England, we need to talk about football. I know we’ve been talking about it, almost every minute of every day for the past exhilarating month. But the truth is that we need football to talk about England.
The fact is, nothing else in this country allows us to talk about ourselves like the England national football team and our collective experience of its struggles. Our “years of hurt” – 55 and counting – are not wounds of battle but pains of birth. For all these years, this stateless nation, England, has been hidden inside the broken carapace of imperial Britain.
Back in 1966, when Wembley was full of union jacks, we could still see England and Britain as identical; this fiction has since become impossible to maintain. But there are no other specifically English civic institutions around which to have this conversation: the royal family, the military, the BBC, parliament and Whitehall are all British. The football team is all we’ve got to work with.
It has been a very mixed experience. At Euro 96 we saw the rediscovery of the St George’s flag, and its reclamation from the far right, but we have also had fans singing No Surrender to the IRA during the national anthem for much of the last 25 years. We have had the music-hall conga lines of fans at the World Cup in Sapporo in 2002, and Brexit chants at Euro 2016, and of course we have had a lot of overexpectation and underperformance.
This year has been different, the conversation more intense: for not only has the team been more successful than most people could have imagined, but the meaning of the tale has been set not by the fans or the media, but by the team and their coach.
Its not hard to see why Gareth Southgate has proved so popular: he seems to be speaking about so much more than what happens on the pitch. He has been a man with plan, and one who actually sticks to it, whatever the populist and popular outcry. He neither under- nor overestimates opponents, treats them all with respect, and has shown remarkable emotional intelligence, towards himself and his players. He understands and celebrates the interlinked contribution of everyone in his team – players, coaches and every kind of support staff – and saves his greatest praise for the players who have had the least game time, on the grounds that we are only as good as our weakest link.
In his promise not of victory or triumph but of treasured collective memories, there is a reminder of a long-lost form of public service. Above all he has been unwavering in his support for the team’s decision to take the knee, and a vision of England that is diverse and inclusive – by race and ethnicity most loudly, because the times demand it, but also on questions of gender, class and sexuality.
And we have loved the team because they have played so well, but also for being themselves: young, driven, focused, but also fragile and vulnerable. England’s most centred, balanced and socially conscious generation of football players: public and unabashed campaigners for hungry kids, for social and racial justice, and for LGBT inclusion.
And the English football nation has never looked so diverse. Not merely the team, the majority of whom have migrant roots, or even the TV pundits, but in the wider football nation: where kids at a Muslim boarding school and a street party in Oldham are sent into simultaneous ecstasy by the same goal; where an England-supporting bhangra band can march through Wolverhampton; where Harry Kane wears a rainbow armband, and Jordan Henderson celebrates an LGBT fan’s first “out” attendance at an England game.
But it’s one thing to finally change the conversation; it is another thing to change ourselves. One example, England, is that we need to talk about our relationship with alcohol. The days when elite footballers were on one long pub crawl, and were celebrated for it, are long gone; some of the squad have never touched a drink. And, yes, we are the people who like a beer, but this was a competition in oblivion, turning public spaces into vast brawling stag nights. It often turns us into the people who beat up opposing fans outside Wembley, and physically abuse people of colour on the street. Private spaces have, no doubt, been much worse – the record on post-match domestic violence is terrifying and all the more so after losing games.
England, we need to talk about our relationship with the rest of the world. We have loved a team that has refused to take on the implausible weight of concocted histories and military narratives. To them the Scots are not the enemy, the match with Germany was not a restaging of the Battle of Britain or even past semi-finals. Yet we are still the people singing Rule, Britannia! and the Dam Busters theme music, and the people who boo their opponent’s national anthem.
This team was made in England, for sure, but its debt to the rest of the world is immeasurable: to Arsène Wenger and all the foreign coaches over the past quarter of a century who have transformed the culture of the nation’s dressing rooms and refined the skills of the current team.
England, we loved this team because they are so young and so full of promise, but are we going to spread the love around? These exceptional football players have been nurtured and supported like no generation before them. The FA, for all its past failings, has over the last decade massively invested in the development of this team, building the exemplary facilities at St George’s Park, investing in coaching education, sports psychology, medicine and analytics.
Meanwhile, young people have had their education and mental health badly hit over the past 18 months, and can look forward to being excluded from the housing market and loaded with debt. For them, all we offer are the pitiful crumbs of the government’s educational catchup fund.
England, we need to talk about the future. For a month we have lived in the world of the collective imagination, we have felt the delirious electricity of what collective action can make possible, what it really feels like to be “we”, not “me”. It has been good to dream, to imagine the other Englands that are possible. Yet we still face the awful madness of the Covid pandemic, climate change and a government that is taking £20 a week from the very poorest people in England.
English football is not going to solve any of these problems, but this team has given us a chance to imagine what kind of nation we would be if we chose to do so.
David Goldblatt is the author of The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football and The Game of Our Lives
