George Orwell wrote: “Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence.” (1) Even more depressingly, perhaps, sports sociologist George Sage claimed that “organised sport has nothing at all to do with playfulness – fun, joy, self-satisfaction – … sports are instruments not for human expression, but of social stasis”. (2)

These views might sound overly dramatic and slightly heavy. Sports psychologist Terry Orlick summed up America’s approach to sports in the 1970s in simpler terms: “We do not teach children to love sports; we teach them to win games”. (3)

Many of us today, by contrast, seem to believe that there is not enough emphasis on competition and winning. A headline last year in the Guardian asked, “Are ‘non-competitive sports days’ really better for school kids?” The article reports that 86% of parents questioned did not approve of the idea. David Cameron famously condemned the ‘all-must-have-prizes’ culture in school sports, and education more generally, and called for a return to more competitive sports.

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