Why is there no British national football team? ft. Matt Taylor.

What is the connection between national identity and the beautiful game? And why is  there no British national football team? In this episode Guy and Francesco speak to Professor Matthew Taylor, one of Britain's main historians of sport, based at DeMonfort University. Matt discusses the origins of the game and the first competitive matches, often involving teams between different British cities, as well the development and relevance of the international game.   

Transcript

Why is there no British football team? ft. Matt Taylor

Francesco Belcastro 00:08
Hello and welcome to football, the podcast where football meets politics. I'm Dr. Francesco Belcastro and here with me is my co -host, Dr. Guy Burton. Hello, Guy, how are you? 
 

Guy Burton 00:17
Hi, nice to see you again. 
 

Francesco Belcastro 00:20
We've got a great topic today, we're gonna be talking about football and national identity. I think the title of the episode is Why There Is No British National Team. Is that correct, Guy? 
 

Guy Burton 00:30
I think so, you were the one responsible for it. 
 

Francesco Belcastro 00:33
Yeah, I think that's the title. So we're gonna be talking about the connection between national identity and football. And we're gonna be talking specifically about the case of Great Britain, United Kingdom, England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. 
 

Francesco Belcastro 00:47
And to do that, we've got the great experts. We've got Professor Matthew Taylor, Matthew's a professor of history at De Montfort University, published widely on the history of sport and football in particular.
Francesco Belcastro 01:01
Hello Matthew, how are you? 
 

Matthew Taylor 01:03
I am fine. Yeah, thanks for inviting me. It's great to be here. 
 

Francesco Belcastro 01:05
Thanks. Thank you so much for accepting the invitation. Okay, so let's get started. So you're an historian of sports. I'm sure the listing and interest in the connection between national identity and football.
Francesco Belcastro 01:17
Was this something that was always there from the early days, did it develop later? Was there a stage in which people realized, well, actually there is some potential in sort of national teams and football? 
 

Matthew Taylor 01:29
Yeah, I think it's interesting because if you think about the period when football really developed both in the kind of UK and then as it emerged in parts of Europe and Latin America, that kind of coincides with a period, kind of age of nationalism really, so an age when national identity was considered quite significant.
Matthew Taylor 01:51
But also, I would suggest that it coincides with a period where cross -cultural connections and kind of transnational developments were also really significant. And I think both those things are there in the, as football develops over time.
Matthew Taylor 02:09
I don't think the nation immediately becomes the, you know, the first organisational concept for football. It tends to be localised, it tends to be linked to civic identities and sometimes ethnic identities and religions, depending on which, you know, where we're looking at in different parts of the world.
Matthew Taylor 02:32
But when we then start to think about representative teams, it's kind of not surprising that the nation becomes an organising point, you know, both for the creation of teams but also in terms of associations and those, you know, those organisational points for the way in which the game kind of develops administratively as well.
Matthew Taylor 02:56
So I think it's there, I think in certain parts of the world, it has a much more potent link to, kind of, I don't know, identity politics and people's identities earlier, but I think it takes, in other parts of the world, it takes a lot of time to be anything like the most important connection of real identity.
Matthew Taylor 03:17
And I think the UK is an example of that. You could say it's not until much later that the national team comes to be anything, is anything like an emblem of the nation, whereas I think it did much earlier in other places. 
 

Guy Burton 03:34
But one of the interesting things about in the early stages of football when it was developing in the 1870s, 1880s, you do have this distinction made between the English game and the Scottish game, right?
Guy Burton 03:46
Where the English are very much everyone running after the ball, almost like a scrum, and the Scottish game being very much more about passing. Could you say a little bit about that and to the extent to which that sort of ties in with national identity? 
 

