George Orwell
The Sporting Spirit
Now that the brief visit of the Dynamo football team has come to an end, it is possible to say
publicly what many thinking people were saying privately before the Dynamos ever arrived.
That is, that sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will, and that if such a visit as this had any effect
at all on Anglo-Soviet relations, it could only be to make them slightly worse than before.
Even the newspapers have been unable to conceal the fact that at least two of the four
matches played led to much bad feeling. At the Arsenal match, I am told by someone who was
there, a British and a Russian player came to blows and the crowd booed the referee. The
Glasgow match, someone else informs me, was simply a free-for-all from the start. And then
there was the controversy, typical of our nationalistic age, about the composition of the
Arsenal team. Was it really an all-England team, as claimed by the Russians, or merely a
league team, as claimed by the British? And did the Dynamos end their tour abruptly in order
to avoid playing an all-England team? As usual, everyone answers these questions according to
his political predilections. Not quite everyone, however. I noted with interest, as an instance of
the vicious passions that football provokes, that the sporting correspondent of the russophile
News Chronicle took the anti-Russian line and maintained that Arsenal was not an all-England
team. No doubt the controversy will continue to echo for years in the footnotes of history
books. Meanwhile the result of the Dynamos' tour, in so far as it has had any result, will have
been to create fresh animosity on both sides.
And how could it be otherwise? I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport
creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could
meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the
battlefield. Even if one didn't know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for
instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from
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The Sporting Spirit
Now that the brief visit of the Dynamo football team has come to an end, it is possible to say
publicly what many thinking people were saying privately before the Dynamos ever arrived.
That is, that sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will, and that if such a visit as this had any effect
at all on Anglo-Soviet relations, it could only be to make them slightly worse than before.
Even the newspapers have been unable to conceal the fact that at least two of the four
matches played led to much bad feeling. At the Arsenal match, I am told by someone who was
there, a British and a Russian player came to blows and the crowd booed the referee. The
Glasgow match, someone else informs me, was simply a free-for-all from the start. And then
there was the controversy, typical of our nationalistic age, about the composition of the
Arsenal team. Was it really an all-England team, as claimed by the Russians, or merely a
league team, as claimed by the British? And did the Dynamos end their tour abruptly in order
to avoid playing an all-England team? As usual, everyone answers these questions according to
his political predilections. Not quite everyone, however. I noted with interest, as an instance of
the vicious passions that football provokes, that the sporting correspondent of the russophile
News Chronicle took the anti-Russian line and maintained that Arsenal was not an all-England
team. No doubt the controversy will continue to echo for years in the footnotes of history
books. Meanwhile the result of the Dynamos' tour, in so far as it has had any result, will have
been to create fresh animosity on both sides.
And how could it be otherwise? I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport
creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could
meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the
battlefield. Even if one didn't know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for
instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from
Página 1 de 4
