The best-run governing body in world sport is not FIFA, the IOC or the ECB. It is the International Federation of Charming Worms and Allied Pastimes, it operates from a village in Cheshire, and it has never once been raided at dawn by the Swiss police.
Every summer since 1980, the playing field of Willaston County Primary School, near Nantwich, is marked out into plots three metres square, and competitors are given half an hour to persuade as many earthworms as possible to come up and say hello. No digging. No drugs. Vibration only — plus, if the mood takes you, a spot of music, because worms are apparently not immune to a tune. The whole thing is overseen by the aforementioned federation, IFCWAP to its friends, which enforces precisely eighteen rules. Eighteen. The Premier League handbook runs to several hundred pages and still cannot explain what handball is. Willaston manages doping control, plot allocation and full athlete welfare — including for the invertebrate athletes — in a list you could fit on a beer mat.
And doping control is no joke here. According to the federation’s own rulebook, water counts as a stimulant, and any competitor wishing to deploy a liquid must have it vetted by officials before the off. Sit with that for a moment. The cycling world spent two decades chasing Lance Armstrong through courtrooms and hotel minibars; in Cheshire, a bloke with a clipboard sniffs your watering can and justice is done by teatime. If the anti-doping agencies of the world want a masterclass in swift, proportionate enforcement, they should get themselves to a school field in June.
The favoured technique is known, gloriously, as twanging: you plant a garden fork in the turf and wobble the handle, sending vibrations down into the soil. The worms, so the theory goes, mistake the tremor for rain — or possibly for an approaching mole — and make for the surface, whereupon they are gently gathered up. Some charmers have been known to reach for instruments instead. It is, in essence, percussion for an audience that lives underground, and it is more honest musicianship than half of what headlines Glastonbury.
Now to the record books, because this is where the story stops being merely charming and becomes properly great. The event began in 1980 when Tom Shufflebotham — a name so perfectly English it ought to be listed — charmed 511 worms from the ground in half an hour and accidentally founded a sport. That mark stood, immovable as a Stuart Broad forward defensive, for nearly three decades. Then, in 2009, it was demolished. Not by a beefy agricultural type with forearms like gateposts, but by Sophie Smith, a local schoolgirl aged ten, who coaxed 567 worms to the surface and into the record books, a feat recognised by Guinness World Records.
Think about what that means. The all-time world record in an internationally federated sport belongs to a primary-school child. No academy system. No agent taking fifteen per cent. No performance director with a lanyard and a PowerPoint about marginal gains. Just a kid, a fork, a patch of Cheshire turf and — one assumes — an entirely natural gift for making the earth tremble. When was the last time English sport produced a world-beater without first putting them through a decade of spreadsheets? Exactly.
And here is the bit that should genuinely shame the rest of the sporting world: nobody gets hurt. Organisers have long insisted that every worm charmed is counted, kept safe, and returned to the soil the same evening — released only after the birds have gone to roost, so that no opportunist blackbird can turn the medal ceremony into a buffet. Compare and contrast with the fates of racehorses, greyhounds and the knees of countless teenage footballers. Worm charming is, as far as I can tell, the only sport on Earth where the welfare of the athlete is not a press release but a scheduling decision.
It would be easy to file all this under Quaint English Eccentricity and move on, next to cheese rolling and shin kicking in the national cabinet of curiosities. That would be a mistake. Because while the grown-up sports have spent the past few decades selling themselves to sovereign wealth funds, agonising over VAR and inventing competitions nobody asked for, a village in Cheshire has quietly been doing sport correctly. Cheap to enter. Daft on purpose. Fierce in competition, gentle in consequence. Governed lightly but firmly, by people who turn up, do the counting, and go home. There is no worm-charming super league. There is no breakaway federation in the Gulf. There is a school field, a Saturday, and a set of rules everyone actually follows.
Orwell called serious sport war minus the shooting. He never saw Willaston, where serious sport is a picnic plus percussion, and the losing side gets tucked safely back into bed beneath the pitch.
Five hundred and sixty-seven worms in half an hour, every last one of them home by dusk. Show me another world record with a conscience that clean.