Given all that has happened since, it is easy to forget that four days after the UK voted to leave the European Union, England’s football team provided a brief taster of how that might feel by crashing out of Euro 2016. Losing to Iceland, a nation, as Gary Lineker observed, with more volcanoes than professional footballers, seemed, metaphorically and emotionally, to presage the kind of brutally hard Brexit at which even Jacob Rees-Mogg might blanch.
As the pound collapsed on world markets, the much-hyped stock of Joe Hart and Wayne Rooney nosedived irreversibly. In the short term, England not only needed a new prime minister, but also a new football manager. Both David Cameron and Roy Hodgson departed the scene of humiliation refusing to answer questions about grievous tactical blunders – Harry Kane taking corners? Will Straw masterminding the Remain campaign? – and with hardly a backward glance. Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, with an immediate sense of the wider parallels, tweeted on the night of the football defeat: “England 1-2 Iceland. Winter starts here.”
Ever since England deigned to join in with international tournaments in 1950 – previously it had judged itself too exceptional to bother – there has been a temptation among headline writers and the wider population to link the fortunes of the national team with the political and cultural moment. All nations do this, but no nation does it with more self-involved hubris than England.
Eric Hobsbawm, the great intuitive pattern maker of history, noted the phenomenon in his 1992 book Nations and Nationalism: “What has made football so uniquely effective a medium for inculcating national feelings, at all events for males, is that the … imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of 11 named people.”
I am not old enough to remember the triumph of 1966 – though my parents suggest they brought me downstairs from my cot, six months old, like the infant Lion King held up to the sun, to witness “They think it’s all over” in black and white. I can, of course, still solemnly reel off those 11 names “Banks, Cohen, Wilson, Moore … ” like a sporting lullaby or last post.
To men of my dad’s generation and older, who had lived through world wars, no doubt the 1966 victory felt for a while like a nostalgic return to the old order of things. For a decade after 1945, the national team, like everyone else, had lived off short rations, as England discovered it was no longer quite the power in the world it had emerged from the war believing itself to be. Defeat to the USA in the 1950 World Cup – with a team containing Billy Wright and Tom Finney – could be explained as an aberration (the Brazilian altitude, the goalkeeper, the referee, the jet lag). But the infamous 6-3 humbling meted out by Ferenc Puskas’s Hungary at Wembley – the Empire Stadium – in 1953 had been much harder to dismiss.
On that occasion, England were still recognisably playing the game as they had “invented” it back in the 1870s – suspicious of professionalism, based on individual talent and guts – and tacitly expecting the rest of the world to show some gratitude by playing that same game too. The Hungarians were playing something different. It took a Swedish journalist, Ceve Linde, to observe the “unpalatable truth”: “English football has gradually deteriorated, finally fallen off its pedestal and now keeps rolling downwards. The sorriest feature in the drama is that the English, with very few exceptions, cannot get themselves to recognise what has happened. In their self-satisfaction and conceit they still fancy themselves the first in the football world and their defeats sheer accidents.
“The fact is that English soccer has an enormous amount to learn from the rest of the world, about training, tactics, organisation and strategy … ‘England must find her traditional spirit’ [the newspapers] are writing now. This is easily said but how shall this be found again in a country which has been hit so hard by two world wars and which has been forced by national weakness to let go her possessions all over the world? The same tiredness is to be found in English soccer. This perfectly understandable lack of strength, however, is mated with a haughtiness which to an outsider appears unpleasant, even frightening.”
Those words would ring true at almost every World Cup campaign that followed, bar 1966 – you might also begin to make the case that they captured something of a wider national delusion: the misplaced confidence of a former imperial power refusing to accept that the world was no longer in thrall to its industry or its invention, and had moved on.
The home World Cup, the introverted mastery of Sir Alf Ramsey, the grit and grace of Moore and Charlton, masked some of those traits, just as “you’ve never had it so good” prefaced years of underinvestment in innovation and relative economic decline. In retrospect, 1966 represented not a new dawn but the last knockings of a global superiority that, 50 years on and in the face of all evidence, die-hard Brexiters still fantasise as our “up and at ’em” birthright: “England must find her traditional spirit!” Spare us.
An urban myth has grown up to suggest that Harold Wilson won the 1966 general election on the back of Geoff Hurst’s hat-trick. In fact, the election took place at the end of March and the World Cup final three months later. Wilson no doubt milked the feelgood victory though, as politicians have always done: evidence of making Britain great again.
That link between football and the national mood came back to haunt the Labour prime minister four years later, however, with England’s World Cup debacle at the hands of West Germany – losing 3-2, having led 2-0 with 20 minutes left (I remember watching that one, nearly five years old, sobbing). Four days later, Wilson also snatched defeat from the jaws of victory (a 7.5% Labour lead in the polls translating to a majority for Edward Heath’s Tories) in the general election of 1970.
