ABSTRACT
Introduction The close connection between football and national identity has been long recognised. Indeed, in the twentieth century, there were some notorious cases when football was explicitly used as a vehicle of the most virulent kind of nationalist ideology. Most obviously, sport was consistently employed by the Nazi regime to project an idealised image of itself both for its own people and for the international community. The 1936 Berlin Olympics, somewhat inconvenienced by the performance of Jesse Owens, were intended to be a demonstration of Aryan superiority and the strength of Nazi Germany. Yet, football, although still subordinate to gymnastics as the favoured male activity, was not immune to political manipulation. As part of this project, on 14 May 1938 the England team were obliged to give the Nazi salute before the beginning of a match against Germany in the Olympic stadium.
