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More Than a Game: A History of How Sport Made Britain
A TIMES BEST SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR
'Superb . . . Deserves to become a classic of sporting literature' DAVID KYNASTON
'Absolutely fascinating and completely eye-opening - every page contains a gem' MARINA HYDE
'A sparkling history' MATTHEW ENGEL
The story of how the British shaped sport, and sport shaped the British.
Sport is an enduring element of British life and culture. In all its variety, it touches on so many significant aspects of past and national identity, class, gender, the relationship between country and town, the rise of commerce, the evolution of ethical debate. Our sporting arenas have witnessed triumphs and heartbreaks that have become part of the national narrative.
For a country so obsessed with the invention, playing and watching of sport, the story of how it has come to reflect us remains untold. David Horspool tracks each game as a driver of social horse-racing's obsession with blood and money turned an aristocratic pastime into a national sport; boxing promoted opportunity for ethnic minorities, while simultaneously enforcing a regime of discrimination; golf rehearsed a perennial battle over Britain's landscape; the football fan created an exuberant, often troubled culture at the centre of British life; and the Empire and Commonwealth Games emerged as an unexpected response to the end of the imperial story.
The history of Britain in sport is a history of popular heroes and pantomime villains - independence fighters, suffragettes, Jewish bare-knuckle boxers - all sharing and contesting loyalties, passions, winning and losing. More Than a Game captures these seminal stories, revealing how sport cemented its place as the ultimate theatre of Britain's past, and its present.
'Superb . . . Deserves to become a classic of sporting literature' DAVID KYNASTON
'Absolutely fascinating and completely eye-opening - every page contains a gem' MARINA HYDE
'A sparkling history' MATTHEW ENGEL
The story of how the British shaped sport, and sport shaped the British.
Sport is an enduring element of British life and culture. In all its variety, it touches on so many significant aspects of past and national identity, class, gender, the relationship between country and town, the rise of commerce, the evolution of ethical debate. Our sporting arenas have witnessed triumphs and heartbreaks that have become part of the national narrative.
For a country so obsessed with the invention, playing and watching of sport, the story of how it has come to reflect us remains untold. David Horspool tracks each game as a driver of social horse-racing's obsession with blood and money turned an aristocratic pastime into a national sport; boxing promoted opportunity for ethnic minorities, while simultaneously enforcing a regime of discrimination; golf rehearsed a perennial battle over Britain's landscape; the football fan created an exuberant, often troubled culture at the centre of British life; and the Empire and Commonwealth Games emerged as an unexpected response to the end of the imperial story.
The history of Britain in sport is a history of popular heroes and pantomime villains - independence fighters, suffragettes, Jewish bare-knuckle boxers - all sharing and contesting loyalties, passions, winning and losing. More Than a Game captures these seminal stories, revealing how sport cemented its place as the ultimate theatre of Britain's past, and its present.
380 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 9, 2023
9 people are currently reading
52 people want to read
About the author
David Horspool
9 books6 followersDavid Horspool is a British historian and journalist. A graduate of Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, he writes for the Times Literary Supplement, the Sunday Times, The Guardian, Telegraph, and the New York Times.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
April 4, 2024
So this will not be a history of the rise and fall (and rise) of sport in Britain, but a thematic account. What struck me as I set out to discover more about Britain's sporting past was that different sports seem to reflect particular aspects of our historical experience more strongly. By stepping outside strict chronology, I began to see how, for example, modern international sporting competition has premodern roots, dating back to the tournaments of the Middle Ages; how horse-racing's obsessions - initially with bloodlines and later also with money - turned an aristocratic pastime into a national sport; how cricket reflected a distorted image of the British class system back to its followers; and how boxing promoted a certain level of opportunity for Britain's ethnic minorities, while simultaneously enforcing a regime of prejudice and discrimination. In a similar vein, rugby union became a focus of 'Celtic' identity with very different trajectories in Wales, Scotland and Ireland; golf rehearsed a perennial battle over Britain's land and landscape; tennis was promoted as a game for women, then played out a story of alternating endorsement, neglect and chauvinism; and cycling was a vehicle of political utility before becoming a political statement in itself. Finally, the football fan created a unique, exuberant, often troubled culture at the centre of British life - one which has proved, on occasion, more powerful than the game's governors - and the British Empire and Commonwealth Games were adopted as an unexpected sporting response to the end of the imperial story.
