Category Archives: english soccer

Fee-fi-fo-fum

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English vs. Spanish (Armada)

Things that were worth paying attention to in this month’s 2024 European soccer tournament:

—There was plenty of highly entertaining sports theatre, concluding with Spain’s championship victory over England that was conjured with a bare four minutes remaining in the title match.

—The riveting final result came after England’s repeated narrow escapes from early elimination in the tournament had helped ratchet up the drama. (Especially for me, watching a couple of those tense matches at my daughter’s home in London.)

—More than the competitive sparks, though, the whole exercise, as England coach Gareth Southgate noted, was as much a national incident as a sporting contest.

There were, leading up to the final, references to longstanding hostilities between the contestants, starting with last year’s women’s World Cup, when Spain defeated England. And reaching back as far as the mid-16th Century attempt by the Spanish Armada to invade England. (Spain lost that one.) Such historical allusions seem unavoidable before these big games, as when one English sportswriter previewed England’s 1966 World Cup final with a reminder to “Fret not, boys, if on the morrow we should lose to the Germans at our national game, for twice this century we have defeated them at theirs.”

There is a root-root-root-for-the-home-team vigor on steroids, most of it in good fun. Flag-waving, chanting crowds flocked to stadiums in Germany, the tournament’s host nation, as well as to pubs and watch parties in their home countries. A Spanish newspaper reported that 87 percent of the populace took in the final. Powerful examples of national identity were manifested through soccer.

That England fans were marching through Germany singing “Football’s Coming Home”—a decades-old ditty referencing the country’s status as the sport’s birthplace and its only international championship at the ‘66 World Cup—was ripe for interpretation by non-English supporters as English arrogance and entitlement. Even, perhaps, a reminder that the English empire had once been the largest in history, ruling over more than a quarter of the globe.

“As English fortunes have risen,” University of Limerick psychology professor Orla Muldoon wrote on the eve of the championship final, “so too has the sense that there are many among us who really want the winners to be Anybody But England.” Muldoon, acknowledging “a strong sense of national identity” based on “passionate support for national teams,” further argued for what she called “disidentification.”

“It’s not indifference,” she wrote, “but rather an active process [that] allows us to actively express out dissimilarity and dissatisfaction from those who support English football.” The point is for Europeans who happen to share the English language to reject any connection to stereotypical “lager louts and violent hooligans” who have been associated with English soccer, and a “sense that the reputation of the English abroad is poor.”

Meanwhile, another zeitgeisty situation with national identity—immigration—was at work during the championships. Spain’s breakout star was Lamine Yamal, still 16 years old when he scored the goal to put his team into the title game. He had become the youngest player to appear in the European championships, the youngest to score a goal and the youngest to play in the final, turning 17 the day before that match, in which he assisted on the first of Spain’s scores in the 2-1 victory over England.

He emerged, according to one dispatch, as “the young prince of Spain.” But he was born to parents who immigrated from Equatorial Guinea and Morocco and hailed from the Catalan city of Mataro—near Barcelona—which right-wing politicians had branded as one of country’s “multicultural shitholes,” according to a report in The Guardian. So when Yamal celebrated his decisive semifinal goal by using his fingers to spell out the post code of his hometown, a former Spanish equality minister took the occasion to declare that “it’s very important we remind people who say that Spain isn’t big enough for everyone, or that there’s a problem with immigration that brings crime…that Spain is Lamine Yamal.”

In the moment, Yamal’s heroics seemed to cast him as thoroughly Spanish to national-team fans, the flip-side of what had happened to English forward Bukayo Saka, born in London to Nigerian immigrants. Four years ago, after Saka was one of three Black players who failed to convert penalty kicks in a shootout loss to Italy that left England as European runner-up, he and the other two players were targeted by relentless racial abuse on social media.

So it might be just soccer. But among the hoi polloi, national unity is best facilitated by success. Prior to this year’s Euro final, King Charles lightheartedly encouraged the English team to “secure victory before the need for any last-minute wonder-goals or another penalty drama” so that “the stresses on the nation’s collective heart rate and blood pressure would be greatly alleviated!”

