# Sport, nationalism, and the imagined community of millions

A nice quote about how football and nationalism come together neatly,
from [Nations and nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth,
Reality](isbn:978-0521439619) by [Eric J.
Hobsbawm](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Hobsbawm), p. 143 (emphasis
added):

> Between the wars, however, international sport became, as George
> Orwell soon recognized, an expression of national struggle, and
> sportsmen representing their nation or state, primary expressions of
> their imagined communities. This was the period when the Tour de
> France came to be dominated by national teams, when the Mitropa Cup
> set leading teams of the states of Central Europe against each other,
> when the World Cup was introduced into world football, and, as 1936
> demonstrated, when the Olympic Games unmistakably became occasions for
> competitive national self-assertion. What has made sport so uniquely
> effective a medium for inculcating national feelings, at all events
> for males, is the ease with which even the least political or public
> individuals can identify with the nation as symbolized by young
> persons excelling at what practically every man wants, or at one time
> in life has wanted, to be good at. _The imagined community of millions
> seems more real as a team of eleven named people. The individual, even
> the one who only cheers, becomes a symbol of his nation himself._