"Amateur-Careerism Controversy" and the Football Charity Cup
During the Victorian era, the British government rarely provided social welfare guarantees directly, and private charitable acts were essential to special institutions such as hospitals, orphanages, widows, people with disabilities, and vulnerable groups. Coinciding with the 60s of the 19th century, amateur gentlemen controlled football and advocated participating in the game without seeking material rewards, which was highly consistent with the purpose of philanthropy, and football charity games came into being.
The charity tournament uses ticket revenue and in-venue fundraising to attract funds for public welfare. Hosting a football charity cup allows clubs, patrons to earn a good name, and players and spectators to enjoy sports, enough to enable "different groups interested in the game – players, spectators, organizers – to contribute to a particular charity or event, or to some worthy cause." ”
Therefore, various football charity matches appeared around 1880 and quickly gained widespread social recognition, creating a good story with the ideal of amateurism. Broadly speaking, charity competitions can be divided into three categories. The first is the most common, where the funds raised by the competition are earmarked to support specific institutions, such as local orphanages, hospitals and nursing homes.
The fixed needs of these institutions justify the holding of annual charity competitions. The second is an ad hoc competition held in response to emergencies to raise funds to support the affected areas and people. The third type is organized by a club or association to provide some kind of benefit to injured or retired players, club staff, union members.
The first type of charity tournament usually takes the form of an annual tournament, with football at its core, developing some prestigious cups. The Warncliffe Charity Cup, co-founded by the Sheffield and Haarlem Football Association in 1878, is named after the patron Earl of Warncliffe to raise money for local causes and is one of the reasons why football has become a cultural calling card in the Sheffield region.
The Rothbury Charity Cup was established in 1882 to raise funds from the Royal Hospital of Edinburgh and Bansard Hospital. Now serving as a charity shield for the Premier League opener, it was originally intended to raise money for hospitals and charities. According to statistics, the famous Glasgow Businessman Charity Cup, since its creation in 1876, has raised nearly 11 million pounds.
The second type of soccer charity tournament dedicated to emergencies is quite common, and these "one-off" events provide some support to the victims of the disaster. For example, in 1883, when the Daphne capsized while launching at the Glasgow shipyard, nearly 200 workers suffered an accident and 124 died, and in order to raise funds for the victims, the Denbartons and Rangers organized a race.
In 1893, Everton participated in a race to raise money for poor unemployed cotton workers. In 1897, the FA donated £157 of the entire proceeds from an international match to the Indian Famine Relief Foundation. Two years later, the FA donated 100 gini to those widowed, orphaned or injured by the Boer War.
After the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, Anglesey Football Club specially held a charity football match, and its income was used to rescue the families of the victims of the accident. The third type of charity competition is more temporary. For example, after the early death of the secretary general of the Scottish Football Association, the football association specially arranged for the Scottish FA Cup winner and the English FA Cup winner to raise funds in order to allow his mother to spend her old age in peace.
In 1888 the Glasgow Football Association committee arranged an internal match with the intention of raising enough money to send the treasurer of the Cowlers club to Australia for recuperation. Guided by amateurism, linking sports to charitable activities or welfare is not exclusive to football.
In 1872, a group of hunting enthusiasts founded the "Hunting Servants Welfare Association", whose income was mainly derived from dues paid by honorary members. By 1899, the membership was about 1,800, of which 420 were ordinary members. The association stipulates that if a hunting servant falls ill, he can receive a stipend of £15 a week.
After retirement at the age of 60, you can also receive the same amount of allowance every week; After their death, their widows were also paid in full, a system that fully expressed the paternalistic style of amateur gentlemen. Although the beneficiaries are often referred to as servants, and the patrons always treat them as masters, there is no doubt that they are at least in a good position when they are in trouble, compared to workers who repeat tedious and insecure work in factories.
The rise and fall of the left-wing workers' movement
The reason why the "amateur-careerist dispute" gradually subsided around the time of World War I, not only because the balance of power between the two was broken and amateurism had to accept careerist leadership, but more importantly because Marxism and the workers' movement began to combine in the late 19th century, and this cooperation made it necessary for amateurist and professional sports leaders to put aside their differences, after all, both sides were part of the ruling clique of capitalist society.
At the end of the 19th century, some on the left were indifferent to sports, others hostile, both amateur and professional, but, in general, out of a critique of the capitalist system itself, which was the dominant view, most communists involved in sports sought to expose capitalist sport in all its forms.
