Rethinking the History of Criticism of Organized Sport

Rigorous academic work in the field of the history of sport is increasingly correcting academics' previous unwarranted contemptuous neglect of the subject. As a consequence of this prior neglect and of structural and theoretical influences on the field, however, historians of sport still have some difficulty in dealing with the history of critical responses to sport, a problem which may exacerbate the residual condescension of the academic mainstream. This paper offers a modest contribution to correcting the errors of both sets of scholars, by tracing and interpreting one small but historically significant and resilient strain within such critical responses to sport in Britain, and linking its initial appearance to politically progressive critiques of imperialism and nationalism from the early twentieth century.