The concept for this book is explained really well in a brief introduction – each chapter focusing on a specific sport (the opening chapter on historic tournaments, the final one on the Commonwealth Games) and for that sport concentrating on one aspect of the sport which reflects larger societal themes – so that for example the chapter on tennis (which I have to say was very strong) deliberately barely mentions men’s tennis. Similarly, the chapter on rugby largely ignores the union/league divide as that took place in England not the Celtic nations and anyway the cricket chapter is the one concentrating on players vs gentlemen.
The cycling chapter is a little of an exception here – much broader in its scope but still enjoyable I would say despite rather than due to my interest in the sport (I say despite as even many cycling only books seem to tread more predictable ground); my least favourite chapter perhaps being the final one as the importance accorded to the Commonwealth Games seems completely out of line with my own sporting experience.
Overall an enjoyable read.
September 30, 2025
Unlike many areas of scholarly work, including history, sport –like other areas of popular culture – produces both its own organic intellectuals – analysts and interpreters from within its ranks – and fans and followers who venture into historical and other forms of social analysis. This makes for a rich and often complex and intriguing literature. On top of this, sport plays a multi-stranded social and cultural role, producing and reproducing social hierarchies and distinctions, interwoven with nation, class, gender, locality, and racialized identities, as well providing entertainment, commerce, and business in its increasingly commercialised and financialised current form.
Interacting with all of this is the way many of its writers – those in my world of academic sports history as well as those outside the academy – persist in seeing it something that needs to be justified, its triviality resisted – and to be fair in our scholarly worlds there remain a decent number of our fellow discipline members who see sport as secondary, as less notable that politics, economics, diplomacy and the like. While it seldom causes or ends wars, sport’s banal significance, its everyday cultural importance, makes it an ideal vehicle to carry (as it does) and allow exploration of meaning, identity, and ways of being.
This slightly defensive tone is woven through David Horspool’s exploration of the meaning of sport to Britishness, while also noting the diversity and differences within Britishness – a defensiveness that becomes explicit in the book’s last two paragraphs with their exhortation that sport is universal and that it is our “duty … to cherish it”. The paradox of this is that for much of the rest of the book he unpicks and unpacks the multitude of meanings and social significances that sport has had in modern (that is, since the 18th century, notwithstanding the opening discussion of medieval tournaments) Britain. That is to say, this claim of universality is at odds with the rest of the discussion of sport in Britain that stresses its diversity of meaning and experience.
There is much to enjoy here, with Horspool building a thematic and episodic vision of British sport – this is no linear narrative – where he explores horse-racing, boxing, cricket, rugby, football, cycling, golf, and the Empire/Commonwealth Games as telling us different stories of Britishness. Each sport carries a discussion of social stratification, of gender, class, race, and locality. Rugby, then, becomes a marker of different forms of Celtic distinctiveness, while cricket carries a distinct form of class dynamics that is elsewhere (but not explicitly) challenged by cycling’s association with mass involvement and socialist politics. Boxing shows a specific engagement with race – here through discussions of 18th and 19th century Black and Jewish boxers, while tennis, not surprisingly, grants Horspool space to explore ideas of gender. In doing so, we’re left with a strange silence however, where this discussion of gender means women players, while the book remains perplexingly silent about the language of manliness that pervaded 19th century discussions of team sports, despite having all the evidence necessary to draw out the question.
This structure, its sport-specific, episodic form, then points to another difficulty with the text. We’re left with glimpses of British sport, as moments appear with at times little connection between them. The effect is that Horspool points to aspects or elements of Britishness being made, formed, constructed, or otherwise framed by sport, but with very little sense of any coherence – either in the sport-Britishness dialogue or in how these changes might be explained, or even interlinked. The consequence is a series of snapshots, some of which are rich and insightful, but with little in the way of a thread that holds the moments together.
I say this with a degree of hesitancy – I’m an academic writer with little sense that I could write ‘for trade’: it’s a profoundly different voice and genre than I use, and I have great respect for those who can do it well. What’s more, the dialogue between academic history and that for the general market is a tough one, where so much of what we do is drilling down into the particular, often obscure and distinctive, to make sense of the detail that allows us to build more integrated analyses. Horspool’s citations are important in this sense – he’s read and draws on some important work, but very little from the last ten years when those in my world whose work focuses on Britain have begun to point to some significant revisions of the dynamics of sport-nation-meaning. The effect is that much of the discussion feels just a bit dated.
