Empire games

It's a commonplace that association football was invented in Britain, but unlike many commonplaces it's actually true. We also invented cricket and rugby, back when there was a British Empire, but we didn't share all our games around the colonies in quite the same way. Rugby went to Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, while cricket went to all those places plus the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent.

Football didn't take off in the colonies. The Europeans and the South Americans went mad for it instead, and as a result it became a mainly Catholic game. 17 of the 22 World Cups so far have been won by majority Catholic countries, and no-one from outside South America or western Europe, or from outside the Christian world, has ever won.

The North Americans largely disdained our sports, preferring their own, and for a century that was how it stayed. Baseball and American football in the Americas, cricket and rugby in the Commonwealth and football elsewhere. The Americans don't even think the ball is called a football because you kick it with your feet. They think it's because it's about a foot long. Which their ball is, so it isn't unreasonable of them to think that. It wouldn't work for us because spheres don't have a length they have a diameter, but we do kick it with our feet so we're right as well.

Before you all wade in, I realise this is all a simplification of a more complex truth. Yes there have been US association football clubs for a long time, yes baseball is supposed to have been invented in England and yes the US national team beat England in the 1950 World Cup. Also, I've left out half the world. What about China? What about Africa?

What I would say to all of that is that knowledge is knowing that tomatoes are actually fruit, while wisdom is still treating them as vegetables. When it comes to football, the US have always been mainly a tomato, while England are the boring onions. I realise Sandi Toksvig wouldn't like it, but approximately true is still true.

It's all different now, anyway, because capitalism and cable TV have homogenised the world. Millions in Europe watch US sports, and NFL teams play fixtures in Britain and Germany every year. Soccer, meanwhile, has taken off fairly much everywhere. Over half the 48 nations at this World Cup would have been a joke team if they'd turned up in 1966, but now the joke threatens to be on the old guard.

There is a positive message in all this for the English speaking white guy countries. That's England, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US. Let's call them the Billericay diaspora, if the Scots don't mind too much. They've done very well so far, winning five games and drawing two, but they've mainly done it by picking disproportionately black squads. Look at Canada, who beat Qatar 6-0 yesterday with a team an estate agent would call vibrant. England, meanwhile, beat Croatia with a team with names from Africa and accents from Catford and Macclesfield.  Do you like winning at the World Cup? Embrace the modern world, darlings, it's the only way.

Imagine if Nigel Farage's predecessors had won fifty years ago. No Massive Attack, mainly chard in the shops - and an England squad so average Harry Maguire would have to be in it. No wonder Makerfield said no thanks.

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