Much as I hate to disagree with Gary Younge, I can’t get on board with his utopian vision of the upcoming World Cup evoking a “collective sense of latent English identity . . . infused with positive energy”.
I despise the World Cup. I will not be supporting England, nor any other team.
I refuse to get excited about some wealthy, misogynist jocks tossing a ball around in the name of patriotism and product endorsement. Mistrust of team sports as a fulcrum of social organisation comes naturally to me. I’m a proud, card-carrying member of the sensitive, wheezy, malcoordinated phalanx of the population for whom the word “football” still evokes painful memories of organised sadism and unspecified locker-room peril.
I’m a humourless, paranoid, liberal, feminist pansy who would prefer to spend the summer sitting in a dark room, contemplating the future of the British left and smoking myself into an early grave.
The fact remains, however, that there are more pressing things to worry about over the soccer season than the state of Frank Lampard’s admittedly shapely calves. This country is in crisis. Young people are in crisis, poor people are in crisis, unemployment stands at 2.5 million, the labour movement is still leaderless and directionless, and there’s a brutal train of Tory public-service cuts coming over the hill.
In short, the left has more important things to do than draw up worthy charts determining which Fifa team is worth supporting on the basis of global development indicators.The British left has an uneasy relationship with international sport.
Liberal alarm bells can’t help but start ringing when a bunch of overpaid PE teachers get together to orchestrate a month of corporate-sponsored quasi-xenophobia; however, as soon as World Cup fever rolls around, members of the otherwise uninterested bourgeois left feel obliged to muster at least a sniffle of enthusiasm, sensing that not to do so is somehow elitist.
This is a misplaced notion: football is no longer the people’s sport. Just look at the brutal contempt that the police reserve for fans, or count the number of working-class Britons who can afford to attend home matches, much less the festivities in South Africa. Then there’s the uncomfortable fact that the World Cup is only and always about men.
Younge is right to celebrate that race is no longer an impediment to his young niece’s and nephew’s vision of football as a world “in which they have a reasonable chance of succeeding” — but unfortunately, his niece can forget about it. Even if she were to make it to the big leagues, she would be forbidden to play in the World Cup: the women’s league, held separately next year, garners barely a fraction of the media coverage devoted to proper football, where the only significant female figures are footballers’ wives.
In South Africa itself, female players are lucky if they are merely dismissed — barely two years ago, Eudy Simelane, star of the South African women’s team, was raped and murdered for the crime of being a lesbian.
There is something suspect about a people’s sport that violently excludes more than half the people, and boozy, borderline misogynist pseudo-nationalism is the last thing Britain needs to help foster a badly needed sense of community. George Orwell observed in 1941 that “in England all the boasting and flag-wagging, the ‘Rule Britannia’ stuff, is done by small minorities . . . The patriotism of the common people is not vocal or even conscious.”
Britain itself is a shuffling, gloriously dissipated nation that also includes many people from Scotland, Ireland and Wales. By contrast, the kitsch, horn-honking vision of English identity associated with World Cup-EnglandTM is too easily co-opted by big business in an effort to get us to spend money on booze, branded sportswear and chocolate bars emblazoned with the England flag. B&Q, which expects to make a loss over the season, has even released a range of garden gnomes wearing the England strip, which rather sums up the twee consumer desperation of World Cup season.
Marketing strategists clearly envision the people of England drinking and shopping the summer away, safe in the knowledge that national pride is being guarded by a regiment of xenophobic pottery goblins. This cheery commoditised nationalism runs unnervingly close to the uglier face of engineered “English pride”.
Of course, not everyone who displays an England flag is a fascist, but a few of the flags in circulation will undoubtedly be reused at the upcoming EDL rally in east London, which plans to process through the same streets where Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts marched in 1936.
As football season begins, England flags are once more emerging like a welter of giant sticking plasters where social injury is keenest, in areas where the coming cuts will be deepest.
Meanwhile, the left still has no coherent response to Britain’s bricolage of troubles. The problem with footie as commodified nationalism is that it leaves the left wing entirely undefended.
The tacky, tribalistic, red-and-white bandage of cheesy national sentiment is already stifling the healing power of political expediency. And as the people gear up to root for EnglandTM, the left’s best chance to reorganise and re-energise is deflating like a football, smashed against a wall by idiot children.
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