Anthony Clavane
What Thatcher did for football: How a new generation of sports writers have embraced politicsMargaret Thatcher hated football - and sport in general - but her legacy to the game was to turn a generation of sports writers, who had previously dodged any analysis of their sports' significance, onto politics.
The great irony is that, up until the Thatcher era, sport had acted, by and large, as a bulwark against incisive analysis of its own political significance. The mantra adopted by right and left alike was: “Keep politics out of sport.” When Thatcher broke this golden rule by calling for a British boycott of the Moscow Olympics in 1980, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, it opened the floodgates. [...] Sports writing before Thatcher had usually turned its nose up at politics. So it would be no exaggeration to describe the keen interest of the new generation of writers, bordering at times on obsession, as a profound change.
"New Statesman", 22 August 2013
