Saturday, 2.30pm, and I’m watching football. Borussia Dortmund versus Schalke, the Ruhr derby, kicks off the resumed Bundesliga in Germany, the first major European league to return from lockdown. These will be Geisterspiele, or “ghost games”, with no spectators. Much is at stake, and not just for German football. If all goes well, the Premier League may well return in England.
What’s intriguing is not just the politics of lockdown but the changing relationship between English and German football. From victory over Germany in the 1966 World Cup final to heart-breaking defeat on penalties in Euro ’96, the rivalry between the two nations came almost to define English football.
It was a rivalry rooted in the importance of anti-German chauvinism to British (and English) identity in the postwar decades. Much of that “Kraut-bashing” has gone.
Football, at elite club level at least, has become far more international. Two-thirds of Premier League players and half the managers are foreign. A German, Jürgen Klopp, who, as Liverpool manager, led the league when it was suspended in March. Klopp may be German but he probably has a greater affinity to both the city and the club than most English managers do to theirs.
The old football chant of “Two world wars and one World Cup” seems to come from a different world. It may only be a game, and one often stained with racism, but there’s something to be said for football’s ability to combine fierce tribal attachments with a nod to a wider horizon.
•Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
