Football, England and the triumph of modernity

Beaten on the pitch. Victorious off it.

No point talking about politics today. The old is gone and the new has yet to be born. We’re in the interregnum. There’s nothing left to say about Starmer that hasn’t been said already and nothing useful to say about Burnham until he confirms what he’s going to do. There’s just speculation and I just don’t see the point speculating when we’ll have confirmation Monday. So instead let’s talk about a subject I know literally nothing about. Let’s talk football.

Photo by Fauzan Saari on Unsplash

I first noticed football during Italia 90. This is back in the distant past when Fifa used to hold the tournament in countries that cared about the sport - it was crazy, you had to be there.

I woke up one morning and everyone was talking about the same thing. They spoke about it at home, my friend’s father spoke about it on the way to school, the teachers spoke about it in the classroom, the other pupils spoke about it in the playground. All of a sudden, the various disparate conversations you had in different places solidified into one conversation, which everyone seemed to be having, whoever they were, everywhere. And I loved it.

Everyone wanted the same thing. That was what stood out to me. Everyone very intently and passionately wanted one thing to happen, which was for England to win. The primary feeling was of joint desire and shared emotion. When England won, we all felt happy together. When England lost, we all felt sad together.

The semi-final against West Germany was the perfect introduction to what the next few decades would entail. Paul Gascoigne crying, the last minute hope, the penalty shoot-out, the crushed dreams. The drama, the structure of the defeat, the sense that victory was always tantalisingly close to hand, but kept out of reach by some sort of almost mystical force, something which could not quite be described in words - a curse perhaps, or a psychological flaw in the national personality, or a fundamental lack of will. I had no idea at the time, but I was being ushered into this house of pain, a neverending story about failure and frustrated self-belief.

In another sense, it was actually a terrible introduction, because England very rarely do well enough to get into a World Cup semi-final. It didn’t actually happen again for 18 years. This actually, was as good as it got. And it was fucking terrible.

Over the last few weeks, I have consumed football insatiably. I’ve gulped it down - several matches a week, then podcasts, analysis from the sports pages, endless Instagram videos of cute mildly homoerotic moments between footballers. I’ve decided on my preferred journalists - Barney Ronay, Lars Sivertsen - and the ones I’m less keen on. I have developed an interest in watching videos of first-touches in slow motion and marvelled at how beautifully they combine grace, speed and spatial logic

Football is a hobby. People don’t call it that because it is too ubiquitous and because the word ‘hobby’ is nerd coded, whereas football is anti-nerd coded. But that’s what it is. It’s a hobby that’s so successful, so good at being a hobby, that it broke free of the definition. It has all the qualities that are required for something to be satisfying as a hobby: it is fundamentally very simple, but it spreads out to extreme degrees of complexity. It has purity and it has breadth. If you wanted to, and unfortunately many people do, you could talk about it forever.

I’ll miss listening to those podcasts and reading those articles. To be clear: I absolutely will stop listening to them as soon as this is over. But I’ll miss them. I love hobbies. I love being into things and listening to people talk about them as I potter around in the kitchen. I like the sense of shared time that comes with a hobby - that big events happen, or important new developments, and then you want to rush to a podcast or a website to see what your favourite commentators have to say about them. This is how I feel about comics and films and it’s how I’ve felt about football the last few weeks.

After one of the international tournaments, I decided to try following club football. I really enjoyed all this and I didn’t want to wait another two years. So I picked the club which was closest to where I lived at the time - Chelsea - and chose to support them. It didn’t work and it wouldn’t last. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t bring myself to give a fuck about Chelsea. As a place, I don’t particularly like it. As an organisation, I didn’t like it either. I didn’t like it as an identity, or a brand, I didn’t like the men on the pitch, I didn’t particularly like the men off it either. It all just felt cold and brittle, not like supporting England at all.

I’d misunderstood clubs. The local area is only a part of their constitution. Far more important is the sense of identity cultivated by childhood experience. What, really, is the meaningful local difference between Tottenham and Arsenal? There isn’t one. What is the great fundamental distinction between Haringey and Camden, Enfield and Barnet? It does not exist. The clubs are only meaningful in so far as they provide a shared history in which people have embedded a sense of belonging. I didn’t have that. And if you don’t have it, you can’t escape how preposterous it all is. The same is true for countries, of course, but the basic fact is most people do have a sense of attachment to their country and only some people have a sense of attachment to a club.

