Football as soft power: English football and British appeasement policy in the interwar years

Kristian Gerner
Department of History, Lund University

In this book on English football and British foreign policy in the interwar period. Peter J. Beck demonstrates how English international football matches were believed to be an asset in the British government’s appeasement policy vis-à-vis Germany and Italy in the 1930s.

Sport is part of cultural diplomacy which is thought to influence the politics of other states through peaceful means, through soft power. Peter Beck quotes the American political scientist Joseph Nye Jr, who introduced the concept ‘soft power’ into international relations research. The exertion of soft power, Nye observes, is “getting others to want the outcomes that you want […] government propaganda is rarely credible. The best propaganda is not propaganda” (p. 55).

Peter Beck shows how the British Foreign Office attempted clandestinely to use international matches between the English national team and foreign national teams, and between F.A. clubs and foreign clubs, all in order to further the government’s international political aims. This was the use of soft power as an effect of (hidden) active measure. Ideally, soft power should not have agency: it should lie in the eyes of the beholder. One may define a state’s soft power as a counterpart to an individual’s charisma.

Analyzing documents in the Public Record Office, contemporaneous reports in newspapers and magazines, referring to the author’s interview in 1980 with Sir Stanley Rous, F.A. Secretary 1937–1962, and in addition recapitulating the abundant research literature on British foreign policy in the interwar period, Peter Beck documents the increasingly eager efforts by the Foreign Office to make English football contribute to the appeasement policy.

The subtitle of the book names Britain. In practice, and for good reasons, the story is about England and its self-understanding and special role in both world politics and football. The Empire was British, but in international football matches it was primarily about the English national team and the FA clubs. The presidents and secretaries of the FA were the football opposites of the British government. By being very keen on the distinction English–British Peter Back succeeds in giving non-native readers a feeling of the English sense of exceptionalism with football as its most visible manifestation.

Before the game the England players lined up giving the Nazi salute. The British ambassador to Germany, Neville Henderson, had admonished them to do so.

Any reader of a book about international football will know that footballers in the foggy island in the North Sea do not represent (Great) Britain or the UK. The national teams represent England, Northern Ireland (called Ireland in the interwar years), Scotland and Wales. These four were united in the International Football Association Board. Matches between two of the British national teams were labelled international.

From the beginning, as Beck notes, football was more than just an innocent game. He refers to George Orwell’s dictum: “At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare.” (p. 22). From the beginning this was true of football. The annual England-Scotland matches nurtured “Scottish hopes à la Braveheart of repeating their famous 1314 victory over the English at Bannockburn” (p. 5).

The living memory of the Great War among the Britons caused the four British teams to withdraw from F.I.F.A. in 1920 because Germany was accepted as member.  They re-entered in 1924 but withdrew again in 1928. They did not take part in F.I.F.A.’s World Cup tournaments in the 1930s. The matches in 1935 and in 1939 between England and Italy, the World Champion in 1934 and in 1938, was understood in the UK to be the “real” World Champion matches. The one England won and the other was a draw. Besides Italy, the English considered the German team and the Austrian Wunderteam to be worthy “test match” adversaries.

Peter Beck gives detailed reports on the political and ideological controversies in England concerning England’s matches against Italy and Germany in the fateful years 1938 and 1939, that is, before and after the Munich Conference on 30 September 1938. In focus is the perspective of the British Government. An important result of Beck’s investigation of a famous/infamous incident at the opening of the match between Germany and England at the Olympic Stadium in Berlin on 14 May 1938 is that seemingly, at the time of the event, the British government could pride itself of successful diplomatic use of the match. It was interpreted in immediate retrospect as the prelude to the – seemingly, at the time – equally successful (!) Munich Conference in September.

The apex of Beck’s narration is chapter 5, “Facing Hitler’s Germany on and off the football field, 1938–1939. England’s Nazi salute as virtue signalling in support of footballing appeasement?” In spite of protests in England against the forthcoming match, the Foreign Office was positive about the game being played. It should be used for propaganda. Beck quotes from a Foreign Office minute that it mattered that the English team should win or at least manage to “put up a very good fight”. Before the game the England players lined up giving the Nazi salute. The British ambassador to Germany, Neville Henderson, had admonished them to do so. Peter Beck emphasizes that both Neville Henderson and Stanley Rous became satisfied with the impression on the German crowd of the English gesture. The British press was positive about it.

The English Nazi salute in the face of Hitler “was adjudged to have helped maximise the fixture’s perceived contribution to the national interest on and off the field, that is, the use of international football as an instrument of appeasement” (p. 125). The author remarks that at this juncture in history the British government was not negotiating from a position of strength but from a position of weakness. He argues that in such a situation appeasement policy is futile. England’ Nazi salute in Berlin certainly pleased both the German and the British government but it did not make Hitler abandon his war plans.

After war had broken out in 1940 and until recently the English Nazi salute has been widely condemned in most popular accounts of the incident. “However”, Beck adds, “generally speaking, sports history studies, especially player’s memoirs and biographies, stick, and continue to do so, to the ‘Guilty Men’ approach to appeasement and ‘Munich’, denigrating Neville Chamberlain and the Nazi salute, and hence prove largely unaffected by subsequent revisionist historiographical controversies.” (p. 128).[1]

Attempts to use presumed soft power in international relations existed long before the term was conceptualized by Nye. Beck enumerates twelve “key episodes of intervention in international football by British governments in 1927–1939.” The episodes were very different. In order to demonstrate the significance of each case Beck has had to place everyone in its specific historical context and refer to it in 1240 endnotes on 69 pages.

The first instance was in 1927 when The Foreign Office used private informal conversations with football leaders and a “tame” journalist to blame “incompetent and ill-balanced teams” playing in Germany. These teams caused damage to British prestige, which was “of sufficient importance to be considered seriously enough.” Beck makes clear that in this case the issue was that the behavior and results of English FA clubs did not enhance British attempts to “use” soft power vis-à-vis Weimar Germany.

The last instance in Beck’s enumeration is the English national team’s match against Italy in Milan in May 1939 when the Foreign Office and the British ambassador to Italy admonished the English players to give the Fascist salute before the match. In this case everything in practice was in the open: the framing of the match evidently was that it was a competition with political overtones.

By writing the history of English international football games in the interwar years, Peter Beck has given a very good account of the ultimate failure of British appeasement policy. He has given readers who might be primarily interested in football and not in political science a sense of international politics in general as being multidimensional, and of football as being a worthful key to understanding the roles in international relations of individuals such as football leaders and football players on the field.

Last but not least, International Football as Cultural Diplomacy is really a book about soccer. It is about the sport in itself, about memorable matches. The book is a good read for football aficionados.

Copyright © Kristian Gerner 2025

[1] The term ’revisionist’ here refers to serious scholarship concerning the history of the Cold War and the preceding interwar period and not to charlatans that use the term concerning the Holocaust as the denial that it occurred.