(This post was originally published by The Dabbler in April 2011 under a different title)
On a wet afternoon in June 1909, Tottenham Hotspur played Everton in front of 8,000 spectators. One of the Spurs players on show was Walter Tull. He was black, and the abuse he’d suffered from hostile audiences had appalled the British press, but today he would score one of his side’s two goals. The game ended in a draw.
There was nothing unusual about any of this, except for one thing: the fixture wasn’t held in Liverpool or London. It was taking place in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where both teams had disembarked days earlier after crossing the Atlantic on the Araguaya. Over the next month, both sides would play a series of matches against local teams in Argentina and Uruguay, and leave a legacy of local teams named in their honour right across the continent.
They weren’t the first English sides to visit – Southampton and Nottingham Forest had been there before them, and Grimsby Town had been to Brazil. On top of these South American tours, English league sides had summered in Germany, Austria, Holland and France and would continue to do so right up until the outbreak of the Great War.
The previous year, what was to all intents and purposes a full-scale World Cup had taken place in London as part of the 1908 Olympic Games. And although the Great Britain team won at a reasonable canter, all of this activity does raise one of the big questions of English football history: why didn’t England enter the FIFA World Cup in 1930, 1934 and 1938?
As usual, the conventional account blames the toffs at the FA. These remarkable creatures, the story goes, combined moustaches with a public school background and harboured a lunatic hatred of everyone they hadn’t known at Eton. Mixing with smelly foreigners was obviously out of the question, so they flounced out of FIFA, and refused to come to World Cups. As ever with barking football tales of this kind, we are provided with endless retellings but never with footnotes.
Which is a pity, as it is undoubtedly true that, as the FA’s leading figures grew older, their early openness and adventure had faded away. Kinnaird had forced professionalism through in 1885 in his 40s, but by Edward’s accession he and his colleagues were entering old age. Nevertheless, this was not the only issue, nor the deciding one.
From an English point of view, international football was having a difficult childhood. By the early years of the twentieth century, internationals had lost their novelty, and only the annual match against Scotland attracted the sort of attendance that club football took for granted. When an England side toured Europe in 1908, tiny crowds saw a distracted, hungover, holidaying England coast to huge and meaningless victories. Crowds at the 1908 Olympics had been disappointing too. Did anyone want international football?
The Great War made a bad situation worse. Most of the best football on the continent had come from Austria, Hungary, Bohemia and Germany, where retired players like Steve Bloomer and John Cameron had gone out to coach. Football had already lost huge public face by playing on until the summer of 1915, and it was not about to compound that once war was over by playing games against former enemies.
Furthermore, as we’ve seen, English sport was being spread successfully to the far corners of the globe by individual initiative, the way it always had been. Football and polo for South America; Indian cricketers were turning out for England; New Zealand were already world leaders at rugby. English sport had extraordinary global reach, and, outside of athletics, Europe just did not provide competitive opposition.
Corruption was another quite justified concern. So was violence: Jack Hogan would see guns drawn and used at continental matches. Proper stable football institutions in continental Europe took time to develop – bureaucratic squabbling had seen France send not one but two rival teams to the 1908 Olympics.
All of the evidence before the FA, therefore, pointed to two things. Club football, not international, was the way forward. And the best way to help that was by lending expertise in the form of coaches, referees and even players, not by joining corrupt and unstable institutions.
So England weren’t there in 1930, when only four European countries entered. Or in 1934, when Italy won, courtesy, many believe, of buying referees. Or in 1938, when there was no Austrian team because of the Anschluss. A year later, Matthias Sindelaar, the Austrian captain who refused to play for the Nazis, died in “mysterious circumstances”. Italy retained the trophy, and played England four times during their period as “World Champions”. They’d lose three, and draw the other.
They wouldn’t beat England for another 30 years, when they’d do so courtesy of a 1973 goal at Wembley scored by a certain Fabio Capello. Whatever became of him? As for Walter Tull, he went on to become the first black officer in the British Army, was Mentioned in Dispatches and died during the Spring Offensive of 1918. His memorial was unveiled in Northampton in 1999, a trophy was named for him in 2004 and there are now plans for statues at three separate locations.