"The Sporting Spirit" is an essay by George Orwell published in the magazine Tribune on 14 December 1945, and later in Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays, a collection of Orwell's essays published in 1950. The essay was written on the heels of the 1945 tour of Great Britain by the Soviet football team FC Dynamo Moscow. The essay became famous for Orwell's description of international sporting competitions as "war minus the shooting", a phrase that has since been used as a metaphor for sports when referred to in popular media and for actions evoking hyper-nationalism and national pride.Orwell uses the examples of football, cricket, and boxing to argue that sport, while never intended to generate bonds of friendship, generates politicized and hyper-nationalistic emotions that can only stoke ill-will between nations. Source: Wikipedia (en)