Think of this, though: Charles reigns over a nation, the United Kingdom, that includes Scotland and Wales, two non-English lands whose ardent soccer supporters fit comfortably into Professor Muldoon’s theory of disidentification. And who likely welcomed that the championship trophy went to “Anybody But England.”

 

Brexit and soccer: A political football

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The best thing about Brexit is that it offers an occasion to summon the delightful noun “portmanteau,” a word that blends the sounds and combines the meanings of two other words.

Mostly, though, “Brexit”—for “British exit,” the United Kingdom’s pending withdrawal from the European Union—feels thoroughly unpleasant. It has been characterized by some experts as the worst step backward for Europe and Western civilization since the end of World War II. Economically. Socially. Ethnically. Even—and this caught my attention as a veteran of sports journalism—athletically.

A major aspect to Brexit is its proponents’ expectations of British control over immigration. And that translates to the likely loss of foreign superstars who have been so essential to the English Premier League’s status as the world’s best in soccer. The subsequent retreat in the game’s quality, and the resulting dent in its commercial appeal, are why all 20 Premier League clubs were against the Brexit referendum passed in 2016.

In a Forbes listing of the Premier League’s best 10 players last season, only two were Englishmen. According to the BBC, a Brexit-imposed work permit requirement for non-UK workers would eliminate almost 60 percent of the league’s current roster players.

That could take English soccer back more than two decades, to when a quota system limited UK teams to three foreign players. Back then, many of the sport’s cognoscenti were becoming convinced that the increasingly insular nature of the English game made it boring. It was mostly hopeful long balls launched downfield—“pigeon racing,” it was dismissively labeled—and not much else.

Such an approach, by-passing the midfield as defenders send balls over the top toward a clinical, physically imposing striker, still is particularly associated with the English. It does have its adherents, though they are in danger of being accused of being old school. I recall this argument from Jack Charlton, a member of England’s last World Cup champion in 1966, when he used the strategy to coach the first Irish team to qualify for the World Cup in 1990.

“Play in [the opponents’] half of the field,” Charlton said. “Endeavor every time to get the ball behind people. Get the buggers turning, turning, turning on defense. It drives them crazy. All the fanciest, classiest, ‘possession football’ in the world is no substitute for getting the ball behind the defense and playing merry hell with them when they’re facing the wrong way.”

But, since that ’66 English world title, Germany has won the Cup three times with a relentless efficiency emphasizing shifting player roles; Italy has won twice with its defensively oriented, counter-attacking catenaccio; Brazil three times with its creative, fast-flowing brand sometimes equated to dance; Argentina twice with individual skills and speed; Spain once with grounded, quick-touch passing—the fancy, classy, possession football Charlton believed to be no substitute for long ball.

These “national styles” are generalizations, of course, and generalizations are dangerously unreliable. What is difficult to argue against is that a broader talent pool will make a sport, and every team, better. Though there were grumbles from the xenophobic French fringe last summer that the country’s 2018 World Cup team was more African than European, stocked with sons of immigrants from the Congo, Senegal, Morocco, Mali and Cameroon, the bottom line was that France won the title. Viva la difference, n’est-ce pas?

Soccer teams, posited a 2014 Washington Post series, “may accrue additional benefits when their players differ in the way they interpret problems and use their skills to solve them,” and that “this variation likely stems from their exposure to different training methods and styles of play” that undeniably differ from country to country.

An opinion piece in the New York Times by a political journalist based in London argued that Brexit is “the most boring important story in the world” right now. Sticking strictly to the less significant aspect of soccer, I am rooting for unrestricted travel of players that assures a continued diversity in the game—an antidote to boredom. Some fancy, classy, possession football mixed in with the pigeon racing. Describing such a soccer style would necessitate a portmanteau: Spanglish.

The World Cup escape

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Comparative happiness is immoral. I’m not about to take pleasure in the fact that England currently suffers with some dreadful politicians stoking fear of immigrants and other perceived grievances. Besides, that sort of thing is abundantly available right here at home.

On the contrary, I am a bit jealous of how the English were afforded a temporary, euphoric respite from anti-social turmoil by the World Cup and their national team’s delightful run in the tournament.