I’m fully aware that I come at this as an insider in academic British sport history (albeit with an emphasis on imperial and colonial relations) so have a distinctive and privileged reading position. There’s a lot here to stimulate discussion and rethinking of some of the simplistic narratives of British sport and Britishness linked to world of boosterism and corporate sport, but for me it just felt a bit flat.
Interacting with all of this is the way many of its writers – those in my world of academic sports history as well as those outside the academy – persist in seeing it something that needs to be justified, its triviality resisted – and to be fair in our scholarly worlds there remain a decent number of our fellow discipline members who see sport as secondary, as less notable that politics, economics, diplomacy and the like. While it seldom causes or ends wars, sport’s banal significance, its everyday cultural importance, makes it an ideal vehicle to carry (as it does) and allow exploration of meaning, identity, and ways of being.
This slightly defensive tone is woven through David Horspool’s exploration of the meaning of sport to Britishness, while also noting the diversity and differences within Britishness – a defensiveness that becomes explicit in the book’s last two paragraphs with their exhortation that sport is universal and that it is our “duty … to cherish it”. The paradox of this is that for much of the rest of the book he unpicks and unpacks the multitude of meanings and social significances that sport has had in modern (that is, since the 18th century, notwithstanding the opening discussion of medieval tournaments) Britain. That is to say, this claim of universality is at odds with the rest of the discussion of sport in Britain that stresses its diversity of meaning and experience.
There is much to enjoy here, with Horspool building a thematic and episodic vision of British sport – this is no linear narrative – where he explores horse-racing, boxing, cricket, rugby, football, cycling, golf, and the Empire/Commonwealth Games as telling us different stories of Britishness. Each sport carries a discussion of social stratification, of gender, class, race, and locality. Rugby, then, becomes a marker of different forms of Celtic distinctiveness, while cricket carries a distinct form of class dynamics that is elsewhere (but not explicitly) challenged by cycling’s association with mass involvement and socialist politics. Boxing shows a specific engagement with race – here through discussions of 18th and 19th century Black and Jewish boxers, while tennis, not surprisingly, grants Horspool space to explore ideas of gender. In doing so, we’re left with a strange silence however, where this discussion of gender means women players, while the book remains perplexingly silent about the language of manliness that pervaded 19th century discussions of team sports, despite having all the evidence necessary to draw out the question.
This structure, its sport-specific, episodic form, then points to another difficulty with the text. We’re left with glimpses of British sport, as moments appear with at times little connection between them. The effect is that Horspool points to aspects or elements of Britishness being made, formed, constructed, or otherwise framed by sport, but with very little sense of any coherence – either in the sport-Britishness dialogue or in how these changes might be explained, or even interlinked. The consequence is a series of snapshots, some of which are rich and insightful, but with little in the way of a thread that holds the moments together.
I say this with a degree of hesitancy – I’m an academic writer with little sense that I could write ‘for trade’: it’s a profoundly different voice and genre than I use, and I have great respect for those who can do it well. What’s more, the dialogue between academic history and that for the general market is a tough one, where so much of what we do is drilling down into the particular, often obscure and distinctive, to make sense of the detail that allows us to build more integrated analyses. Horspool’s citations are important in this sense – he’s read and draws on some important work, but very little from the last ten years when those in my world whose work focuses on Britain have begun to point to some significant revisions of the dynamics of sport-nation-meaning. The effect is that much of the discussion feels just a bit dated.
I’m fully aware that I come at this as an insider in academic British sport history (albeit with an emphasis on imperial and colonial relations) so have a distinctive and privileged reading position. There’s a lot here to stimulate discussion and rethinking of some of the simplistic narratives of British sport and Britishness linked to world of boosterism and corporate sport, but for me it just felt a bit flat.
November 23, 2024
Books have been written about individual sports and their societal impact in Britain, so doing it for 10 sports in under 300 pages was always going to be an ambitious project with a very selective approach as to what to include. Nonetheless I found it too casual in parts and there was no real attempt to link the social changes to more than one sport, so each chapter was very self-contained and each sport was covered as though it was in a vacuum, even though football and rugby league were closely linked to professionalism.
After an introduction that talked about the fair play in women's football not seen in the mens, suggesting he watches very little of it, the book started off promisingly enough; the first proper chapter was about sport as practice for the military and practical skills, and pre-dated the recreational sports that followed, especially once racehorses and cavalry were bred from different stock as covered in the second chapter on racing. In general, Horspool stuck to the book's stated remit, namely the relationship between society and sports, and the first chapters documented the changes well, albeit on subjects I knew little about. In what I presume was a decision based on readability and brevity, statistics were used sparingly and assertions made without being backed up, but on the sports I knew more about, I felt he focused on the wrong aspects to illustrate change, or missed key context.
