The word “sport”, like “game”, was originally linked to the pursuit of hunting: the diversion and satisfaction involved in bringing down the prey – be it in riding to hounds, salmon or trout fishing, or shooting. A preserve of the landowning nobility and gentry, these pursuits came to count as characteristics of the English gentleman, together with a penchant for gambling and horse-racing. The antiquary and engraver Joseph Strutt published The sports and pastimes of the people of England from the earliest period, including the rural and domestic recreations, May games, mummeries, pageants, processions and pompous spectacles in 1801; a dedicated Sporting magazine ran from 1792 until 1870. The fiction of Robert Surtees (1805–1864) and Anthony Trollope evoked these sports, in particular the fox hunt (“riding to hounds”), as an expression of what was best and most characteristic of English country life. In the course of the 19th century, there was also a fashion for target-shooting with bow and arrow, which, since it did not require strenuous physical movement, was also popular as a women’s pursuit. The movement was headed by the Royal Toxophile Society, founded in 1781, and the first Grand National Archery Meeting was held on the Knavesmire at York in 1843. It was ousted in the 1870s by the newly invented sport of lawn tennis, a hybrid combining elements from the older indoor games of “real tennis” and racquets, and from the Spanish/Basque game of pelota, introduced into England by the Spanish-born merchant Augurio Perera and initially played on croquet lawns. (The All England Lawn Tennis Club at Wimbledon was originally founded as a croquet club in 1868, changing its remit and name to include tennis in 1877.)

Among team sports, cricket had since the 18th century been a widespread and firmly-established favourite; its formalization began with the 1814 opening of Lord’s Cricket Ground as the home base of the Marylebone Cricket Club (itself founded in 1787); in 1839 the first county club was founded (Sussex). “Test matches” pitching English players against teams from other parts of the Empire (initially Australia) began in the 1860s; by 1890 a nationwide county-based competition was in place, and around the same time the cultural/literary representation of the game began to frame it in the idyllic mode of One-Nation Toryism, uniting parishes and players from different classes in idyllic village surroundings.

A more robust game was rugby, invented at the public school of that name under the influence of its reforming head master Thomas Arnold (1795–1842). In line with Arnold’s pedagogic ideal of the “Christian Gentleman”, uniting the chivalric values of courage and force with the Protestant values of self-control, self-abnegation, and honesty, rugby was initially seen as a boys’ game, ideally suited to channelling their energies and aggression into an observance of the “rules of the game” and obedience to arbitration, “team spirit”, and “fair play”. As such, the game was celebrated in the emerging genre of boys’ fiction, notably so in the seminal novel Tom Brown’s school days (1857) by Arnold’s adept Thomas Hughes. The meme (spuriously attributed to the Duke of Wellington) that “the Battle of Waterloo had been won on the playing-fields of Eton” began to circulate from 1859 on. At a later stage, outdoor fieldcraft, adapted from pioneer and army life in South Africa, would be added to this pedagogical mix, especially in the Boy Scouts movement instigated in 1907 by Baden-Powell (1847–1901). By the opening of the 20th century, the prevailing feeling was that a sportive training prepared boys to become soldiers for the Empire.

The game of rugby had meanwhile become a fixity, like its offshoot, association football, first played among schoolboys and students, and from the 1850s onwards more widely, when clubs were also founded outside educational establishments. The Football Association was founded in 1863, crystallizing the differences of its rules from those of its sibling sport Rugby (for which a separate rugby Football Union was founded in 1871). The first official international football match was held in 1872 between England and Scotland; in the following decades, football became a truly global sport, with the international federation FIFA founded in 1904.

Indeed, many sports of English origin went global: cricket (in all parts of the Empire and its successor states), tennis, football, and even boxing. English dominance in these sports was in the course of the 20th century overtaken by other countries; but this did not affect the strong function of national self-affirmation that these sports carried, and continue to carry, within Britain (or, more specifically, England) itself.