Matthew Taylor 04:02
Yeah, I mean, so yeah, I think another key aspect of national identity is obviously the way in which then the styles of play and ways of approaching the game become significant. And that's a really significant factor in the way in which people, I think that I would call it partly the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.
Matthew Taylor 04:18
And that's an aspect of, you know, what is our football? What does it represent against others? There is, I think there's definitely, definitely truth in the fact that there are different styles of play that emerge from Scotland and England.
Matthew Taylor 04:33
But I think a lot of that also has developed over time. And so this particular combination game has been considered a Scottish game, you know, over the years and over time, and perhaps more so than it would have done, would have done, you know, in the 1870s and 1880s.
Matthew Taylor 04:54
You could argue, now some of my colleagues, Scottish football historians might disagree with me, but you could argue that the combination game or aspects of that sort of approach was developing in parts of England as well, a similar sort of time.
Matthew Taylor 05:08
And so actually the key distinction based on nation is not as clear as we would like to think. And actually, as is often the case, I'm probably going to talk about this a lot today. The history is a lot more messy than we think it was, and it's a lot more complicated. 
 

Guy Burton 05:28
And so then we have, and we've just had in the last month or so, the 150th anniversary of the first international game between England and Scotland, so - which also is interesting because it constitutes two of the constituent nations of the United Kingdom playing against each other.
Guy Burton 05:45
And then since then, we've seen the emergence of an Irish, Northern Irish team and a Welsh team. So there is something going on there about the Britain not having a unified approach to the game or at least administratively.
Guy Burton 06:01
Could you talk a little bit about the history of why we ended up with these separate nations and not a British team? 
 

Matthew Taylor 06:09
Yeah, I think again, it's kind of haphazard in a way, in the way in which it develops. Because if you think about the way in which, how will we, once we move from the teams in the streets and the towns and the regions, how will we organize things geographically?
Matthew Taylor 06:27
There's no obvious precedent necessarily. I mean, cricket is organized by counties and they're developed to kind of a national team. But in England, seeing which at the time, also can constitute players from Scotland or whatever.
Matthew Taylor 06:39
And so you have those developments. But the FA, which established itself, and it called itself the FA, and it still technically calls itself the Football Association, not the English Football Association, it saw itself, I think, as a representative of England, but more than that.
 Matthew Taylor 06:59
So you get the fact that very early on, Scottish teams join, Irish teams join, Welsh teams join, the National Associations of the US join, the National Associations of Australia join, and various others, they're kind of are connected to the Football Association, which considers itself, the first and so the most significant.
Matthew Taylor 07:22
And over time, as the game develops in Scotland, the kind of administrative, the administration of the game becomes much more significant. Then they kind of push to pull the Scottish teams out, but Scottish teams are involved in the early decades of the English FA Cup, for instance, and Welsh teams still are, and they become very significant in that.
Matthew Taylor 07:46
So I think it kind of emerges from, also the networks of playing, clubs in very early on kind of represented teams of Glasgow, play against representative teams in Sheffield. The networks aren't restricted by nation in that sense.
Matthew Taylor 08:05
You know, they are genuinely British, and although we sometimes impose this national distinction later on, they are genuinely kind of British, and things players move around, particularly when there's the first kind of veiled professionals, and people are kind of given boot money and before professionalism is legalised.
Matthew Taylor 08:25
And but quite often, those players actually follow the general trends of migration, you know, the industrial trends, which might bring workers from Glasgow to parts of Lancashire or the northeast of England and things like this.
Matthew Taylor 08:41
So football kind of develops in terms of the specific nations, the specific nations within the state, because they become the kind of key source of identification. And in the sense that England -Scotland game gets there early, and so that becomes a key, you know, there's not huge numbers that go to the games early on, but it becomes a key fulcrum around which newspapers can speak about the developing game, and it just doesn't just represent cities and parts of cities, it's beginning to represent something bigger than that. 
 

Guy Burton 09:18
So those first England-Scotland games, they're sort of very much in the mold of those representative games you talked about, talking about teams from Glasgow, Edinburgh going down to Sheffield. Is England Scotland seen in pretty much the same way? 
 

Matthew Taylor 09:32
Well, it's kind of a little bit more complicated, but the very first games, quite often, you have representatives of Scotland who actually live in London, and those sorts of things, you have that happening quite often, because we're talking about an elite group of amateur footballers.
Matthew Taylor 09:48
And so this isn't a period where the game has kind of spread socially, generally, to different groups. But certainly over time, within relatively short time, because it happens quite quickly, this kind of incredible enthusiasm for different codes of football, not just as association code.
Matthew Taylor 10:07
I think it then soon does become a source of... It begins to be a source of identification, not for huge numbers of supporters, because they aren't the big crowds in the 1870s, 1880s. But it is another way in which football, social football begins to become a kind of marker of identity, in a way which we can kind of connect ourselves in one way or another to this particular...
Matthew Taylor 10:38
One of the layers of our identity, we might see ourselves as a member of a particular city, an ethnic group, but also the nation that comes to be important. Yeah, early on, perhaps not so, but certainly I think by the 1890s, it's becoming much more significant. 
 

