

So you couldn’t row in ARA competitions if, for instance, you were a Thames lighterman as your job.

 

The issue around class and sport still features in the life of the UK today. How often do you see snotty newspaper stories about rugby union players or golfers or tennis players or F1 drivers – unless, in the case of the penultimate one, it’s snotty English stories about dodgy Scot Andy Murray or, in the last one, the rather non-white Lewis Hamilton?

 

Those sports are – in England at least (it’s particularly a different case in Scotland around golf) – seen as being for A Slightly Better Class of People. In other words, you probably need a bit of dosh and time to participate.

And goodness, look back at cricket and the entire concept of 'gentlemen and players' – amateurs and pros: the snobbery – and the politics – are enshrined in the language.

 

Football, however, remains culturally working class – for all the money coming into the English game from some exceptionally wealthy sources.

 

Think of the many times have there been negative stories about ‘wealthy footballers’ – the only group the UK’s Conservative government ever suggested should give up some of their pay because of COVID-19 – and also a group that routinely sees negative stories about them in the press.

 

And square that if the player in question is black – see the contrast between the Daily Mail’s reporting of how Manchester City duo Raheem Sterling and Phil Foden have spent some of the money they have been paid by their employer.

Today, the Sun, which has rubbished Sterling more than once for being 'flashy', 'unethical' etc, lauded him on its cover of Monday's edition for scoring the winning goal against Croatia in the European Championships. Glass houses spring to mind

 

Let’s be quite clear – racism and politics are interconnected.

 

Culture secretary Oliver Dowden and – of course – PM Boris Johnson are currently fannying around complaining about ‘politicising sport’. In the former’s case, commenting on the reaction of his employer to historic, racist tweets by an England cricketer, and about England players taking the knee, in the latter.

 

It took a passionate yet calm article from England’s football manager Gareth Southgate on the subject – and the reaction to it – to persuade Johnson that, oops-a-daisy, he should actually condemn those who were booing England players taking the knee.

 

Now, as Kenan Malik pointed out in today’s Observer, taking the knee might mean little – and it might mean virtue signalling – but the England team is not a bunch of Marxist anti-capitalists who want to end our way of life, blah blah blah.

 

Though to be fair, I doubt that anyone applauding the suggestion that they are, whichever cretinous Tory MP or shock jock suggests as much, actually has a great deal of a clue as to what ‘Marxism’ actually is. 

 

But there you go – that’s the constituency that this Conservative government’s culture war is being aimed at.

 

The reality is, that as long as sport has existed, politics has been entwined with it – and Malik’s article gives other examples.

 

Of course Dowden has dived in – this is an individual who now has himself pictured in his office, with a whopping big Union flag, much smaller flags of the constituent nations of the UK (watch out Ollie – your leader won’t like that) and a large portrait of the queen – presumably for the simple reason that he believes it to be convenient for his career.

 

He also has a similar relationship with facts as The Dear Leader. Apropos his tweet at the weekend – subsequently deleted – falsely claiming that the Minack Theatre in Cornwall (which hosted a G7 partners’ event) had received government financial aid during the pandemic.

 

It hadn’t. And he hasn’t apologised or made a correction. Just deleted the tweet.

 

But hey – taking the knee is ‘politics’.

 

For my parents, politics in sport was people trying to stop cricket tours to apartheid South Africa. Because somewhere along the line, they'd missed the idea that apartheid itself was ... ‘political’.

 

But that highlights a point: while the German Nobel literature laureate and anti-Nazi Thomas Mann said that “everything is politics”, for many, it doesn’t become so unless and until it challenges their view of the world.

 

It’s only ‘politics’ when women challenge the privileged role men have in society.

 

It’s only ‘politics’ when LGBT+ people dare to raise their heads about the parapet and demand equality.

 

It’s only ‘politics’ when black people call for meaningfully equal treatment.

 

It’s only ‘politics’ when disabled people dare to suggest that they might have their needs considered.

 

It’s only ‘politics’ when a museum wants to take down an external statue of an individual who profited from slavery.

 

But of course, it’s not ‘politics’ when the secretary of state responsible threatens the museum in question over that issue.

The status quo is never ‘politics’.

 

So, if you think that removing the statues of those who profited from selling other human beings for profit is ‘politics’, you probably don’t want to really think about the history of this country.

If you think that England players taking the knee is ‘politics’, you probably don't want to spend time learning about the actual, real history of this country.

 

You want to stay in a history comfort zone – because you perhaps need, for the sake of your own sense of self, to feel that the country of the accident of your birth, is brilliant and far superior to other countries, making you superior to lots of other people.

And if you think that, if some statues are removed, history will end, then you might need help.

 

If this is the case, then the NHS can still get you counselling – even in this time of COVID.

• The photo at the top is of protestors dumping a statue of Bristolian slave trade Edward Colston into the harbour in 2020, from Kier Gravil – ksagphotos.