In late 1945, as the Iron Curtain was falling across Europe, a Soviet club played several British teams on a goodwill mission.
George Orwell was unimpressed. In his essay The Sporting Spirit, he argued that sport was “an unfailing cause of ill-will.”
- Even if one didn’t know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred one could deduce it from general principles… The significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe — at any rate for short periods — that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue.
Writing when the World Cup was still a small tournament that the British teams didn’t bother to enter, he warned that you couldn’t do better to “add to the vast fund of ill-will” in the world “than by a series of football matches between Jews and Arabs, Germans and Czechs, Indians and British, Russians and Poles, and Italians and Jugoslavs, each match to be watched by a mixed audience of 100,000 spectators.”
Even 81 years ago, he foretold that this year’s cup was a bad idea.
John Authers Bloomberg 17 July 2026
When I visited on a squally day last week, obviously much had changed since Orwell’s time, yet the arguments playing out ahead of the June 18 by-election in the Makerfield constituency bear striking similarities to those set out in his seminal work, The Road to Wigan Pier.
The area's voters have a choice between electing Andy Burnham, the popular mayor of Manchester, to Parliament or voting for the populist Reform UK party
https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2026/06/britains-future-has-echoes-of-orwell.html
George Orwell’s 1984, written in 1948, tells of a world divided into three great powers.
They are: Oceania (The US, plus South America, the UK, Australia and southern Africa).
Eurasia (All of the old Soviet Union, including Russia, and continental Europe in its entirety).
East Asia (Essentially China, Japan, and the Korean peninsula).
They fight interminably over the contested, poorer parts of the world: the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, and the rest of Africa.
Though alliances shift, they remain in permanent balance
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