Francesco Belcastro 10:54
You alluded to this connection between football, style of football and national character. Now this is a very important part of the narrative, particularly around international football. So the Dutch who are creative and fun to watch, but never win, or the Germans who are super efficient and perhaps don't play so... 
 

Guy Burton 11:15
And Italy was very defensive. 
 

Francesco Belcastro 11:17
And won four World Cups! So yeah, that's an important part of the way that we understand international football. And it seems to me that from your narration, this developed quite early.
Francesco Belcastro 11:32
Is that the case? 
 

Matthew Taylor 11:35
So I think again it's partly the way in which we see the actual game developing. There's two things going on. I think the game, the way in which the game is played is developing and the tactics related to the game is developing over time.
Matthew Taylor 11:51
I mean great, I mean lots of really interesting things written about this but I mean Jonathan Wilson's book Inverting the Pyramid is just a great example of the way in which that developed and it kind of does encompass some of these and the cultural meanings of this as well.
Matthew Taylor 12:05
So I think that becomes a really important, you know, there's an awful lot going on and changes developing very very quickly and different approaches are being borrowed and added to and amalgamated and developed and those I suppose in many ways are kind of technical things, technical aspects of how we make the best of this game if players but increasingly when the notion of spectatorship comes on how do we make this interesting for the spectators as well and those two elements begin to come important.
Matthew Taylor 12:40
But I think writing this into the notion of particular styles it is down to the way in which, you know, I use my own writing and the way in which the writing around and the speaking around football is done.
Matthew Taylor 12:52
Journalists are there from the beginning. Journalists are there organizing the clubs, organizing the associations, quite often the people who form the clubs also have a role in kind of writing about it and they're really at every stage in most countries journalists are significant and the early historians are significant and I suppose in a sense I'd then separate that what we talk what we understand about being national styles may not actually be you know what is actually happening on the field of play but nonetheless people become attached to the notion that Brazilian football is played in a certain way you know I think I think some of these stereotypes come later but certainly you know there are stereotypes early on in early writing about kind of the first exchanges between between teams and so so yeah so I think it's it's the way in which the game is narrated as it develops which provides that significance of style as much as actually what was happening on the field of play. 
 

Francesco Belcastro 13:59
And now, 150 years later, I think we can agree that international football has been a success. We just think at the sort of interest that there is in the World Cup, perhaps that's one thing. But would you say that the fact that throughout history we've seen so many stateless nations striving for the possibility to play as international team, is that a sign of the fact that this has become almost kind of a sign of statehood, having a national football team? 
 

Matthew Taylor 14:29
Yeah, I mean, it's often said, isn't it, the kind of, you know, in order to kind of get recognition, you know, acceptance as a member of FIFA, you know, and the Olympic movement, you know, these are kind of two key, significant, significant elements and you do find, yeah, you do find that it's, it's the early debates and the early things that that organ, that an organization which FIFA was involved in, as well as issues of finances are about representation, you know, which, which association, which group in particular areas, and are we going to recognize, you know, which teams are we going to recognize as being significant and that and that becomes really, really important.
Matthew Taylor 15:12
So if you think about when FIFA, for instance, is established in 1904, we've got a situation where, you know, Austria-Hungary is one of the key early, early, early territories where football develops and within there you have debates, you know, Bohemia has its own football association.
Matthew Taylor 15:30
So what do we do about that? You know, the, the Austrian representatives are saying, well, actually, you know, we, we can't have this because then if we have that we'll have representatives from all other nations, similarly with Germany. The confederations within Germany, you know, there's a, we could potentially organize it around there and look, we've got this example that's, that exists anyway in the UK.
Matthew Taylor 15:49
So that becomes, I think, a really, really important factor in the kind of internal politics of football, but also, you know, much wider and, you know, we, of course, we still see it in terms of, and, you know, Catalonia and various other and really important and places and areas where, you know, the significance of the creation of a football team, you know, is, is, is so closely connected to, to notions of identity. 
 

