This issue is being written before Sunday's EURO 2024 final. I don't know the result. I don't know how England played. I don't even know who played for them.
This is a deliberate act. The main article this week isn't about the fortunes of the England team but about my sense of Englishness, which is shaped, or at least illustrated, by my experience of supporting the national team.
In that regard, it doesn't matter whether England won or lost in Berlin. That's really the whole point.
So let's get to it.
This is my England
When England captain Harry Kane exhaled before taking the penalty that drew his team level against the Netherlands in their ultimately successful EURO 2024 semi-final, he must have had his miss against France in the back of his mind.
Or so I'm told. I've never seen that penalty against France or anything else that happened at the 2022 World Cup. I sat out the entirety of England's 2022 cycle, which amounted to a significant amount of time away for someone who's been an England supporter for nearly four decades.
I'd joke in those days that I was boycotting England in protest against the inclusion of Jack Grealish, who offended the public good by leaving the football club I support. In reality, I made the personal choice to sit out the World Cup on human rights grounds and I remain comfortable with that decision.
Ducking out of a qualification campaign and the World Cup finals inevitably creates distance. I was less comfortable with that. I love supporting my country, albeit without attending more than a handful of matches. That distance became a recess, a space to consider what supporting my country actually means.
It’s not easy being an England fan. We are incredibly unpopular not only among our nearest and dearest neighbours but around the football world. Even a rudimentary handle on the history of the global game gives a long list of perfectly cromulent footballing reasons for that.
But history is history. We’ll take our knocks on that. The likes of Stanley Rous are ours to own and there’s nothing we can do about it now.
Some of the slings and arrows from abroad aren’t to do with English football, but Englishness. That’s a concept that extends far beyond sport and into the bowels of a nationality, into the terraced housing and the affluent countryside, into the whys and wherefores of English working class culture and the decidedly not working class power brokers of English society.
One’s sense of Englishness can, if we choose, be boiled down to this: am I proud to be English, and why?
English identity evolves like any other. It manifests differently online than it does in the real world, but in the end it all comes from the same people and that can be a frightening thought.
The briefest doomscroll on Twitter reveals a rancid underbelly masquerading as national pride. The cross of St George and the Union Flag have become signifiers of an easily predictable suite of opinions about the European Union, pronouns, immigration, vegan sausage rolls, Elon Musk, our right to make racist jokes, and footballers with haircuts.
Out in the real world it’s not so brazen. It’s not even widespread if the 2024 General Election is any indicator, Keir Starmer and Labour’s acquiescence to the new Overton Window notwithstanding. But Reform UK Party Limited – whether you like it or not, a marker of right-wing politics in England at the very least – tallied more than four millions votes and a share of 14.3 percent.
A few weeks before the election I was in a pub outside Leeds, swigging Guinness in between bites of an impossibly large meal. At the next table sat a family discussing politics too loudly to be ignored. They were just normal people, a couple of them business owners, and clearly anything but stupid.
They shared two views. Firstly, Labour were going to kill their businesses because, well, who the fuck even knows why? Secondly, Nigel Farage tells it like it is and was the only option for a hard-working British business owner.
If I hadn’t knocked my chair over in the process, my dramatic lefty flounce to the other side of the pub would have been spectacular.
These are not fringe views. Irrespective of their rights and wrongs, they’re part of the fabric of modern Englishness. They’re influential enough to have made it necessary for Labour to fully embrace Red Toryism in order to oust a feral pack of actual Tories who barely qualify as human, for one thing. For another, they’re woven into the flags under which the nation sails.
But these are my flags too. I’m English and proud of it, not just as a football supporter but as a person who’s lived his entire life in England. I was born here and I plan to die here. I am as English as anyone and inarguably more English than some of the ponces and scrotes who’ve used a false nationalism to destroy the already limited integrity of British conservatism and line their personal pockets since 2010.
Their England is not my England.
My England is modern and progressive and diverse. It understands its wealth and power but also the cost of its imperial history. It’s inclusive and welcoming and tolerant, not only to people immigrating from elsewhere but to those from within whose choices and lifestyles differ from mine or anyone else’s.
My England is open of mind and heart. Generous. Warm. Friendly. Honest. Funny. Cheeky. Silly. A little bit naughty. Sarcastic. Diligent. Willing. Cultured.
These are all characteristics we have in our country and, to me, they represent us far better than the monarchy or some ludicrous sense of Anglo Saxon nationalism. To me, Englishness comes with a live-and-let-live mindset baked in. The evidence suggests that’s not the majority view.
My England doesn’t count for any less by virtue of focusing on an inclusiveness and social consciousness that I truly believe we have within us. It’s not a weaker Englishness or a softer Englishness or a quieter Englishness. I want us to not only be capable of all this, but loud and ferociously fucking proud of it. This is England.
There are supporters of the England national team who’d consider me the enemy within. England, like any team, has among its fanbase a proportion of people with whom I’d prefer not to associate. I know personally a number of would-be England fans who don’t follow the national team or international football specifically for that reason.
The uncomfortable truth for those of us who throw our weight behind the Three Lions in spite of those associations is that our reputation isn’t without justification. There are racists and white nationalists, boozers and casual cokeheads, just as there are in other supporter groups and indeed other walks of English life.
But we cannot allow them to be England. I will leave this life, hopefully from a faraway future, having never been to an England away game. The memories of the home games I’ve attended are fading and I have little appetite to gather more – that’s not about England, but about a lack of desire to go to top-level football in general. Nevertheless, my claim to a little slice of what it means to be English is as valid as anyone’s, and that counts in football too.
More importantly, the people I know who follow England home and away deserve better than to have their names dragged through the mud. They’re fiercely proud and as positive a representation of England supporters as we could possibly want.
As they traipse around the planet following England, they’re doing Englishness on tour in what I consider the right way. They’re terrific ambassadors for the nation and for English football who wear the badge with a sense of responsibility. Some of them take it upon themselves to actively support local initiatives while they’re abroad, others simply use their overseas trips to explore the world and broaden their horizons.
That’s an England I can get behind.
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“A boring bloke. A boring team.”
Just one of the charming comments about Gareth Southgate tweeted by the ever deteriorating Danny Baker after England’s defeat against Spain. Self-awareness doesn’t live here anymore.
Salty beef extracts
Gareth Southgate’s methods were utterly vindicated on his greatest night (i)
Gareth Southgate’s authenticity helps England’s mental preparation (The Observer)
As the beer rains down, one thing is clear: Uefa’s complacency puts all of us at risk (The Guardian)
BBC-Experte Gary Lineker: "Deutschland auf dem richtigen Weg" (Sportschau Fußball)
Football doesn't want to talk about its domestic violence problem (Unexpected Delirium)
Venezia FC's Iconic Partnership with Kappa Ends (BrandStrat)
Dessert
FC København have had some stylish kits over the last decade and a bit, and this year’s zig-zag effort from adidas literally comes with a health warning.
That’s your lot. Thanks for reading. Please subscribe if you enjoyed it and haven’t done so yet.
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Have a week.