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.”