It’s just a game, right? Wrong. You don’t have to be on nodding terms with, let alone a fan of, the beautiful game to see that Sunday’s final of the European Championship – and the fact that England are in it – has a significance that goes beyond sport. It has implications for all the things that usually preoccupy us on these pages: politics, culture wars, race, masculinity, identity and our national story – and, unusually, most of those implications are good.
We can dispense swiftly with the most obvious. Keir Starmer likes to say his favourite Labour leader is Harold Wilson, the man who was in Downing Street the last (and only) time England’s men won a major international football tournament. Wilson milked that 1966 success the same way he capitalised on Beatlemania, and who could blame him? Success in Berlin on Sunday would give a feelgood boost to the country and be one more bit of luck for a new prime minister who, in recent weeks at least, seems to have been gifted with a crateload of magic lamps and a full squad of genies.
It will be a particular boon for Starmer, whose case to voters is that solid, steady leadership – low on personal pyrotechnics, high on quiet competence – gets results. Gareth Southgate was the proto-Starmer, offering during the last Euros a study in contrast with the then prime minister, Boris Johnson. Not for nothing does the historian David Olusoga argue that England under Southgate served for eight years as a welcome island of national stability surrounded by roiling political chaos.
If Starmer gets to witness a victory – and he’ll be in the stadium – there will, inevitably, be a few tweeted gags suggesting England only win under Labour. That’s obviously daft. But while no one would be foolish enough to claim credit for one political camp, it will certainly represent defeat for another.
For confirmation, look no further than what is already my favourite video highlight of the competition. Not Jude Bellingham’s overhead bicycle kick, or even Ollie Watkins’s thrilling finish on Wednesday night. No, this one comes from Edgbaston cricket ground, which hosted an India v Pakistan “legends” game last Saturday, the day England sailed through a penalty shootout to book their place in the semi-finals.
For the crucial final minutes, much of the cricket crowd emptied out to watch the football on the TV screens in the bar area. They were in replica kits – green for the Pakistan fans, blue for India, on opposite sides of a fierce national and sporting rivalry. But when Trent Alexander-Arnold converted the final spot-kick, they erupted in shared joy.
Now recall the “cricket test” proposed in 1990 by the former Conservative cabinet minister Norman Tebbit, which argued that an affinity with a land beyond these shores indicated a suspicious lack of national loyalty. That leaping crowd was a beautiful rebuttal of such thinking: many were Brits born in Birmingham, with deep ties to India or Pakistan, joined together in their common love of England. Complicated, overlapping, plural identities, to be sure – rather like the two flags woven on to Cole Palmer’s boots, one for England, the other, in a nod to his father’s roots, for St Kitts and Nevis – but also rather simple.
The men of the England football team seem similarly relaxed with their own diversity, just like most of their generation. These days, no more than one in 10 white people in England feel that “only people who are white count as truly English”, according to a survey analysis from the British Future thinktank. The same study found that it was the team of Bukayo Saka and Harry Kane that served as the symbol of England most capable of unifying people of all ethnic backgrounds, in a way that other symbols – the flag or St George’s Day – struggle to do.
Yet this team’s approach to race, and much else, had to be fought for. At the last European Championship the then home secretary, Priti Patel, declared that England fans had the right to boo the team over the “gesture politics” of taking the knee. Southgate defended his players, sending his now legendary Dear England letter, which inspired the hit James Graham play of the same name. Addressing those who still judged people by the colour of their skin, he wrote: “I have some bad news. You’re on the losing side. It’s clear to me that we are heading for a much more tolerant and understanding society, and I know our lads will be a big part of that.”
But if Southgate’s England have modelled a more enlightened stance on race, they have offered a different version of maleness, too. The Graham play focuses on how Southgate worked to fix the fear that haunted previous England teams: fear of penalties, fear of failure, fear of disappointing fans, fear of not matching up to England’s much-mythologised past. Part of the remedy was to bring in psychological help, to get the players to talk about their feelings, to encourage them to be kinder to themselves and each other. The macho football old guard mocked him, of course – “woke Mr Southgate is a soft lad in a hard world” says the stage version of Matt Le Tissier – but he persisted.
Indeed, he has doubled down. Experts analysed the way England approached last weekend’s penalty shootout, noticing how each taker was accompanied by another player who stayed close by. Turns out Southgate has introduced a “buddy system”, so that, whether a player scores or misses, they won’t have to make that long walk back from the penalty spot alone. While they wait, the rest of the team no longer stand together in a wall, arms locked, “as if communicating ‘US vs YOU’”, says Geir Jordet, author of a study of the psychology of the penalty shootout.
The point is, all this stuff worked. England used to have the worst penalties record in the world; last week, they banged in five out of five. Much of the angst of the past seemed to have vanished, a burden lifted. Ivan Toney was so confident as he took his spot-kick, he didn’t even look at the ball. In his gamechanging few minutes on the pitch on Wednesday, when so much was at stake, Watkins looked like a man having fun.
In other words, the approach so easily derided as woke or soft paid dividends. Indeed, it proved so much more resilient, so much tougher, than the old beer-and-head-butt ethos of before. In this tournament, England have come from behind to win three times; they have survived the dread of the shootout. They have succeeded where their old-school, macho predecessors failed.
None of us knows whether England will win or lose on Sunday night. In a way, it hardly matters. They have already achieved so much. Not least by showing that a country need not be weighed down by its past, forever striving to recapture former glories, whether Wembley in 1966 or the might of a global empire. In football, as in politics, you can write a new story instead.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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• This article was amended on 14 July 2024 because an earlier version referred to Edgbaston cricket ground hosting India v Pakistan “last Sunday”. The game took place last Saturday, 6 July 2024.