Guy Burton 16:18
So we've talked a little bit about administratively, it's a bit of a jumble in Britain back at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century. So you do have different teams emerging, including sort of the four nations.
Guy Burton 16:29
There comes a point though at which the four nations have become clearly separate. There's not going to be a British team. When does it become evident? And why has it remained the case that we don't have a British team?
Guy Burton 16:41
Although with the exceptions of the Olympics in most recently 2012 in London. 
 

Matthew Taylor 16:47
We talked about the England, Scotland games and then as the associations developing Wales and Ireland and you get the creation of the Of that what we probably sometimes still call the Home International Championship But at the time very significantly was called the British International Football Championship. International football in Britain was these matches.
Matthew Taylor 17:08
That's what it was. You know, that's how it was for many years That's how it was seen. That's why the very the very kind of a lukewarm response to the World Cup in 1930, etc etc, so that becomes... part of the - part of, the the main part of the international footballing calendar with these matches They become a very significant aspect of a football culture in the UK and so, and something that needs to be protected and I think the the British associations are very aware of that when they start to have discussions with FIFA. You know early on, there's a rejection of this so England joined FIFA in 1905 - that's initially Scotland and Ireland are rejected, you know, because it comes at the same time as these other debates around what do we do about Bohemia, what do we do about other issues and and kind of, you know, effectively the English say well, you know, they have to come with us, you know, we're all going in.
Matthew Taylor 18:06
This is the way our football is organised. So... But I would never say that it was something that is entirely accepted elsewhere. It becomes a... It becomes an issue at various times and certainly, you know, the British compete in early Olympics and they send amateur teams and you know that that becomes a factor but um, they then tend to the men's the men's um in terms of the men's Olympics the football competition. There tends to be a resistance to do that a little bit later after the First War, because as football develops in different parts of the world and there is a move towards a democratization of international football, you know, the fact that, you know, African nations should have more representatives, Latin American nations should, Asian nations should, you know, the this anomaly of four - four, um, four nations within one state with a one nation state - you know, it's potentially open to, um, to open to quite serious challenge. And I think British associations are aware of that and people like Stanley Rouse who was at the head of FIFA are aware of that so they try and not open up that that um dialogue and not not actually, you know allow pot shots to be taken at it by actually organizing many matches in terms of a British team 
 

Guy Burton 19:23
And so that's why we have certain wariness about having had the British team back in London, right, in 2012? But I think since then, we're starting to see, at least in the women's game, discussions about a British women's team potentially competing at next year's event in Paris.
Guy Burton 19:39
But there is that, but not on the men's side. So I wonder if you can say a little bit about that. 
 

Matthew Taylor 19:43
Yeah, I think there's a couple of things there. I mean, I actually think we may get there in terms of more of the resistance to it as the, you know, this, this last women's World Cup is incredible in terms of, not just the standard of the football, but the fact that there were so many newer nations at that level who clearly have developed so so well. And so we're not just looking at the small number of elite nations anymore. I think one aspect for this perhaps is that... You know the women the women's game at an international level - although it does go back further than we than we think I mean They were international fixtures in the 1920s really - but in terms of this organizational base it's, it's younger. And so, there haven't been as many teams... So I don't think there is necessarily as much of a concern amongst the British nation that they'd be that push for for more places. And that that would become, you know, a significant factor In the way in which In the way in which the game is seen and the way and the way in which the games develop. I think the other thing is simply that the Olympic tournament is, is bigger, is more significant in the women's game still than it is in the men's game. Certainly because - perhaps you could say because the US have been such a key figure and the Olympics - has always been very important in those terms. That tournament is, it's always, for a long time.
 Matthew Taylor 21:03
It's been on the par with the women's World Cup And so I think there's a sense there. I think the British, you know, this is worth the risk You know, we want we you know, we don't compete in this major tournament, you know every four years. So maybe this is something that we need to consider. But I think it might change. It might change and there might be more concern about this as the women's game spreads and as there's more push to have you know to have greater representation from all parts of the world in the Women's World Cup. 
 

