The Pitch of Public Opinion: Debating Professional Football's Place in Wartime Britain, 1914-1915
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“The Pitch of Public Opinion” examines the public discussion and debate regarding the cancelation of professional association football in Britain during the First World War. Using the term, “the Football Debates” to refer to the discourse, this paper argues that the concepts of social standing, masculinity, and class especially, shaped opinions on professional football’s value in British wartime society. I demonstrate that the criticism of professional football coalesced around two arguments: that British football fans shirked their duty by partaking in sport, and that the playing of professional sport during wartime harmed Britain’s reputation among its allies and enemies. In turn, I highlight how football’s supporters combatted these critiques, and argued for the necessity of the institution of professional football during the tumults of wartime. “The Pitch of Public Opinion” pinpoints this almost yearlong debate about professional football’s wartime fate as the culmination of more than sixty years’ worth of tension between the professional and amateur models of sport in Britain. Drawing from a primary source base that includes contemporary newspaper coverage of the Football Debates and recruitment posters aimed at the working-class Britons who partook in football culture, “The Pitch of Public Opinion” elucidates the social and political factors that affected how Britons perceived professional football during a time of national crisis.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it