It was just soccer and, in the end, the English lads didn’t necessarily reverse a self-deprecating “narrative of decline” described by Rebecca Mead in The New Yorker, that it’s been “all downhill since the end of the Second World War, or the end of the Empire, or 1066…”

Or the Brexit chaos that reportedly has Prime Minister Theresa May facing the possible collapse of her government. But by changing the subject—“Don’t You Know There’s a Bloody Game On?” the Sun newspaper headlined amid bad bureaucratic developments—the soccer team unleashed a unifying giddiness in pushing to the Cup semifinals for the first time since 1990.

From my perch in New York, and with the United States having failed to qualify for the first time since 1986, I allowed myself multiple, shifting allegiances from the start of the tournament. Spain, for its buzzing, precise passing and teamwork. Portugal, just to watch Cristiano Renaldo’s out-of-the-blue strikes. Argentina, in anticipation of Lionel Messi’s magic. Mexico, because our neighbors to the South deserve a break. Brazil, because Brazilian soccer is true performance art. Panama, because a tiny country making its World Cup debut is a beautiful thing, however it fares. France, based on a family ancestry going back many generations, and with the discovery of France’s wondrous teenager Kylian Mbappe.

The whole thing, even without a home team to follow, was a welcome escape from the daily—hourly—assault of depressing national and international news, an uplifting antidote to spreading xenophobia.

By the end of group play, I was all aboard the English bandwagon. Marveling at goalie Jordan Pickford’s lightning reactions. Raheem Sterling’s downfield sprints. Harry Maguire’s precise headers. Manager Gareth Southgate’s formal attire (a vest?). Harry Kane’s relentlessly unmussed hair in spite of his diving, lurching, rumbling charges toward goal—not to mention his role as the target of repeated fouls. (“A friend,” reported my daughter, who now lives in London, “called him ‘the most English person possible.’”)

Even England’s excruciating extra-time loss to Croatia in the semifinals couldn’t break the celebratory fever. The soccer anthem “Three Lions,” with its bullish chorus originally written when England hosted the 1996 European Championships, was revived with a vengeance:

It’s coming home/It’s coming home/It’s coming/Football’s coming home.

Because England invented soccer, the natives nurture an assumed superiority regarding the sport—but offset by the contained melancholy of knowing their side has won the World Cup only once, in 1966. And, since then, repeatedly has endured the cruelest of losses in major international tournaments, six times beaten in penalty shootouts, beginning with the 1990 World Cup semis.

A sidebar: I covered that shootout loss for Newsday, in Turin, Italy. The English manager then was Bobby Robson, who gamely declared that he and his team had “to put on a bright smile and accept it. There’s nothing you can do about it.” The English had played the Germans to a 1-1 tie through 90 exhausting minutes of regulation, plus 30 of extra time, only to lose the sport’s version of a game of H-O-R-S-E. Or something akin to taking turns throwing a football through a tire.

Of course it was noted then that the Germans had been England’s victims in the ’66 final, and that called to mind the English sportswriter who is said to have written, on the eve of the ’66 title match, a wickedly clever reference to matters beyond soccer:

“Fret not, boys, if on the morrow we should lose to the Germans at our national game, for twice this century we have defeated them at theirs.”

But, as I say, comparative happiness is immoral. And this World Cup did a good job of sidelining political stuff and cultural differences. While the English jauntily sang their “Three Lions” song (the title referencing the team’s official shield with national roots dating to the 12th Century):

Three lions on a shirt/Jules Rimet still gleaming/Thirty years of hurt/never stopped me dreaming. (Jules Rimet was the longtime soccer official after whom the World Cup trophy is named.)

It’s coming home/It’s coming home/It’s coming/Football’s coming home.

After England eliminated Sweden in the quarterfinals, my daughter texted that “People are driving around honking horns and singing out of windows….I just saw a young white kid on a bike yell, ‘It’s coming home’ and high-five two old black guys sitting on a bench as they yelled it back to him….Everyone here is talking about weather (in a good way) and the World Cup. It’s a lovely change in atmosphere.”

We could use some of that here in the Colonies.