In the late 20s and early 30s, the British Workers' Sports Federation, which was taken over by the Communists, focused its propaganda on the campaign of blaming commercialization, amateur elites, and factory-sponsored "bosses" as hallmarks of an unequal social system. The left-wing movement is critical of sport, mainly because it interferes with realpolitik, because the energy of the working class is consumed in watching and participating in sports, which leads to the dilution of the power of the working class and the taming of the fighting spirit.
An article published in Justice magazine in 1891 entitled "Socialism and Sport" pointed out that sports, like everything else, had been demoralized and cursed by capitalism. All horse racing, hounds and other things in sports are now the property of the bourgeoisie.
They exhibit, buy or sell human beings and other animals purely for profit ... Before the demise of capitalism, no real sport can be viable, and current sport must also disappear. In 1902, in his essay "Social Revolution," Kautsky accused parts of the British working class of abandoning revolution and caring only with actual politics, and their highest ideals were simply imitating their masters, maintaining hypocritical decency and worship of wealth, and fanatical and obsessive for leisure and entertainment to kill time.
After the First World War, the major capitalist countries tried to promote welfare measures to ease social contradictions and offset the great influence of communism, sports were vigorously promoted as an important leisure activity, and this act of giving small favors to maintain bourgeois rule was rightly regarded as spiritual opium by leftists, who believed that "the great expansion of work-based welfare and leisure services in the industrialized world in the 2020s of the 20th century concealed the idea that sport could reduce the threat of revolution." ”
The deep knowledge of sports on the left led to the formation of workers' sports organizations. In the UK, there are the aforementioned Clarion Cycling Club, the British Workers' Sports Federation, and the Social Democrats' National Workers' Sports Association. In 1893, The Arbeiter-Turn-und Sportbund was founded and by 1931 had as many as 1.2 million members.
In France, Parisian workers founded the Socialistsports and athletic association in 1908, which included 320,000 members of the workers' bicycle association. The development of workers' sports organizations in Britain, France and Germany pushed the seeds of left-wing sports to spread to Europe.
In 1913, socialists from Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Germany and Switzerland convened an international conference in Ghent to plan the formation of the International Workers' Sports Organization, but it was shelved due to the outbreak of World War I, and in September 1920, the Second International met in Lucerne, Switzerland, and established the international sports association, the Lucerne Sports International.
Its goal was to oppose nationalism and militarism while providing sports facilities to workers. In 1925, Lucerne Sports International organized the first International Workers' Olympiads, which was attended by more than 60,000 people.
In 1928, in response to criticism from the Communists, Lucerne Sports International changed its name to Socialist Workers' Sports International, and by 1937 the organization had more than 1.8 million members.
At the same time, in August 1921, the Third International also established its own workers' sports organization, Red Sport International, which was more radical than Lucerne Sports International, declaring that sport was a political battlefield and that the goal of workers' sport was to support revolutionary struggles similar to the October Revolution.
In 1928, the Soviet Union held a worldwide games of the working class in Moscow, and chose the name of the leader of the ancient Roman slave revolt, "Spartakiad", as the Spartakiad, which contrasted with the "Olympic" movement, which in classical times was an event restricted to propertied citizens.
Workers' representatives of the Spartakid Games made an uplifting statement at the event: "We received the word Spartakid from Spartacus, the hero of the ancient world, the leader of the slave revolt... (Our goal) is revolution, to fight together for the classical material culture and the revolutionary military culture of Marxism-Leninism", and the pursuit of pure sports to a certain extent shows the combination of left-wing ideological trends and amateur sports.
In the 20s and 30s of the 20th century, in order to ease the competition between countries and prevent imperialist competition, thousands of working-class men and women in Europe watched and participated in international competitions, further freeing themselves from the shackles of capitalist sports, and most importantly, these activities were not organized by capitalist entrepreneurs or right-wing amateurist moral defenders, but by workers for more noble purposes.
The move helped shape a "sports culture based on socialism and the workers' movement, aiming to offer a new model to replace the overly competitive model of nationalism, male chauvinism and commercial sport." "The workers' movement organizations guided by communism have united the broad masses of the working class, and their clear political struggle objectives pose a fundamental threat to the capitalist ruling clique.
So in Britain, the "amateur-careerist struggle" was no longer important, and the key was to stop the spread of the workers' movement, which was deeply influenced by communism.
As a result, Britain banned Soviet footballers from entering the country in 1928 and Julius Deutsch, an Austrian socialist and president of the International Socialist Workers' Sport, from giving speeches in London in 1934, but in the same year allowed the Nazi Italian national football team to play England at Highbury Stadium in London, and the following year, Nazi Germany was also allowed to play at White Hart Lane Stadium.