Club football could not give me that same sense of joint sentiment which international football offered. In fact it provided the opposite - a rivalry, a splintering. When I was going to school in Southampton, people liked nothing better than slagging off the Portsmouth team. No-one ever called them Portsmouth, of course. They were Pompey scum. It was all baffling. How can you not see that both our cities are exactly as shit as each other, I thought. Not only that, they are shit in precisely the same barely distinguishable way. You’ve gone mad in the gutter of our lives.

I could keep listening to the podcasts now, keep reading the sports pages. Just like that time I tried to get into club football, I would quite like to have this new hobby chattering away in the background. But when you don’t have a fundamental loyalty, all the delightful hobbyism breaks down. You lose the wellspring, and all the analysis and gossip and debate just becomes irrelevant. I’m sure there are people out there who follow football without supporting a side, but it’s rare. There has to be this beating heart to the whole thing, it has to spring from a kind of identity.

I missed the first half of the game against Croatia and came in for the second. What the fuck is this, I thought. This isn’t England. Look at how confident and positive and attacking they are. Look at how imaginative. I felt the same during the Mexico game, this bundling new sense of commitment and passion and energy. And last Wednesday, for one brief beautiful moment, roughly two-and-a-half minutes long, we saw it again. It lasted from Anthony Gordon’s goal to Djed Spence’s last-second tackle. Afterwards he got up, looked at the crowd and roared at them like a fucking lion. And for a few seconds it was possible to believe that the ghosts of the past have been vanquished, that we were now full of a confidence that previous generations could not muster.

It lasted two and half minutes and then it was gone, replaced by very familiar feelings, old psychological contours, sentiments which at this point feel like ancient texts found on the bottom of the ocean. All those old haunted dreams came flooding back. All those old anxieties in the bathroom mirror.

National football teams are a story that we tell ourselves. People talk about an England team, or an Argentinian team, but obviously that’s nonsense. There’s no continuity, no ship of Theseus puzzle. It’s a completely new set of people - three generations of them in my time alone. But the actions of the team and their fate become part of the formative experience of the next generation of players, who then tend to display the same neuroses and broadcast them out to those below them, and so on and so on.

The Argentinian football team has a distinct sense of identity. Unlike England, they do not have a crippling sense of self-doubt. They believe they can win. Even when they are two-nil down, as they were against Egypt, they believe they can win. And so they often do. They are powered by this intense intuitive confidence which is almost impossible to learn. They are also shameless, graceless, dishonourable fucking cheating bastards. I don’t say that as a joke or as a bit of good natured banter. I don’t even say it to excuse the result this week - they were clearly the better team. It’s just an objective assessment of what they are. Absolute copper bottomed cunts and I mean that in a really authentic genuine way. It’s not surprising that Fifa loves them, as it loves Trump.

The politics of the team are also plainly Trumpist. After the match they gathered around a placard which read ‘The Malvinas are Argentinian’ - it rhymes in Spanish but remains just as stupid on rational grounds. There’ll be a few leftists who approve of this sort of thing, but it’s pure imperialist bullshit. The people on the Falklands want to be British. It’s no more complex than that. If they wanted to be Argentinian, it would be right to give it to them. But they don’t, so we won’t. This is because it is people that matter, not geography, not distance from a fucking landmass. Progressives do not struggle to understand the right to self-determination when it comes to Palestine, and they should not struggle with it here.

This is the third quality the Argentinian team demonstrates: a desperation to translate footballing prowess into political validation. And it is here that the self-confidence they show on the pitch leaves them, because no self-confident nation would behave in this way. I loved Argentina when I was there - they have great meat and great wine, they like to sit on the street talking until the early hours of the morning, they like all the things I like. But politically they have been driven insane by various strands of ideologically-vacuous Peronist glamour-tyranny over many decades, and now exist in a state of frustrated victimhood, which can only be processed through football.

The character of the national side is not really connected to the character of the nation. Argentina’s football team demonstrates a confidence the country cannot achieve. There is no mystic link.

