The Origins of Football in Spain: From the First Press Appearance to the Constitution of the First Clubs (1868–1903)

This research focuses on the origins of football in Spain and seeks to show how and where it was introduced in the country, to comprehend the historical context, and to understand why it took roots so rapidly despite the rivalry with the well-established tradition of bullfighting. The period of study spans from 1868 (first news piece on football in Spain) to 1903 (celebration of the first football championship in the country). The methodology focused primarily on identifying the primary sources and selecting the secondary sources, followed by the interpretative analysis and the mapping of football associations created in Spain in the sport’s early days. The large urban cities led the process of creating football clubs from 1889: Barcelona (61), Madrid (15), and Bilbao (9) steered the process of legitimization and institutionalization of football in the country. In the last 11 years of the nineteenth century (1889–1899), 29 clubs were created in 12 different cities. In the first four years of the twentieth century (1900–1903), a further 103 clubs mushroomed all over the country. Thus a total of 132 clubs were founded between 1889 and 1903 in Spain, which laid the necessary foundations for the implantation and legitimization of football.     

Mary Garber's Coverage of Black Sports in the US Segregated South, 1944–1964

This paper addresses the gap in literature that ignores sport as practiced, managed or communicated by women by focusing on sportswriter Mary Garber, and the meanings engendered through her coverage of black high school and collegiate athletics in the Twin City Sentinel of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, during the mid-1940s through early 1960s. She received numerous prestigious awards during a career that spanned seven decades, but limited historical treatises examine this influential figure. Few scholars have attempted to understand the history of women in this male-dominated field or the sociocultural forces and obstacles that contextualise and hinder their contributions. It is a sad irony that Garber was atypical for her time, and remains so in the contemporary climate. Therefore, one major objective of this paper is to create a discourse through Garber's body of work that will help to eradicate the gender inequalities of women in sport media. In contrast with representations of women and racial minorities in mainstream sport media, this paper demonstrates that Garber addressed pertinent social concerns and supplemented dominant ideological content with more inclusive depictions of the population she covered by resisting white, masculine, heteronormative assumptions about which sports and athletes merit attention.1 ^1. I use ‘black’, ‘African-American’ and ‘white’ throughout the paper not to reinforce false notions of race as an innate biological trait, but to refer to the ways ‘race’ has been socially constructed with real, material effects.     

‘Lobby’ and the Formative Years of Radio Sports Commentary, 1935–1952

This article traces the professional career and influence on sports broadcasting of Seymour Joly de Lotbinière, known within the BBC as ‘Lobby’. Lobby was the BBC's Director of Outside Broadcasts from 1935 to 1939, and then again encompassing radio and television from 1946 to 1952, before concentrating on television OBs from 1952 to 1955. He is widely credited with transforming the codes and conventions of radio running commentary as the BBC expanded its radio coverage of sport in the late 1930s and in the immediate post-war years. The article provides a brief biographical sketch of Lobby's upper-class background and privileged education and how this influenced his eventual career in broadcasting. Drawing on papers held in the BBC Written Archives and on autobiographical accounts of BBC commentators, the article analyses Lobby's development of the core principles of running commentary, the recruitment and management of commentators and his relations with the producers of sports coverage in Broadcasting House and the BBC's regional centres. The article concludes that Lobby's meticulous management and analytical approach to sports commentary had a significant influence on the institutional practices of the BBC's outside broadcasting department, an influence that continues to reverberate today.     

Sport and Politics: The Cultural Revolution in the Chinese Sports Ministry, 1966–1976

Abstract

The Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) was one of the most violent political movements to have taken place in modern Chinese history. Sport was not immune from this political storm. In the first phase of the revolution (1966–1972), the country’s sport system was brought down by the Red Guards and revolutionary rebels. Athletes, coaches and officials who dared to challenge the Maoists were arrested and tortured, and suffered greatly as a result of their ‘counter-revolutionary’ status. In the second phase of the revolution (1972–1976), the Sports Ministry became a battlefront in the power struggle within the PRC leadership. This paper studies the relationships between sport, politics and power struggle during the Cultural Revolution. It points out that what happened in the Sports Ministry demonstrates how China’s sport system was linked to and affected by top-level power struggles and ideological conflicts. It also reflected how ordinary people’s lives were affected by the revolution.     

