‘Football fans ‘overwhelmingly’ backing Brexit”, claims the Daily Express, whose front-page assertions about haunted house prices and Diana controlling the weather once placed them on the fringes of public discourse, but are now no less true than things said by the lord chancellor. “Football fans ‘overwhelmingly’ backing Brexit – will they get the result they want?”
I can promise all those fans an Engxit, if that helps.
For those who like their metaphors to smack them round the head like a piece of French cafeteria furniture, we live in promising times. England begin their Euro 2016 campaign as we inch brokenly towards the climax of the referendum campaign. Jingoism, laziness, self-delusion, desperate short-termism – the referendum has already played out like the ghost of tournaments past. It’s an excruciatingly unwatchable long-ball game – go out there and hoof it to immigration! – and there are still 17,000-odd minutes of it to go. In two weeks’ time we could be in the round of 16 and out of the single market, or in the EU and cataclysmically out of the groups on penalties. Either way, buy shares in effigy-makers now.
Many moons ago, the fact that England, Wales and Northern Ireland had all qualified for a major tournament – for the first time since all four home nations competed in 1958 – was regarded as potentially hugely positive for those in charge of making the case for our European destiny. What could be more coincidentally appropriate, whether you wanted to win Europe or simply take part in it?
I think we’ve all died a little since then. I cannot speak for the other home nations, but for those of us experienced in the traditional England tournament “journey”, the sense of a gathering toxic shitstorm that attends the referendum will feel familiar. Back in February, a malarial reworking of Three Lions by a Ukip supporter was a source of unbridled mirth. It’s now the classiest thing I can remember from either campaign.
With England yet to kick a ball, the football currently retains a less tarnished veneer; but both campaigns are likely to end up resembling the other one, repeated as farce. In Marseille on Thursday night England supporters were carolling the cordial inquiry: “Isis where are you?” (They were burning women in Mosul, to answer your question.) Out looking for aggro in London, meanwhile, was the energy secretary, Amber Rudd, whose attacks on Boris Johnson, her fellow Tory, kicked off early in ITV’s referendum debate with the sledgehammer assertion that “the only number Boris is interested in is No 10”. The sparse tittering of the studio audience suggested they found this somewhat cringeworthy, much in the same way one might react when presented with snaps of a clench-fisted England fan addressing French riot police outside an Irish pub in Marseille: it’s hardly your fault, but it’s still embarrassing, in a vicarious and indeterminate sort of way.
Much like the referendum, though, international football tournaments have long offered a chance to see outrageous club-on-club treachery as people usually on the same side square up on different ones. Think Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo winking at the bench in 2006 after his part in Manchester United team-mate Wayne Rooney’s dismissal, and tell me Rudd wasn’t trying something similar when she signed off with the clearly Cameron-approved line: “Boris is the life and soul of the party. But he isn’t the man you want driving you home at the end of the evening.” Oof. Hats off to Amber for her breakout performance and everything, but that was basically a date-rape jibe with a drink-drive cover story. Still, all’s fair in the quarters and referendums. Wayne and Cristiano were already laughing it off in the tunnel after the incident in Gelsenkirchen. I’m sure Amber and Boris can totally do the same on 24 June.
Happily for the strong of stomach, there will be plenty more magic to come over the next 12 days. The Vote Leave campaign will pay a £50m prize to anyone who can correctly predict the results of every match in the tournament, because that’s how much the UK has to relinquish to the EU every day. Except it isn’t, and they won’t have to. Even so, the great Euro 2016-referendum coincidence already reads like a quiz game entitled Who Said It: English Football or Referendum Campaigners? – in which the playing public is required to attribute sick jokes, stock market warnings, Isis references, casual racism, committed racism, jingoism, fact-free optimism, Hitler references (veiled and unveiled) and plastic tommy hats. (The answer to all the above, by the way, is that they both said it.) Much of it works best in split screen. “We have to believe in ourselves,” explained Joe Hart on Thursday; “We have to believe in ourselves,” explained Boris Johnson a few hours later.
And yet I can’t help feeling it would frequently be less hideous if we believed slightly less in ourselves. To outsiders we come off like the toddlers of Europe, as convinced of our own centrality to the universe as we are that the best use of French police time at this unique security moment is mediating in exchanges outside Irish pubs as “part of the fun”. We certainly seem as unable to mentally adjust to post-imperial realities as we are to accept that other people are now permanently better at the game we invented.
Even the England Euro 2016 bus slogan – “One team, one dream” – turns out, embarrassingly, to be a German hand-me-down, having been truncated from the “One nation, one team, one dream” that adorned the world champions’ Brazil 2014 transport. Perhaps the best that can be said about it is that it’s not a complete lie about the NHS.
No disappointment would be complete if we didn’t know the fantasy cost of it, so we’ll play out with a very British look at the various exits on offer. In the Euros, researchers are suggesting $6bn (0.3%) may be wiped off the stock market in one day if England go out early. The effect of Brexit is generally (though far from exclusively) thought to be somewhat more apocalyptic, with falls of 20% or 30% predicted by people who predict these things (yet fail to predict others).
So there you have it. In the latter eventuality, it is to be hoped David Cameron would at least donate to the nation his fee for the inevitable self-deprecating Pizza Hut advert.
