The Relevance of the 'Irrelevant': Football as a Missing Dimension in the Study of British Relations with Germany

This article has been developed and updated from a paper delivered at the Grossbritannien-Zentrum, Humboldt University at Berlin, June 2000. Traditionally, sport has been marginalized, even treated as an irrelevance, in the study of International Relations (IR). The 2002 World Cup Finals raised yet again questions about the realism of continuing to write sport out of IR, and particularly to ignore its impact upon such relationships as those between Britain and Germany. Football's role in mirroring, influencing and articulating British perceptions of Germany, at least at the popular and media level, is presented as a case-study, since the football field proved another important British_German battleground throughout the twentieth century. This trend continues. Already, three high profile football internationals played during 2000–1 as well as rivalry to host the 2006 World Cup tournament have illuminated the problematic state of the British-German relationship, particularly the fact that history, most notably world war imagery, imparts en enduring extra-sporting sub-text for any England-Germany footballing encounter.