Wilson denied cause and effect: “Governance of a country has nothing to do with a study of its football fixtures,” he asserted, but others in his cabinet were not so persuaded. Denis Healey later revealed that in a strategy meeting at Chequers when the election was called that “Harold asked us to consider whether the government would suffer if the England footballers were defeated on the eve of polling day.” Wilson’s minister of sport, Denis Howell, was in no doubt that the failings of England’s stand-in goalkeeper – who had a second half to match that of Liverpool’s Loris Karius in Kiev last weekend – was responsible for the shift in public sentiment. “The moment goalkeeper Bonetti made his third and final hash of it on the Sunday, everything simultaneously began to go wrong for Labour for the following Thursday,” Howell recalled.
The studious reserve that characterised Ramsey’s regime gave way, after that failure and the next, to brasher leadership styles, when football’s focus began to shift, oddly, from the players to the management – a trend that has led to the bizarre cult of multi-millionaire coaches (who have an unwarranted mystique matched only by bonus-rich chief executives).
Don “Readies” Revie set this pattern by doing the unthinkable in 1977 and giving up the England manager’s job to take up a petrodollar post in Dubai. On the field, meanwhile, English football had apparently gone the way of the three-day week economy: poorly managed and globally uncompetitive.
By the 1980s, the violent divisions in wider society had long been reflected on the terraces. Football matches involving England were invariably heralded with a backing track of police sirens and occasionally viewed through a miasma of drifting tear gas. A beery bigotry, whipped up in the tabloids, came to characterise England supporters’ foreign adventures. With not much happening on the pitch, the television cameras dwelt on sudden frenzies in the stands of that well-known “mindless minority” of England fans tearing up seats and invading the “territory” of bemused and terrified locals.
While the minorities and majorities of most other nations seemed to view world cups as a celebration of internationalism, bringing samba rhythms and flashes of orange and fancy dress, our most visible contribution to the party was to arrive early, raid the drinks cupboard, destroy the furniture, abuse the host’s family, pee in the sink and stagger home. We retained, of course, a powerful belief that the rest of the world wanted nothing more than for us to come back again next time.
The domestic game solved what it always insisted was “society’s problem” in the fashionable political way: by “rebranding” and encouraging enormous amounts of foreign money to be thrown at the situation, making premiership football a kind of globalised and gated community, protecting the elite product at all costs. For a while, it seemed some of that elitist largesse would trickle down and make watching the England team a more joyous spectacle.
The 1996 Euros captured some of that “things can only get better” spirit. At the 1996 Labour party conference Tony Blair returned the compliment with the line: “Seventeen years of hurt, never stopped us dreaming, Labour’s coming home.” For that tournament and the 1998 World Cup, the England of Alan Shearer and Teddy Sheringham and then the youthful Michael Owen played with thrilling (and not quite fulfilled) promise: inclusive and confident, and apparently at home as a part of a global family of nations.
It was money that shifted that sentiment. Though the vaunted generation of David Beckham and Steven Gerrard and Rio Ferdinand and Rooney proved more glister than gold, their celebrity, their outrageous fortune created a new kind of relationship with the nation. A narrative emerged that they “owed us” something; the tremendous luck of their lives required payback. In 2002, England played pretty much to their potential and lost to Brazil; in 2006 they went out unluckily to Portugal on penalties; in 2010 they were thumped by Germany; in 2014 they went home winless from an underwhelming group.
The defining emotion that the team generated in that sequence was increasingly the nation’s currency: anger. The national sport was not raising up Hobsbawm’s representative 11 men on a pedestal, but finding ways to prove that they were not fit to wear “our” shirt. Losing became above all a sign of ingratitude for the millions that our collective goggling Sky subscriptions had afforded them.
All of which brings us, happily, expectantly, to the next great celebration of Fifa’s global game in Vladimir Putin’s Russia in a fortnight’s time. When George Orwell offered his famous dictum that international football was “war minus the shooting” he was writing about the arrival of the Dynamo team from Moscow in Britain in 1945, two months after the war ended, an ill-fated gesture to improve Anglo-Soviet relations. “At the Arsenal match, a British and a Russian player came to blows,” Orwell noted. “The Glasgow match was simply a free-for-all from the start.”
Even so, he suggested, the most significant thing was not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators. “There cannot be much doubt that the whole thing is bound up with the rise of nationalism – that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige.”
In many parts of the world, not least this one, those populist forces are on the march again. England games have become in some quarters tests of patriotism, poppy wearing occasions, opportunity for invective against tattoos and a “lack of respect” for the flag, the anthem, the badge. As ever, England expects. But what might we hope for from Gareth Southgate’s moderately gifted squad? In today’s climate a few goals, one or two happy memories, and no wider metaphorical significance would do just fine.
