I wrote this review of David Horspool’s More Than a Game: A History of How Sport Made Britain for the TLS.

In his classic book Anyone but England: An Outsider Looks at English Cricket (1994), Mike Marqusee writes about falling in love with the sport as an American newly arrived in the UK in the 1970s. Watching TV in the long hot summer of 1976, he saw the West Indies blow England away in the Test series, and became captivated by the spectacle: thirteen men in immaculate whites, moving in intricately choreographed patterns on perfectly mown grass as if obeying some ancient religious rite. “The change at the end of the over, when I first saw it, struck me as magical,” he writes. “It was so arbitrary, yet so precise, like a sorcerer’s trick.” This, Marqusee learns, is what makes cricket such a handy conveyance for its peculiar brand of racial and class politics: its pointless beauty draws us in first.

Britain is not the most cricket-mad, or football-mad, or golf-mad nation on the planet. But as David Horspool writes in this ambitiously conceived new history, “the sheer variety of games and the complex history of sport in Britain are unparalleled”. Britain has a unique talent for inventing and codifying sport and then sending it round the world as “an agent of empire and a spreader of soft power”. Meanwhile, on home turf, sport has generated endless social anxieties and panics, concerning its supposed encouragement of idleness, Sabbath-breaking, violence, unruliness, foul play, corruption and greed. These fears often bring to the fore the British genius for the botched compromise. When betting shops were finally legalised in 1961, they had to operate behind blacked-out windows. Rab Butler, the Home Secretary responsible for the legislation, later reflected that they had been so “intent on making betting shops as sad as possible, in order not to deprave the young, that they ended up more like undertakers’ premises”. In 1986 a concession arrived: they were allowed to serve hot drinks.

For Horspool, sport is “more than a game” because it has penetrated every area of British life and served as both a crucible for and a reflector of social change. In cricket’s perennial tension between the celebration of amateurism and style over professionalism and the pursuit of victory, for instance, we see both an illustration and an artful exaggeration of the British class system and its “fantasy of patrician beneficence”. Golf, as the greediest coloniser of green spaces of any sport, has been at the heart of battles over the future of the British landscape, first by monopolising common land and more recently by falling foul of environmentalists. Boxing has offered a way out of poverty for successive waves of immigrants but was also a pioneer of colour bars and other ugly forms of racism.

Each chapter takes on a different sport and is split into themed sections. There are illuminating five-page riffs on subjects such as boxing’s origins in London’s Jewish East End, football stadium chants, street bookmakers and Wimbledon dress codes. Sometimes this division into subheadings leads to an over-reliance on potted histories that don’t quite cohere into a thesis. Elsewhere, though, the non-linear structure allows Horspool to make suggestive connections across time. He traces many elements of the modern international sporting competition, for example, back to the medieval tournament: the heraldry badges on football players’ shirts, the semi-contained, ritualised violence, the elite competitors playing to a broad audience, and an ethos of fair play battling constantly with the urge to win.

Horspool has done much useful rooting around in old newspapers and sporting magazines and has a lovely eye for the informative detail. What, for instance, makes 1830 such a key date in the evolution of bowls, croquet and tennis? Because that was when the lawnmower was invented. Why is the preferred view of the “true” football fan not the self-evidently optimal one from the halfway line, but the distorted, foreshortened and often distant view from behind one of the goals? Because a century or more ago, the Glaswegian architect Archibald Leitch established the standard football stadium design, with posh grandstands and supporters’ terraces at each end. Why are the two statues in Britain in honour of tennis players (Fred Perry and Dorothy Round) easily outnumbered by those for racehorses (Frankel alone has four)? Because tennis, outside of Wimbledon fortnight, is a surprisingly minor sport in Britain; racing has always been huge. Victorian jockeys were the first sporting superstars.

Horspool’s rationale for writing this book is that a country that expends so much of its energies on sport should feel more acutely than it does “its absence from mainstream historiography”. But is it really so absent? There have been several single-volume histories of British sport before this one, as well as countless histories focusing on individual sports. Academic sports history is a long-established and thriving sub-discipline with several journals dedicated to it. More puzzlingly, Horspool cites many of these books and journals in his notes. This skirting over the existing scholarship may explain why More Than a Game never quite turns its many fascinating vignettes and trenchant observations into an overarching argument. “Sport can only exist and develop in the wider environment in which it takes place,” he writes. “So the tensions of race, class, gender, geopolitics, money, identity and environment are always exposed or reflected in sport, which, in turn, reflects them back on to wider society.” It is hard to argue with that, but nor is it an original insight.

There is a far more interesting argument, I think, dotted through the book without ever being fully articulated. It is that sport is a kind of distorting mirror of society: it feeds into broader histories while spawning its own rich micro-histories. Sport is limitlessly weird. I did not know, for instance, that until the Covid pandemic put paid to them, racecourses all had saunas, where jockeys desperately sweated away the final few pounds before a race like exam-sitters doing last-minute revision. Sports follow their own sweet logic and are a capacious container of contradictions. How else could the urban game of professional cricket, with most of the county grounds located in cities, present itself as a world of “unblemished rustic amateurism”?

The history of sport is also the history of these strange subcultures that demand complete immersion in their symbolic universes. Looking at them with an outsider’s eye would break the spell and render them meaningless. There are plenty who remain immune to the spell and who, like Kipling dismissing “the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals”, see it all as a silly distraction from more important things. A large number of Britons couldn’t care less about any sport, as is shown by the always surprisingly low recognition scores for sporting stars on the TV quiz show Pointless.

But that spell, when it works, is what compels fans to stand in the freezing rain to watch their side get beaten week after week, or spend fortunes on Sky Sports subscriptions and flat screen TVs the size of dining tables. And they do all this despite so often being treated with undisguised contempt by the powerful and monied people who run elite sports – for that is another common theme in this book, of rich men’s pursuits being opened up grudgingly to the rest of us.

“Fortunately,” Horspool concludes, “sport is also transcendent.” Sport, for many, is not a distraction from the real business of life; it is life itself. I wish this book had offered more of a sense of that life-giving joy of sport – which is, after all, what made it matter to the historical subjects who played and watched it. But More Than A Game rarely ventures onto the field of play or into the thick of the action. Take one passing comment, that the Welsh rugby union stars of the 1970s (Gareth Edwards, Barry John, J.P.R. Williams) provoke “gasps of admiration” when we watch replays of their darting runs on television. Horspool doesn’t elaborate on this with an account of those thrilling, snaking dashes for the try line. The half-choreographed dance of a team game, the thrilling pulse of collective movement, the luminous piece of individual virtuosity plucked from the jaws of contingency – these too are part of sport’s history, but we only glimpse them intermittently here. And yet sport would not have had nearly so much power to drive and refract social change – the history that Horspool tells with great aplomb – if that magic were missing.