What’s Wrong with a Little Swinging? Indian Clubs as a Tool of Suppression and Rebellion in Post-Rebellion India

Though the practice of swinging weighted clubs for gymnastic exercise has a centuries long history in India, the latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed the exercise practice grow in political significance. In the years following the 1857 Indian Rebellion, both Hindu nationalists and British army officials undertook the practice with differing intent. Within the martial context, a differentiated style of British club swinging was used to reform supposedly weak and effeminate Hindus, a practice the Hindu physical culture movement sought to render useless through the promotion of heavy club swinging. In first examining the clubs’ origins and British appropriation, the paper explores how two club swinging traditions existed in India in post-1857. Following this, the paper demonstrates how the British army sought to control Hindu bodies through club swinging and how the Hindu physical culture movement concurrently sought to rebuild Hindu bodies capable of defeating British athletes through heavy club swinging. Regarding the latter, focus is given to the wrestling tours of Buttan Singh and Ghulam Muhammad in early twentieth-century Britain. Such tours were used to prove Hindu manliness as constructed through the club exercise.     

Behind the Iron Curtain: Football as a Site of Contestation in the East German Sports ‘Miracle’

Sport is employed as a lens through which one can understand better the social and political inner workings of dictatorship. This paper treats sport as a cultural institution within GDR (German Democratic Republic) society and sets out to complement the two broad paradigms used to study East Germany: the first, a broad approach under the umbrella of ‘Cold War histories’ and ‘totalitarianism theory’, usually focusing on the few; the second, a so-called ‘histories of everyday life’ approach generally focusing on the many. Using an in-depth case study of the sport of football, the paper introduces a new paradigm: the ‘contested dictatorship’ approach. This approach rejects the broad totalitarian notion of dictatorship as applied to East Germany and shares many of the underlying assumptions of the ‘everyday history’ approach, in particular by allowing a far greater role for agency with much more room for manoeuvre for actors and institutions within the structures of an authoritarian state than ‘totalitarian’ understandings usually permit. Drawing on empirical archival material, the paper reveals the endemic rivalries between key personalities (and even large industrial enterprises expressing regional identities) in a struggle for influence over the game; rivalries between fans of GDR football teams; fan culture and hooligan behaviour as forms of self-determination; and how these issues contributed to the poor performance of football relative to other sports.     

Sports participation and health during periods of educational transition: a study of 30–35-year-olds in north-west England

In view of the persistence of health inequalities and declines in leisure-sport participation over the life course, several quantitative investigations have explored the links between participation and other leisure activities, which have their foundations in childhood and youth, as a means of understanding adults’ health behaviours. This paper presents new qualitative evidence to examine the largely under-explored relationship between leisure-sport participation and health within the context of educational transitions among a sample of 30–35-year-olds in north-west England. Drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted with 19 participants between July and August 2009, the paper illuminates the differential impact that gender and social class had on sports participation, and other health-related behaviours (e.g. drinking and smoking), among different groups of adults during the inherently transitional life-stage of youth. The findings suggest that while significant, the length of time spent in education and the differential educational experiences recalled by adults cannot adequately explain the observed differences in health and leisure-sport participation. The major sources of difference, while associated with educational transitions, appeared to lie instead in the broader inequalities that characterized adults’ lives and it is argued that simply enhancing leisure-sport participation and individual lifestyle change, as a means of health promotion, is a futile endeavour that does little to tackle the socio-economic structural determinants of health. We conclude by suggesting that until this is recognized by government and those both inside and outside of the health and sport policy communities, stubborn differences in leisure-sport participation rates and health inequalities—that have their foundations in childhood and youth, but extend over the life course—are likely to remain intact, and the unequal lives people currently lead are likely to become even more unequal in the future.     