County cricket is a loss-making endeavour, but it has been for most of its history, and while there may be fewer privately educated captains, a disproportionate number of pro cricketers are from private schools. Women's football matches were popular after the war, but were fundraising efforts akin to Socceraid, not merely sporting contests. Rugby was indeed popular in Limerick, but that was an Irish exception and the sport has otherwise been heavily linked to private schools and a wish on the part of the more affluent Irish Catholic society to integrate with English overlords.
Perhaps the need to keep things concise meant that telling a full story was impossible, but it meant that while the popularity of early racing was documented, along with football attendances over time, this wasn't done with tennis (which focused a lot on the objectification and lower pay of female players) or boxing. Horspool had chosen different narratives for different sports, but as a result the social changes in relation to each other were pretty much avoided entirely, and it wasn't pointed out, for example, why rugby union offered a nationalism for non-English entities, but not football.
There were still plenty of interesting elements to his research and I didn't feel as though the author was making any obviously misleading claims. Despite being concise I didn't find it flowed that well and it didn't tell the story of Britain and sport, it told 10 short individual stories of Britain and sports and it didn't tie them together well enough. I've read 400-page books on the social histories of football and cricket so doing it concisely wouldn't be easy, but I'd rather it was longer and told a fuller story than the potted versions in this book.
After an introduction that talked about the fair play in women's football not seen in the mens, suggesting he watches very little of it, the book started off promisingly enough; the first proper chapter was about sport as practice for the military and practical skills, and pre-dated the recreational sports that followed, especially once racehorses and cavalry were bred from different stock as covered in the second chapter on racing. In general, Horspool stuck to the book's stated remit, namely the relationship between society and sports, and the first chapters documented the changes well, albeit on subjects I knew little about. In what I presume was a decision based on readability and brevity, statistics were used sparingly and assertions made without being backed up, but on the sports I knew more about, I felt he focused on the wrong aspects to illustrate change, or missed key context.
County cricket is a loss-making endeavour, but it has been for most of its history, and while there may be fewer privately educated captains, a disproportionate number of pro cricketers are from private schools. Women's football matches were popular after the war, but were fundraising efforts akin to Socceraid, not merely sporting contests. Rugby was indeed popular in Limerick, but that was an Irish exception and the sport has otherwise been heavily linked to private schools and a wish on the part of the more affluent Irish Catholic society to integrate with English overlords.
Perhaps the need to keep things concise meant that telling a full story was impossible, but it meant that while the popularity of early racing was documented, along with football attendances over time, this wasn't done with tennis (which focused a lot on the objectification and lower pay of female players) or boxing. Horspool had chosen different narratives for different sports, but as a result the social changes in relation to each other were pretty much avoided entirely, and it wasn't pointed out, for example, why rugby union offered a nationalism for non-English entities, but not football.
There were still plenty of interesting elements to his research and I didn't feel as though the author was making any obviously misleading claims. Despite being concise I didn't find it flowed that well and it didn't tell the story of Britain and sport, it told 10 short individual stories of Britain and sports and it didn't tie them together well enough. I've read 400-page books on the social histories of football and cricket so doing it concisely wouldn't be easy, but I'd rather it was longer and told a fuller story than the potted versions in this book.
April 16, 2024
This could be marvellous but for the tortuous syntax. Badly composed and poorly punctuated, it's a confused muddle. The grandiose sub-title is just as baffling.
And for £25 I'd like it to be printed on something better than toilet paper and with illustrations that are legible.
By the way, all four of the dazzling accolades on the back cover are from the author's colleagues at the Guardian - a supreme bit of log rolling.
And for £25 I'd like it to be printed on something better than toilet paper and with illustrations that are legible.
By the way, all four of the dazzling accolades on the back cover are from the author's colleagues at the Guardian - a supreme bit of log rolling.
July 13, 2024
Turgid.
July 11, 2025
Social history impressively researched. The narration is also impressive.
October 6, 2025
Interesting stuff, for the sports of interest to me. Written a bit too much like a history book for my liking, which in fairness is exactly what it is...
October 14, 2024
I really enjoyed this look at sport and how it has shaped Britain.
I read the published copy so perhaps some of the issues with the text have been solved which came up in the other comments
I read the published copy so perhaps some of the issues with the text have been solved which came up in the other comments
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews