My students often roll their eyes when I start talking about anachronism in sports history. Anachronisms are things that are ‘against time’, things we put in the wrong historical context, things that are temporally impossible. Sports history in the everyday sense is full of them. For example, the British Olympic Association (BOA) claims that there was a British ‘team’ at the Olympic Games of 1896, 1900, and 1904, all of which took place before the BOA formed and before the International Olympic Committee developed the notion of national teams. Plenty of record books written since the reunification of Germany in October 1990 fail to distinguish between West German and East German sporting achievements between the 1950s and late 1980s, with ‘Germany’ often credited as having won the football World Cup in 1954, 1974, and 1990. The frequent changes in the names of the leagues and divisions in English football has led some record books to give the impression that the pre-1992 Football League Championship (that is, the highest club honour) is the same as the post-1992 Football League Championship (when it became equivalent to the old Second Division title). The Royal and Ancient Golf Club at St Andrews claims that it was founded in 1754, but the name ‘Royal and Ancient’ was not applied until eighty years after the foundation of the Society of St Andrews Golfers, in 1834. My current favourite, and one that almost made me scream when I saw it, is on Soccerbase.com, a generally impeccable database of football results. This site has taken the current team Milton Keynes Dons, which grew out of Wimbledon FC, and applied the ‘Milton Keynes’ name backwards on every Wimbledon entry. So not only does it give us the frankly ludicrous record that the 1988 FA Cup final was between Liverpool and Milton Keynes; it also claims that the club Milton Keynes was formed in 1889, a full 78 years before the new town of Milton Keynes was established.

You get the picture. As Paul Weller once put it, ‘I could go on for hours and I probably will…’ These examples, which range form the pompous to the comic, from people inventing traditions to people being lazy, illustrate the problem of anachronism. All of these cases, and the many others that pepper popular sports history, are ‘against time’, temporally impossible. It is this kind of usage of anachronism that is an enemy of sports history, and that I want my students to be aware of when they research and write.

Why is anachronism so problematic? First off, it perpetuates errors. Every historian will own up to making occasional factual errors, and then doing what they can to correct them when they get a chance. Anachronistic errors are avoidable, but the more often they get used, the more difficult it is to set the record straight. I remember the 1992 restructuring of English football, so I can spot the slippage in the use of the name ‘League Champions’; but future generations might not. The more we can do now to get rid of these ambiguities and falsehoods, the better record we will leave for the future. The second problem is that anachronisms can be demeaning to the people involved. When Lawrie Sanchez scored for Wimbledon in the 1988 FA Cup final, he could not have had any notion of playing for or representing Milton Keynes: he was a Wimbledon player, with no debates or ambiguities about what that meant. When record books mess around with this fact, they dilute the achievement and rob people of their past. Third, anachronisms are problematic because they involve reading history backwards: rather than seeing history as being about ‘moving away from’, as Nancy Struna put it, they suggest that history has always been ‘moving towards’. Anyone playing golf at St Andrews in the 1760s could not have had any notion that, seventy years down the line, their club would be given royal patronage: they were members of a club that had been set up in the past. This kind of reading of history, which concentrates on features of the past that make sense in the light of our present concerns and arrangements, betrays a lack of concern for contexts.

So, avoid anachronism. Don’t just think of it as pedantic if someone points out that it was Cassius Clay, not Muhammad Ali, who won the light heavyweight boxing gold medal at the 1960 Olympic Games, or if you are reminded that the 1966 football World Cup final was between England and West Germany, not England and Germany. Develop your skills of empathy and contextual understanding so that you can deal with events in sports history as being ‘in time’ rather than ‘against time’.