Guy Burton 21:31
But does that also mean this confidence or assurance that we can have a British team also reflect a change in the way that the British nations are perceived? So you were talking a little bit earlier about how there was a concern amongst the British as the game was expanding and democratizing that if we bring too much attention to this, we risk losing our unique status.
Guy Burton 21:56
So there's a sense that actually no, now the British teams or the British home nations are very much solidified. They're very clearly separate. That there's very little likelihood of the other countries in members of FIFA saying, no, no, no, you just have to be one British team. 
 

Matthew Taylor 22:13
I think it's about just regularity. You know, if we had a British team in every Olympics, then I think, you know, this would be a regular source of debate, a regular source of conflict. And I think we're still early in terms of understanding what's going to happen in the women's game, because you know, it happened in 2012, but I think there were other Olympics when there wasn't a British women's team and they still talk about it.
Matthew Taylor 22:38
You know, so I think there is still that concern. I don't think there's necessarily a key distinction in terms of women's football in this. I think this will be a source of debate, you know, in both the men's and women's game. 
 

Francesco Belcastro 22:53
Great. I was wondering if I could perhaps ask you something about the role of Britain in the development of the game. Now the kind of accepted narrative there is that this was a boarding school game, then the kids brought home, then from there it sort of went internationally with British sailors and British companies to Bilbao or to Montevideo or whatever there was, and from there it became global.
Francesco Belcastro 23:17
Is that an oversimplified but correct narration of things or are we just it's just a story we're telling ourselves? 
 

Matthew Taylor 23:24
I think it's a little bit oversimplified, but there's elements that are certainly right in that. You won't be surprised: there's an awful amount of disagreement and debate about some of these issues.
Matthew Taylor 23:35
And there are whole issues of, special issues of journals devoted to the invention and origins of football, association football in England. And one of the key debates is over how important were the public schools, as opposed to a more organic emergence of football within particular areas.
Matthew Taylor 24:01
And I think we will accept there's an element of both in that, but clearly the public schools are really important because they were crucibles where particular codes of football were created, where then when the ex -public schoolboys wanted to continue to play games and they met people who had different forms of the game, to play together, they had to come to an agreed code.
Matthew Taylor 24:27
And so that's clearly an important element in things. Although the speed with which the game seems to emerge in certain places suggests that the culture of football was known before necessarily the rules were brought.
Matthew Taylor 24:39
So there's a suggestion. So I think there's an element of both in that. But again, I'd say, who are the people who are narrating these histories? Who are the people who are writing the early histories?
Matthew Taylor 24:51
They tend to be the ex -public schoolboys. They tend to be the people from the elite of the game. So their role in the story is particularly emphasized. If we look to them as spread of football to the world, the British were, you can't deny the British were important, but the roots taken are invariably not as direct and not as straightforward and more twisted and multiple.
Matthew Taylor 25:16
If we think about the way in which football arrives in any country, it tends to be not just one place at one time. We probably need to think of the transfer of football, whatever term we used, as a process rather than a particular act.
Matthew Taylor 25:33
So it's not necessarily a single individual, a one -time event, but it actually develops over a particular course of time. A great example is Brazil, in terms of the development of football in Brazil.
Matthew Taylor 25:48
A lot of people like to focus on this chap, Charles Miller, who was an Anglo-Brazilian and who went to boarding school and fits into your frame - but he goes to boarding school in Southampton, comes back with a ball and the FA rules, and there we go, kind of spreads this game.
Matthew Taylor 26:05
That happened, he's significant, but there were others. There was a guy called Hans Nobiling, who came from Hamburg, who also found out about the game in a convoluted way, but also was coming back to Sao Paulo, and then there was development of people who'd gone to school in Switzerland, some were British, some weren't.
Matthew Taylor 26:28
There's really complicated routes and these sorts of things then develop together and emerge together, and even if we think that Miller was the key figure, Brazil at the time was an incredible melting pot of different nationalities and people with different influences and different cultural things to add.
Matthew Taylor 26:48
And so, it's much more complicated and actually much more interesting than simply the British going out, spreading the game, and everyone else just picking it up, because apart from anything else, as it's transferred, it's changed.
Matthew Taylor 27:02
Nothing stays the same. The game doesn't, in the course of transfer, it alters and picks up aspects of local cultures, and I prefer to think in terms of circulation of football really rather than the diffusion, you know.
Matthew Taylor 27:17
It's something which spreads and the ideas around it kind of circulate in complex ways, not just in straightforward, direct lines. 
 

