The Christmas Truce of 1914 occupies a distinctive place in the history of the First World War. In late December, along several stretches of the Western Front, British and German units independently ceased fire, often without authorisation from higher command. Soldiers left their trenches and entered No Man’s Land, exchanged greetings, food, drink, cigarettes, and small personal items, and in many places worked together to bury the dead that had accumulated during weeks of fighting. These truces were local, uneven, and fragile, with some lasting only hours while others extending into the New Year. They were never universal, and fighting continued elsewhere. Yet where they occurred, they represented an unusual suspension of hostilities sustained not by treaty or command but by mutual restraint.
Football appears repeatedly in accounts of these encounters. Letters and diaries written in late December 1914 and early January 1915 mention soldiers kicking balls around during the truce. Sometimes these were proper footballs brought from reserve areas; sometimes improvised objects made from tins or bundled cloth. In several accounts, British and German soldiers are described as taking part together, in others, one side played while the other watched or commented. Football was a familiar pastime for many soldiers, particularly in the British Expeditionary Force, where it had been encouraged before the war as a form of recreation and morale-building.
From these fragmentary references emerged the later claim that a football match was played between British and German troops on Christmas Day 1914. In its most elaborate form, the match had teams, goals, and a final score, usually reported as a German victory by three goals to two. This version of events has become one of the most widely circulated anecdotes of the war and is often presented as emblematic of spontaneous peace amid violence.
Historical research draws a clearer distinction between what contemporary evidence supports and what appears to be later elaboration. The existence of the truce itself is firmly established through war diaries, private correspondence, and corroborating German sources. Football, too, is well attested, but in a limited and informal sense. Contemporary descriptions consistently depict improvised kickabouts rather than organised competition. Participants were numerous and loosely defined, play was brief and influenced by poor ground conditions, and the activity was often intra-unit, with enemy soldiers observing nearby. Where British and German soldiers appear to have kicked a ball together, the game is described as spontaneous rather than anything competitive.
What is absent from the contemporaneous record is reliable evidence of a ‘proper’ Britain vs Germany match and claims to the contrary rest largely on a small number of press letters published in early January 1915, some of which relay second-hand information and cannot be reliably linked to eyewitnesses. Indeed, later investigations had shown that units mentioned in these reports were not always positioned close enough to make the described match plausible. War diaries from the relevant sectors do not record organised football games or German sources do not corroborate the existence of a scored match. Later oral testimonies that do describe such games were recorded decades after the event and often conflict with diaries written at the time.
The cautious consensus of historical scholarship is therefore that football was played during the Christmas Truce, but almost certainly in informal, distinctly non-international forms. The organised, scored match where Germany won 3-2, however, is a later invention.
The question, then, is why the idea of a football match became so central to how the truce has been remembered?
Part of the explanation lies in early circulation. Once a striking detail such as a score appeared in a national newspaper, it was repeated in later retellings, gradually acquiring credibility through repetition rather than corroboration. Over time, the distinction between eyewitness testimony and reported rumour simply blurred.
Equally important is the social meaning of football itself. Football’s appeal and origins are in its capacity to flatten distinctions – it is meritocratic. On the pitch, rank, wealth, and background matter far less than player effort and team cooperation. For men fighting and dying in rigidly hierarchical military structures at behest of forces they had no voice in, football carried the appeal of clarity of purpose and a sense of agency otherwise suddenly absent from their lives as the Great War broke out.
The role of Christmas itself also matters. In the Western world, Christmas has long been associated with the softening of conflict, acts of generosity, and the temporary suspension of ordinary social tensions. Canonically, it marks a moment of humility and reversal but, popularly, it is understood as a time when antagonisms should pause and relations be temporarily reordered – families reunited, quarrels set aside, friendships and love rekindled. These expectations must have shaped how the events of December 1914 were interpreted and later remembered.
The informal football play described in contemporary sources fit with these naturally – in No Man’s Land, soldiers defiantly engaged in an activity that briefly set aside all the boundaries of their everyday life – rank, nationality, and military order. The enduring image of a Christmas Truce football match therefore rests on a combination of documented events and later simplification. The truce was real, local, and short-lived. Football was present, but not as prevalent. The match, as later remembered, emerged from the way these elements were selected, repeated, and shaped into a form that was easily understood and transmitted.
What remains for us is not a scoreline or a match report, but a brief episode of part-history and part-myth in which ordinary people temporarily set aside the grim reality of their circumstances and chose love, community and life – the things for which we love football today just as much as they did over a century ago.
Sources:
Adams, I. (2015). A game for Christmas? The Argylls, Saxons and football on the Western Front, December 1914. The International Journal of the History of Sport, 32(11), 1395–1415.
Brown, M., & Seaton, S. (1984). Christmas truce: The Western Front, December 1914. Pan Books.
Crocker, T. B. (2015). The Christmas Truce: Myth, memory, and the First World War. Oxford University Press.
Hanna, E. (2009). The Great War on the small screen: Representing conflict in contemporary Britain. Edinburgh University Press.
Imperial War Museums. (n.d.). The real story of the Christmas Truce. Available at: https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-real-story-of-the-christmas-truce
Vamplew, W. (2014). Exploding the myths of sport in the Great War. The International Journal of the History of Sport, 31(4), 349–364.
Weintraub, S. (2001). Silent night: The remarkable Christmas Truce of 1914. Free Press.
Winter, J. (1999). Forms of kinship and remembrance in the aftermath of the Great War. In J. Winter & E. Sivan (Eds.), War and remembrance in the twentieth century (pp. 40–60). Cambridge University Press
