If a week is a long time in politics, then it can be epochal in football. Just eight days ago the national mood was not exactly, as players like to say, buzzing. There was a sense of relief that 14 years of Tory rule had ended, but neither the election nor the Euros had inspired much jubilation.
The victory on penalties against the Swiss helped ease the country’s collective fear of the shootout, but it was the last-minute winner against the Netherlands on Wednesday that provided a much-needed endorphin rush to our spirits.
Suddenly, after all the criticism, England was awash with belief, pride and a galvanising sense of unity. Football alone can do this, particularly in a country that only half exists – as geographical entity but not really a political one.
Football has not only given a boost to England but it has also played a major part in redefining Englishness. As David Olusoga, professor of public history at Manchester University, noted last week, the England manager Gareth Southgate has been trying “to build a new, workable version of English identity”.
Olusoga spoke of a “hyper-diverse” England team. Strictly speaking, it’s Anglo-Irish-African-Caribbean, with no Asian representation. It’s also homogeneously heterosexual, as far as we know, unlike the English women’s team, which while much more white, has a diversity of sexuality. But the point about the England men’s team is that it is multiracial and distinctively English.
To see the whole team sing our dirge of a national anthem with a rousing passion is to witness a group of individuals from different ethnic – but largely similar class – backgrounds embracing a collective national identity. This is no small achievement, especially as football has often been the focus of racism and division. For Sunder Katwala, director of the thinktank British Future, the feelgood factor of Euro 1996, which took place in England, was a breakthrough moment for ethnic minorities.
Hitherto, as a devoted football fan, he had found the atmosphere around England’s international matches “menacing and angry”, and unwelcoming to anyone who wasn’t white. But that tournament, he says, “had a massive foundational impact in my confidence about identifying as English and other people thinking I was English”.
The squad back then featured just three black players – whereas 11 of the current 26 are non-white – but Katwala says he experienced a feeling of inclusivity separate from representation.
“It didn’t mean for me that there had to be a half-Indian, half-Irish person on the left wing,” he says. There is, none the less, a difference between acceptance and genuine solidarity.
As recently as 2011, the then England captain John Terry was accused of racially abusing Anton Ferdinand, younger brother of the former England captain Rio Ferdinand. Terry was selected for the Euro 2012 squad but Rio Ferdinand was not, leading to speculation that he’d been jettisoned to prevent disharmony.
That scenario is extremely hard to imagine taking place today. This is an England team that jointly took the knee and has been explicit in its condemnation of racism. Rather than sublimating their racial identity, players have felt able to speak out without it bringing into question their national allegiance.
As Katwala puts it: “It’s clear that the black players and white players are on the same side.”
And that side is not just the side of history that is about “a more tolerant and understanding society”, as Southgate put it in his “Dear England” letter to the nation three years ago, it’s also the side of Englishness, a long troubled and disputed concept.
“We don’t talk about Englishness,” says Katwala. “You get a British passport, you’re a British citizen, but can you be English as well? Can you be black or Asian and English?”
The England team, he says, answers that question and, what’s more, it is the only institution that is equipped to do so. There is no English parliament. The Church of England has been slowly fading from national relevance. In a sense the fact of being English has been left as an ill-defined negative – the Britons who are not Scottish, Welsh or Irish.
“The idea that Britishness was inclusive but that Englishness wasn’t was always an unlikely principle, but it’s in football that we’ve seen the issue addressed,” says Katwala.
It’s no coincidence that the people addressing it are in their 20s, because to this younger generation multiple identities that share a common Englishness is the norm. Older generations might disagree about nationalism or the meaning of the St George cross, but the young are busy shaping the reality of how we live. Of course, when Bukayo Saka scores the equaliser against Switzerland, or Ollie Watkins his winner against the Dutch, matters of race and identity are inclined to vanish in the euphoria. But does that mean that black players have to be the very best to feel included?
Well, they are the very best – that’s why they’re there. Football is nothing if not a meritocracy. Yet we know from the final of Euro 20, when Saka, Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho missed penalties in the shootout against Italy, that racists were waiting online to vent their bile.
“The overwhelming response to those players was a kind of love and affection,” says Katwala. “The culture didn’t turn on them, but a minority in a space that is not regulated.”
It will be a special moment for the English, of all races and ethnicities, if somehow the team manages to defeat Spain today. But it’s not really about football coming home. Far more importantly, football has helped make our home.