Francesco Belcastro 27:27
That's fascinating. It's a great way of thinking about it. 
 

Guy Burton 27:30
It sort of says to me, because we're thinking about, we are a podcast about football and politics. It sounds to me like what you're saying is, throughout, sort of the history of the game, it's who writes it determines or shapes how we understand it.
Guy Burton 27:44
So there's a lot of power in the way that we tell the story or we decide this is the person that matters or this is the group of people that matters. I wonder if we can just move on a little bit to sort of talk about as we're coming towards the end, a bit about your current work and any current projects that you're involved in that that engage, deal with football and politics. 
 

Matthew Taylor 28:07
Yeah, I guess, I mean, a lot of my work has been on the history of football, but I've always been interested in other aspects as well. My last book was on the kind of social and cultural history of sport in Second World War Britain.
Matthew Taylor 28:21
And but the thing I'm working on at the moment, it does connect to a lot of the things we've been talking about, is really a kind of transnational history of sport. It's based on, I suppose, it's partly based on original archival work and things like that, but it's partly based on just kind of synoptic analysis of what all the important work that's been written.
Matthew Taylor 28:44
It came really from my interest in kind of global and transnational history. And actually, the realisation that sport isn't used much as an example in a lot of this work. And then actually people working on sport have got a lot to give to understanding this because it is a game of nations, but it's also a game which kind of which kind of in terms of understanding the way in which it spread, the way in which it develops, which it has links between governments and kind of central powers and that, but also a lot of links which go underneath that or around that.
Matthew Taylor 29:19
And, you know, informal connections and those sorts of things. So that's the sort of thing that I'm kind of trying to tease out. It's partly about it's about all sports. It's partly about football. There's obviously some very significant sections on the way in which football develops.
 Matthew Taylor 29:36
And I suppose the politics within that is it's there all the time as you talk about. It's about it's about power relations that all the time kind of kind of developing. So if I talk, you know, think about politics for the small people, that it's there all the time in the way in which this process develops and the way in which the cultures of world sport develop, which is basically what the book is about, really. 
 

Guy Burton 29:56
Can you tell us, do you have a title and a date for it when it's coming out and the publisher? 
 

Matthew Taylor 30:02
Yeah, it will be with Routledge history. The title, which is meaningful for British people of a particular age, the title is World of Sport. It was a famous program on ITV and which had wrestling more than anything else.
 Matthew Taylor 30:17
There is wrestling in the book by the way, but not Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks. 
 

Guy Burton 30:21
That is my childhood right there. 
 

Matthew Taylor 30:24
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's called World of Sport and the subtitle is called Transnational and Connected Histories. And I'm finishing it, so next year. Let's say the next year. 
 

Francesco Belcastro 30:37
Looking forward to it. Matt, thank you very much. It's been really, really fascinating. Thank you very much for joining us. 
 

Matthew Taylor 30:43
No, I enjoyed it very much, thank you. 
 

Francesco Belcastro 30:45
Guy, do we need to remind anything to our listeners before we go? 
 

Guy Burton 30:48
Yes. We should probably tell the listeners if they've got this far that we really, really would appreciate it if they would give us a review, because as we try and climb up the table of podcast rankings, it always helps for people to say how wonderful they found it, or if not wonderful what they'd like to see done differently.
Guy Burton 31:07
And that's another point: we also want our listeners to engage with us. We have ideas about subject matter we want to explore and discuss, and the type of guests that we want to speak to. But we're always open and really keen to hear from people as to who else we should be talking to and what subjects we should be covering. 
 

Francesco Belcastro 31:25
And can I add, next week, because another fantastic episode coming up. It's going to be David Goldblatt on football, society and the environment. So one not to miss.