“We’ve fought wars,” pleads Peter Shilton, his voice breaking with emotion. “People have died to protect our national anthem. Every country has its national anthem, and they’re very proud of it. And, you know, we’re one of the top ones. It’s sad that a small minority feel they have to do this.”
Alas, I was abroad over the weekend and thus missed out on most of the piping hot coronation discourse that many of you will have enjoyed. As it happened I was in Germany: in many ways the royal family’s spiritual home, even if – in Shilton’s reading of history – it did launch an unsuccessful attempt to invade the national anthem in 1939.
But I did watch Liverpool v Brentford, an undistinguished encounter enlivened immeasurably by the scenes that preceded it. As God Save the King piped over the Anfield sound system, met with a predictable concerto of scouse disdain, the Liverpool players arrayed around the centre circle found themselves trapped between two equal and opposing forms of awkwardness.
Different players reacted differently. Mo Salah, game face on, staring flintily into the middle distance, utterly unmoved. Fabinho: just baffled. Andy Robertson: gaze fixed firmly downwards, as if trying to laser-burn a hole in the turf through which he could mercifully plummet. Trent Alexander-Arnold trying, John Redwood-style, to mouth the anthem without singing it.
Why do Liverpool fans boo the anthem? Well, to borrow the words of Louis Armstrong when asked to provide a definition of jazz: “Man, if you gotta ask, you’ll never know.” All football fans have their nemeses. For Liverpool, it’s the British establishment and its associated pageantry. For Manchester City, it’s Uefa and the Champions League theme tune. For England, it’s anything that isn’t England. You might spot a certain double standard in the fans who sanctify their own national anthem while reserving the right to boo the other 208. But – as Shilton so eloquently puts it – we’re one of the top ones.
Shilton was speaking to Jacob Rees-Mogg on GB News, and lest anyone accuse the former England goalkeeper of simply being an unthinking servant to ceremony, be assured that his views on public gestures at football matches are in fact heavily nuanced. Only nine months ago, for example, Shilton was on the same channel explaining to Nigel Farage why he wasn’t in favour of taking the knee to protest against racial inequality, on the grounds that “I don’t think there’s a massive problem with race” and “the game’s full of black players”.
Of course, to anyone with even a passing familiarity with fan culture, the fact that Liverpool fans booed the anthem is neither surprising nor – really – all that interesting. But there is a wider issue at stake here, at a time when the sporting arena is increasingly being used as a theatre for protest, in an age when the very right to express oneself in public is being questioned, often suppressed. Who owns these spaces, and who gets to speak in them? And – more importantly – who gets to police what is spoken?
For all the contemporary distaste, there has in fact long been a rich tradition of anti-establishment protest in British sport, from the suffragettes to the anti-apartheid movement. In many ways the efforts of Animal Rising at the Grand National and Just Stop Oil at the world snooker championship are simply the inheritors of a sacred principle: that these places belong to us all. That in any pluralistic society there must be space for prevailing ideas to be challenged as well as upheld.
In which context it is worth asking which is the more principled act: fans booing a national anthem, or a governing body attempting to enforce one? Before the weekend the Premier League contacted its clubs to “strongly suggest” they commemorated the royal moment in some way. Like, why? It is barely relevant to point out here that the republican segment of the British public stands at 25% and rising. That number could be 100% or 1% and the principle would remain unchanged: celebrating a monarch is an overtly ideological act. There are of course people who will argue with an entirely straight face that the state itself is actually entirely apolitical, and can we all just eat some cake and stand respectfully in agreement?
But none of this is really about tradition or respect or even national unity, a concept that for some reason is never applied to striking nurses. It is a struggle for power, and has always been such: an eternal tug-of-war between those who control the public space and those who occupy it, those who own its deeds and those who own its soul. Protest banners against absentee owners are proscribed or hauled down. Ordinary people with inoffensive placards are hurled into the back of police vans for having the temerity to make a point.
As for the Premier League, an organisation that never met a billionaire royal it didn’t love, there is a sinister branding at work here: a form of influence masquerading as supplication. Bring your colour and noise. Bring your passion and fervour. Bring all the things that make excellent television product. Apart from the bit when you will be asked to stand and sing a hymn to a man you’ve never met.
And of course, the Premier League is entitled to pursue its interests in whatever way it deems fit. We must support the right of privileged executives to hoard the majority of the sport’s wealth while locking the rest of us out. It’s just regrettable – to coin a phrase – that a small minority feel they have to spoil things for everyone.