Diamonds,ovals, and rings: Northwestern shoshone sports at the Washakie colony of Northern Utah, 1903–1929

During the first quarter of the twentieth century Northwestern Shoshone from the Washakie Indian Colony of northern Utah competed with their white neighbours in sporting contests. These events were recorded by white news reporters and, even more conspicuously, by a Shoshone journalist named Willie Ottogary. For 23 years Ottogary reported the daily highlights, struggles, successes and sporting events of his people. His social column was published in several newspapers of northern Utah and southern Idaho. Living descendants of the Washakie, Utah, group provide another key source of information on sporting activities engaged in by the Northwestern Shoshone. These three key sources are combined for the first time, in this essay, to bring to light the fascinating stories of Shoshone athletics from 1903 to 1929.     

The Control of Space and the Development of Sport: A Case Study of Twenty Two Sports in the Mining Communities of East Northumberland, 1800–1914.

This paper is a continuation of my ongoing efforts to wrestle ‘With the theoretical implications of the mass of empirical work’ I have done on sport in the mining communities of East Northumberland during the nineteenth century. The paper attempts to bring some coherence to the histories of tenty two sports by focusing on a unifying theme. In fact, there were several themes that emerged from the data; the central importance of the 1870s, the increasing importance of various social institutions, the impact of economic conditions on sport and the role of several individuals in contouring the social life of the mining communities. However, there was one theme that was more important than any other; ownership, control and actual use of space. The paper will not examine the complex relationships between these elements except to say that the relationships between ownership, control and actual use were a contested domain. Rather I will use the actual control of space as my unifying theme and consider the different roles of those who controlled space had on the development of sport.     

The Thatcher governments and the British Sports Council, 1979–1990

The month of February 2015 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the Sports Council. Despite its central role in sports governance in Britain, the advisory Council of 1965 and its successor bodies have received little attention from historians. This article assesses the early history of the Sports Council, using primary material such as National Archive papers and memoirs by practitioners to focus attention particularly on the period of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership in the 1980s. The pre-1979 Council commanded widespread respect, and the article explores how and why it became beleaguered thereafter, attributing this to a combination of ideological distrust as ‘Thatcherism’ gained in strength, shortcomings on the part of the Council itself and parochial in-fighting among leading sports bodies. By the mid-1980s the Council was under scrutiny as never before, some in the political and sporting world questioning whether it had a viable future. Although it survived to fight another day, the confidence and momentum of earlier years became a thing of the past and the way was opened up for a major overhaul of sports administration to be carried out in the 1990s.     

Ethnicity as an Exercise in Sport: European Immigrants,Soccer Fandom,and the Making of Canadian Multiculturalism, 1945–1979

Abstract

Ethnic sport offers an important and understudied lens into how newcomers – a key population on the social peripheries – negotiate their entry into host societies. Canada was among the top countries to receive European migrants after the Second World War. Soccer participation and fandom were a gateway in their resettlement and an axis for community formation, identity expression, economic advancement, and personal pleasure. This paper explores what four decades of ethnic soccer on the peripheries of post-war Toronto reveals about the local organization of immigrant life and the European newcomer’s mediated entry into English Canada. It demonstrates that Toronto soccer fans were sufficient in number and electoral voice to transform the urban politics of leisure and organization of social diversity, even as their leisure activities were still heavily contained by host institutions. Paradoxically, soccer’s straightjacketed role in Toronto as an ethnic social adhesive and platform for identity expression rendered it largely irrelevant to the general, more settled population, while its capacity to articulate ethnic differences made it a force and symbol of English Canada’s re-imagination as a multicultural society in the 1970s.