It’s tempting to say that England’s crisis of self-confidence on the pitch is a product of Britain’s search for a post-imperial role, but it’s so pat and superficial, a last-minute late-night thesis for a GCSE humanities student.

There is, however, a meaningful emotional story which we tell ourselves through the national team. It is a prism through which we understand ourselves. That’s what Argentina is doing by processing military loss through footballing triumph. And it is what England does too.

Sometimes that is as ugly as it is in Argentina. This is the dark part of the national psyche that the Mirror’s 1996 “ACHTUNG! SURRENDER” front page comes from. It’s where the hysteria over the team taking the knee came from. There was plenty of this type of behaviour when I was growing up, with angry sexually frustrated football fans tearing through continental towns, bringing national shame: impotent on the pitch, impotent off it. In my twenties, this was probably the dominant image of the English in Europe.

But the England story now is a much more positive one. It is a story of sadness, sure. Of frustrated dreams and lost chances. It is not a coincidence that the songs England embraces have a sense of melancholy: Three Lions, Sweet Caroline, even Wonderwall. There is something wistful and lilting about them, either in the words or the music, a sense of nostalgia and yearning. This suits us.

But it is also a story about a country becoming more comfortable with its diversity. This is a tentative, fragile story. We saw that when Bukayo Saka missed a penalty in the Euro 2020 final. Weeks of pride and positivity collapsed instantly into a racist backlash. But each time, we seem to move further away from that era and towards something better. How many people this summer questioned the England team on race? Really very few. Even now, as racism is adopted by mainstream politicians and pumped out by the far-right, there is a sense of ease and confidence about the multi-racial character of the team.

That was the vision of England which was broadcast overseas during this tournament. It was the one that we broadcast back to ourselves. It is the story underneath the one of penalties and tears, overconfidence and inevitable defeat, a story which spans from Italia 90 to today, from rioting thugs to crowds singing Hey Jude.

And perhaps there’s something similar going on with men and their feelings. Sure, Gazza cried, but the England football team of the 90s had that tight, slightly suffocated look to them, as if feelings had to be quelled and emotions had to be neutralised. In the 2010s, during the John Terry era, it went further backwards, towards sneering machismo. But look at it now. Look at the affection with which the team treat each other. Look at Jude Bellingham the precise second the final whistle blows in the Mexico game: all that emotion and physical effort come crashing down, his knees buckle and he briefly starts to cry. These men are the heroes of a new generation of kids. And they seem so much healthier, gentler, kinder, softer than what came before.

Two years ago, during England’s quarter-final victory against Switzerland at Euro 2024, Harjap Bhangal was filming Pakistani and Indian cricket fans at Edgbaston. But no-one seemed to remember why they had gone there. “No-one’s actually watching the cricket,” he said. “Everyone’s just come in to watch the football. And everyone here, regardless of whether they’re supporting India or Pakistan, is supporting England.”

That felt like a crucial moment of national identity formation. It felt like a final and complete ruination of Norman Tebbit’s reputation. It showed the kind of stories which countries can tell themselves through football: Of everyone wanting the same thing, or everyone having, for a brief period of time, the same fear, the same hopes and the same memories. Of an ever wider and more expansive understanding of ‘us’.

We’re out, we’re done, it’s over. On the pitch, England’s story feels much the same as in 1990: crushed dreams and disappointments. But off the pitch, it feels completely different. It’s a story of change and of progress. And to that extent at least, it feels like a kind of victory.

Odds and sods

You can listen to this newsletter as a podcast at the top of the page or on Spotify. You can follow me on BlueSky, Instagram or TikTok.

Couple of pieces in the i paper this week, one on Nigel Farage’s predictably cynical response to the Ann Widdicomb murder and another on Keir Starmer’s last PMQs.

If you’re in the market for more political obituaries, we’ve a new episode of Origin Story on the Keir Starmer administration. We take a listen to our initial episode on him and try to work out how and why it all went so wrong. We’ve also a Patreon exclusive AMA where we take on questions from our subscribers. You can listen by becoming a Patreon and get lots of other goodies besides - sign up here.

No culture this week, it was all football. Normal service finally returns next week. There’s a good chance I’ll be doing a piece during the week on Cabinet announcements, policy initiatives etc as Andy Burnham kicks off as PM.

Now fuck off.