IN COMMON with many others stuck in lockdown in the summer of 2020, I decided to give podcasting a go, along with my foolhardy comrade, Alex Gordon. 

Red Caste focuses on sport and politics for two reasons. Firstly, the reaction to my short series about leftist football clubs in the Morning Star in 2020 brought home us the strong historical links between socialism and popular sports. 

Secondly, the inspiration of the late great Eduardo Galeano, a historian from the world’s top pound-for-pound football nation Uruguay, who wrote in The Astonishing Void as described. To quote Galeano in full: “An astonishing void: official history ignores soccer … history texts fail to mention it, even in passing, in countries where soccer has been and continues to be a primordial symbol of collective identity. I play therefore I am: a style of play is a way of being that reveals the unique profile of each community and affirms its right to be different…”

I’ve travelled in Latin America and could never understand how anyone could write a history of the continent without dealing with the importance of football to the people; this is part of the general tendency of bourgeois history to ignore the working class as nothing but dispensable extras and also of some leftist historians to ignore sport, dismissing it as a frivolous distraction from the struggle — which apart from anything else is inaccurate, the areas of greatest working-class militancy tend to be those where sporting passions are at their most intense.

Part of our intent in doing this series was to help fill that void, by looking at politics and history through the prism of sport. 

It worked: the podcast interviews afforded us a profound view of histories and locations that we thought we knew pretty well. 

And they were fun: we had serious intent and we had to manage the interviews to meet our objectives, but it was a privilege just to be part of the conversation with such an engaging and committed group of people, thanks to all of them. 



A summary of the casts we have recorded for the first series:



Professor Tony Collins: Rugby League, Sport in Capitalist Society



Tony is the top sports historian in the country. I’d read a couple of his outstanding books and felt a little cheeky asking him to appear but he happily agreed and turned out to be a thoroughly decent guy and a great guest. 



The Rugby League cast highlighted two main things: 



The relationship between class divisions and the sheer hypocrisy about “amateurism” that led to the 1895 breakaway of many northern clubs; 

the game’s history confirms that the ruling classes pursue the class war more aggressively, self-consciously and effectively than do working people and their representatives.



In The Sport and Capitalist Society cast, named after Tony’s fine book, we spoke a lot about the intimate connection between organised gambling and the rise of 19th-century sports but majored on the utter cant associated with the ruling class cult of the amateur: a cult that represented the hypocrisy and desire for dominance of a British middle class that “wanted capitalist economic competition but also a hierarchical ordered social structure, in other words a contest that guaranteed their victory.” 



This desire to win, particularly against their “inferiors,” was a powerful impetus to the growth of amateur ideology and culminated at the end of the century in the secession of the northern clubs from the Rugby Union. 



Jack Duffin: Belfast Celtic

Jack is a former Official IRA man, political campaigner, historian and fan of the late, great Belfast Celtic. 

Celtic was part of the fabric of life for the nationalist community in Belfast from 1891 to 1949 when it had to fold due to sectarian violence. 

As Jack says, Belfast Celtic were part of the heart and soul of West Belfast, without them the history of the Catholic population of the city in the 20th century would be one of unremitting gloom (However, Celtic’s support was always about 10 per cent protestant, things are always more complicated than they seem).



In the second part of the podcast he gives us a unique insight into the politics and armed struggles in the northern six counties in the 1960s and ’70s, from the influence of the Cuban revolution to the early collaboration of the British army with Loyalist murder gangs. 



Les Doherty: a Radical History of Cycling



Fascinating stuff. The widening of gene pools which resulted from the growth of cycling led the biologist Steve Jones to rank the invention of the bicycle as the most important event in recent human evolution.

We talk about the connection between the Dreyfus affair and the birth of the Tour de France, why the British bourgeoisie feared young men on bicycles as a dangerous bunch the way small-town United States does the prospect of a visit from an outlaw motorcycle club, how they tried to ban cycling in groups for decades, and why we need an integrated transport policy including the bicycle. 



Les talks about the future plans of his pedal4progress group, which has raised many thousands of pounds for the Morning Star, and talks me into cycling across Ireland this year, and maybe North Korea in 2023.




Matt Smyth: Detroit City FC

We talked with Matt Smyth, a member of the Keyworth Casuals ultra group about his love of Detroit City FC, the history of the club and its vociferous, foul-mouthed, leftist supporters who sing adapted British hooligan songs but choregraph like Italian tifosi; football is truly a funny old international game. 

Detroit may be the coolest club in the world with Iggy Pop and Rashida Tlaib among its fans. 



The podcast was recorded before the 2020 US presidential election. Events have overtaken parts of the cast but it remains well worth a listen, particularly Matt’s warning about the future: we may end up with someone like Trump again in the US, but intelligent, competent and much more dangerous.



Hugh Kirkbride: The Bodyline Tour

This has everything: class struggle and prejudice; an empire attempting to control its colony at a time of economic crisis; the wonderful complexity of Douglas Jardine; the secret illegitimate child of the chairman of England selectors bowling for England in the series; splits in the Australian team based around hatred of Don Bradman and ill feeling between the Irish Catholics and the Freemasons in the camp; all that and some great cricket. 



This was a great exemplar of how studying the past through sport provides an invaluable prism that tells you more than conventional history: We knew that there was tension in the Australian camp centred around Bradman, I didn’t know that this was part of a wider split between the Irish and the masons, nor that this was also a significant fissure in Australian society at the time. 

Tony Collins: Series Round-Up


Tony Collins kindly joined us again. We revisited the rest of the Galeano quote referred to above:

 “For many years soccer has been played in different styles, unique expressions of the personality of each people, and the preservation of that diversity seems to me more necessary today than ever before. These are days of obligatory uniformity, in soccer and everything else … whoever does not die of hunger dies of boredom.”



Galeano sings of loss for a dying footballing world, he feared the elevation of speed and fitness above beauty, intensity and strength above finesse, a game that disdains fantasy and forfeits play for results. 

Tony agreed that this, like much writing about sport romanticises a past that never exists, an elegy over the grave of something that was always a phantom, that worship of an idealised past that seems to curse humanity. 

Sport has long been a hard-nosed, commercially minded branch of capitalism and its growth in the 19th century reflected economic developments. 

Yet it still captivates. 

We want it to be pure, untarnished by the greed and compromises dictated by necessity in a society with the face of a desiccated calculating machine. 

Sport can take us above and beyond Moloch, affording us an earthbound glimpse of nirvana and the integration of a dislocated individuality into an emotionally charged collective experience like watching football. (This can be dangerous, but the experience of St Pauli, Rayo Vallecano and the other leftist teams covered in our series shows that it doesn’t have to be that way).

Despite being part of Moloch, sport offers the prospect of something better, something noble that offers the prospect of something beyond the calculating machine and tribalism, the search for beauty that Galeano summarised:

 “Years have gone by and I’ve finally learned to accept myself for who I am: a beggar for good football. I go about the world, hand outstretched, and in the stadiums I plead: ‘A pretty move, for the love of God.’ And when good football happens, I give thanks for the miracle and I don’t give a damn which team or country performs it.
”

The study of sport tells us something about our history and about ourselves. You can listen to our podcasts here: 

https://anchor.fm/red-caste