Religion and the Rise of Sport in England
Hugh McLeod
Oxford University Press, £30, 304 pages
A visitor from 200 years ago, landing in England in late autumn 2022, might be forgiven for thinking that Christianity had given way to a new cult centred on large screens in public houses with a 90-min-ute long service of two halves conducted by 22 well-coiffured players and a kind of whis-tle-blowing peacekeeper – and that bread and wine had been replaced by large quantities of cold lager. Is football, then, the new reli-gion? Has it replaced a dying Christian-ity? After all, Hugh McLeod reminds us, when Liverpool manager Bill Shankly reflect-ed on whether football was a matter of life and death, he famously concluded that it was “much, much more important than that”. In this highly entertaining, inform-ative and balanced volume, McLeod, a lead-ing historian of modern English religion, offers a comprehensive account of the chang-ing relationship between sport and religion over the last couple of centuries.
