British football has long had a bumpy relationship with the Olympics, simply because we organise our football as individual nations rather than the collective. Without a GB football team, there has long been no obvious path to the Games, certainly in the men’s game, until an unholy alliance was cobbled together for London 2012.
To mark that, in their December 2011 edition, FourFourTwo traced the history of British football at the Olympics in a fascinating and, occasionally, barmy article.
Beginning in 1908, there’s a gold medal in 1912, a trip to the Berlin Olympics in 1936 where they had to each shake hands with Hitler – ‘I’ve been washing my hand ever since’, said defender Daniel Pettitt 70 years later – and a monumental knees up at Buckingham Palace before heading to the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki.
You can get the full story from FourFourTwo here.
