Citizen Writes

Reports from Euro 2020 (2): The new nationalisms in football

2021-06-21

Back in the early 1990s, just as the English Premier League was being launched and the European Cup competition was being reconfigured into the Champions League, the Italian media mogul and owner of the AC Milan club Silvio Berlusconi told World Soccer magazine that national team football was effectively dead.  That the game, in headline terms, could, ‘Wave the World Cup Goodbye.’ Why would fans want to watch national teams play, he asked, when Europe’s top clubs could sign the best players in the world and compete with each other for global superiority in an international league? 

Berlusconi thought that television and rich owners like himself would dictate what version of the sport lived and died, and subscribing fans watching at home wanted only superior ‘content’: the best playing the best, irrespective of national boundaries.  Moreover, if local fans became bored with the product and stopped attending, then people could be paid to attend – like film extras – to provide the backdrop to the main event which would be largely consumed at home.  

Berlusconi was, at best, only half right.  Billionaire international owners are indeed extremely powerful in club football today and television does increasingly shape the elite level of the game. But the European Super League for clubs envisioned by Berlusconi has not yet come to pass 30 years down the line and, perhaps more to the point, interest in national teams seems to have become stronger, not weaker, over time.  Perhaps this is because national team football does not depend on who has the biggest pockets.  Relying on what is available rather than what can be bought in has an obvious levelling effect in international football, a satisfying anti-commodification. Which is why modest but talented Belgium are many people’s ideas of the winners of Euro 2020. 

Just last week, in an era when television audiences have become increasingly fragmented and young people seem to watch less and less on the box, the England v Scotland game in Euro 2020 attracted a UK audience in excess of 20m viewers, with the Scots, especially, raising their game both on and off the field to demonstrate just how much national identity still matters today and how international football remains an ideal conduit for its expression.  Many women fans are included in these figures, too. 

The rise of new nationalisms around the world – in Eastern and Central Europe – are also productively and relatively peaceably expressed in these international sporting contests, though the symbolism sometimes involved in them has clear political messages.  I was conducting research on England fans back in the 1980s when non-aggressive forms of acceptable sporting patriotism were the exception rather than the rule. Now, the national team in England seems to stand for something rather different.  

Twenty-five years ago, UK politicians were well aware of how important success at international football could be for incumbent governments. The Labour spin-doctor Alistair Campbell, for example, was quoted this past week as saying how much he wanted Germany to beat England in Euro 96 because of the favourable bounce an England win would have provided the nation and a sitting Tory government.  The same may still apply today – though a Scotland or Wales win might have a rather different impact. 

The hype around the current Euros shows us just how much international football still matters, partly because of our collective unease about globalisation and our uncertainty about other forms of affiliation and identity formation that seem to be in long term decline.  Those flags of St George you will see at England matches this week often catalogue small towns and marginal cities that have lost much of their modern function and their traditional identity markers, as manufacturing has closed down or been relocated and depopulation has kicked in.  Supporting England and thus reaffirming one’s Englishness may be a comforting way of being part of the ‘big’ story but also a way of anchoring oneself in what can otherwise feel like a rootless and uncertain future. 

Not that contemporary national footballing l identities have themselves remained unchanged, far from it. The England coach Gareth Southgate has spoken movingly recently about how he hopes his squad reflects a unifying ‘modern’ version of Englishness, one made up of players who often have complex heritages. Not all fans accept it, but it is a progressive move. The same applies to many of the 24 nations competing in the Euros right now.  The cultural and ethnic homogeneity characteristic of national teams back in the 1980s has pretty much gone in many places today, offering a much greater sense of diversity and inclusivity behind the ‘national’ sporting label.  

So, for all its problems – racism has obviously not disappeared – perhaps we should celebrate the Euros as a levelling strike against the hyper-commercialisation of the club game, a site for expressions of acceptable patriotism, and a move against the ‘othering’ of people who do not conform to narrow stereotypes of national belonging.  It may actually be a good sports story – and an opportunity, of course, for Silvio Berlusconi and his acolytes to eat their proverbial hats. 

John Williams

Tags: Sport

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