Commerce, sport and empire
From its British roots, football quickly spread to continental Europe, in parallel with British economic expansion, followed by its diffusion to distant parts of the world. The sense of ‘mission’ was absent and football spread through commercial, rather than state, religious or educational intervention, and as a means of recreation rather than of developing particularly valued characteristics.
It then quickly spread beyond the continent, in association with European, especially British, imperialism, marked by the expansion in distant places of industry, trade and communications, mining and pastoralism.This spread of football over a short period of time, coinciding with the second great surge in European imperial expansion, took football to the furthest reaches of the globe. It developed most rapidly in those places where colonial contact was greatest and commercial development most successful. British private (public) schools also played a role in taking the game to other continents, with football part of the curriculum. The origin of many now leading global teams was often industrial. Clubs like Arsenal and Athletic Bilbao originated in the 1880s from factories, mines, ports and other workplaces, which were the sources of players and officials; their histories remain in their names and nicknames. Scottish textile workers took football to Sweden, English cotton-mill workers exported it to Russia and miners took it to Ukraine, and British railway engineers and workers took it to Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. Numerous famous Latin American clubs, such as River Plate and Newell’s Old Boys (Argentina), Corinthians (Brazil) and the wonderfully evocative The Strongest (Bolivia), retain English names and play in team colours brought from Europe.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the spread of football was where it did not go, or become dominant.
While football was one component of settler colonialism, it has curiously been least successful in Britain’s settler colonies (Australia, New Zealand, Canada and especially the United States). Although the lineaments of most European settler colonies were laid out long before football was codified, it remains something of a mystery why it did not subsequently develop in the British settler colonies, with the partial exception of South Africa. Rugby dominated in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, while Canada followed the United States with its own distinctive sports. In South Africa and Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), however, race divided sport: Europeans played rugby and cricket; Africans played football. Where industrial expansion and settler colonialism overlapped, as in the coalfields of Australia (and in later phases of twentieth-century migration), football became more firmly established in settler societies, especially Australia, though it never gained ascendance. By contrast, in French settler colonies—notably Algeria and New Caledonia—football was the absolutely dominant sport, just as in Portuguese and Spanish colonies. Ironically, one of the most successful cultural exports from nineteenth-century Britain proved least successful in the places designed to be most like Britain.