What is it the English feel they once had and lost? Or never had and long for? What is it about the culture that valorises noble sacrifice, near-misses, and heroic failure? Why, most hauntingly at this time, does the image of a red-shirted Bobby Moore, the blond-haired, gentleman-East-Ender who was never knighted and died of cancer aged 51, holding aloft the Jules Rimet trophy as a World Cup-winning captain in 1966, inspire such nostalgia and longing even among those of us who have no recollection of that Wembley final?
“National football events don’t become part of public history, they become part of collective memory,” wrote my colleague Nicholas Harris following England’s defeat to Spain on 14 July. “It’s testament to its power that I can convince myself of the vividness of Gazza’s tears and Maradona’s hand of God despite not being alive for either.” Nick was not alive for those moments and yet he has lived through them, or with them, as we all have. They shape the narrative of what it means to be an England fan, hoping for the best while being resigned to something less than the best. Fabio Capello, the unloved Italian football coach of the England team from 2008 to 2012, described the 1966 World Cup win as the “returning ghost” of the national game. It haunts us still.
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In his short, sombre victory speech outside 10 Downing Street on 5 July, Keir Starmer said he wanted to lead us on “a rediscovery of who we are”. In other words, he wanted to tell a new story about the country. But his words also hinted at something deeper, the suggestion being that Starmer thinks we do not know who we are. Columnists at the Economist and the Financial Times, high on the thin air of their own exalted, self-congratulatory liberalism, may scoff at notions of belonging. What should it matter to them when you are writing for the habitué of the club class lounge and luxury international hotel? But for the people of deep England, in the suburbs, shires and small towns, national identity matters deeply. We understand this instinctively as we come together for those grand national football occasions when, for 90 minutes or more, as Eric Hobsbawm wrote, “The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of 11 named people”.
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England played poorly for much of the tournament in Germany but still reached their second consecutive Euros final. That’s quite some advance on the 1970s – when I was at school, as I explained to my son – when England failed to qualify for the 1974 and 1978 World Cups and the 1976 European Championship. This time around, Gareth Southgate’s England were not good enough to beat a wonderfully fluent Spain, expertly coached by the little-known Luis de la Fuente, who had previously led the under-21s. Spain is a fragile kingdom, destabilised by secessionist movements, climate change, and a rising hard-right faction. But the national football team has cohesion, uniting Basque, Catalan and Castilian. There is a common football culture and a common style of play flowing through the age groups and all parts of the kingdom. It is attractive to watch and hard to defeat.
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I had a glimpse of what was to come in March when I watched a friendly between Spain and Brazil at the Bernabéu stadium in Madrid. A high-energy game finished 3-3 but it was obvious that Spain had a pattern of play – high pressing, constant movement, pace along both flanks through their wingers Lamine Yamal (then aged 16) and Nico Williams – and would be formidable opponents at the Euros. In contrast, England have no signature style. They were resilient, grinding, always hard to beat, and defined by moments of individual brilliance that rescued games when all seemed lost. But they were never “shit” as Gary Lineker, the BBC’s highest-paid presenter and a social media blowhard, called them in one of his laddish podcasts as he joined the chorus of abuse against Gareth Southgate.
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Southgate, who resigned on 16 July, and Starmer share some similarities. They are both cautious, pragmatic men from the home counties. Their speech patterns and diction have a certain low-toned flatness. Their lack of radicalism and charisma have been repeatedly noted by their detractors. They both prefer long-term plans and are not easily knocked off course by events or mob rage. Starmer believes in mission-led government and Southgate was a champion of the FA’s player pathway system, under which players progress from the under-21s to the senior squad. Both men are patriots but also progressives. When I consider their style and approach I think of a remark by Eileen Blair, George Orwell’s first wife, made in a letter to a friend. George is writing a little book, she said of what became The Lion and the Unicorn, “about how to be a socialist while Tory”. Left conservatism – a winning politics for these times.
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Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary, said after the defeat to Spain that the new Labour government would be “far more Gareth Southgate, and far less Michael Gove” in seeking to heal division. In 2018, during the World Cup in Russia, Alex Niven, an astute anatomist of Englishness, coined the term “Southgatism” “to describe the peculiar national mood his team seemed to both reflect and recreate” during that unusually hot summer. Southgatism, Niven says now, has “aged and mellowed. But it retains much of its utopian potential to gesture at a sort of ‘dream Englishness’… to use the football team as a cue for imagining different, more hopeful and liberated ways of national being.” The Southgate era is at an end, but Southgatism will endure.
[See also: Can Labour end our national addiction to prison?]
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This article appears in the 17 Jul 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The American Berserk