Lisbon, 2004. A quiet crowd is gathering on the platform of the sparkling Lisbon metro. We are waiting for the train that will take us to the game between England and Croatia. It comes rumbling into the station and instantly it is obvious that we are going nowhere; every carriage is packed with England fans. On the platform we are all silent and motionless, there’s no point edging towards the doors. They open with a hiss, and on cue, as if we had just flicked the mute switch off, the whole train bursts into song; to the tune of “Knees Up Mother Brown”, “You’re not getting on, you’re not getting on, you’re not getting, you’re not getting, you’re not getting on”. The doors snap shut. Silence. We all look at each other bemused and amused, and the show rolls out of town.

Bloemfontein, 2010. We are standing on the rooftop car park of the city-centre shopping mall where England fans have gathered before the game with Germany. Below, the bars and lawns, walkways and side roads are awash with red and white. Immediately below us a roving conga line of blokes is tumbling through the crowd. They are wearing an assortment of novelty hats – most seem to be blow-up balloon Spitfires. Suddenly, from around the corner, what appears to be a Wehrmacht staff car of second world war vintage pulls up with a uniformed driver and a “German officer” – but they are flying union jacks from the car aerial and one has been tied to the back of the boot. The boys immediately strike up, “There were 10 German bombers in the air, 10 German bombers in the air”. My heart sinks, they’ve started with 10, this will go on for ever. The German officer is conducting the chorus. I wonder what the real Germans are making of it. “And the RAF from England shot them down, the RAF from England shot them down.” Since when did the RAF come from England rather than Britain?

Such were the contrasts and contortions of the English football nation in the 21st century. On the one hand, a riotously funny cavalcade, the real Carry on England, mining a distinctly English seam of music hall and comedy. On the other, a cultural farce in which only the English caricature of the Germans will do, while the royal house and its military are imagined as English rather than British institutions.

Over the past three decades, the England team and the fans that follow them have played out a compelling drama for the nation, one followed by an ever wider slice of the media and the public. At the critical moments of the story – England’s climactic defeats in the knockout rounds of European Championships and World Cups – the spectacle has forced schools and businesses to shift their timetables and attracted television audiences of between 20 and 26 million people.

Yet these moments when the English have rallied behind the flag have been rare. English identity is still a subject that makes people nervous. For much of the last two decades politicians have ducked the English question. The devolution of the New Labour years, that shifted law-making powers to Scotland without changing arrangements at Westminster, made England’s lack of constitutional representation starkly apparent. But with no resolution in sight to the West Lothian question, most politicians decided it was better not to stir things up. Some even tried to conflate Englishness with the aggressive behaviour of hooligans and the far right. Jack Straw, while Labour home secretary, argued that English nationalism was “potentially very aggressive, very violent”. William Hague considered it “the most dangerous of all nationalisms”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest England fans watch the team’s victory over Germany in the 1966 World Cup final. Photograph: PA

Scotland, by contrast, has provided a different model – a confident, modern national identity. The Scottish model of civic nationalism that has emerged over the last 30 years, was built on the basis of the distinct Scottish institutions of church, law and education. Where were their English equivalents? The crown, Parliament, the BBC, the NHS and the armed forces were British. The law was shared with the Welsh, the literary canon was considered English but the language was now used by most of the world. The Church of England was available, but the multifaith character of religious England and the indifference of the secular majority made it a poor candidate. But there was one more arena where the English could perhaps construct a contemporary form of civic rather than ethnic nationalism.

Until now, football has not really featured in the wider debates about Englishness. Even when intellectuals have engaged with the game and its relationship to social identities, their focus has been on clubs, class or cities rather than the nation as a whole. Over the past 30 years, the English national football team has offered one of the very few civic institutions where Englishness was publicly on display and up for grabs. This ensemble of team, fans and media has offered a focus for the construction of England’s imagined community.

Once upon a time, the England national team was identified with Britain as a whole. The 1966 World Cup was hosted by England but its iconography was British. World Cup Willie, the tournament’s leonine mascot, sported a union jack waistcoat, the publicity material and programmes had the flag all over them, and among the crowd at Wembley the union jack outnumbered the St George’s Cross by 20 to one. The defeat of West Germany in the final was widely viewed through the prism of the second world war. When Geoff Hurst’s goal made it 3-2, the crowd spontaneously broke into “Rule, Britannia!” The victory party in London was likened to VE day. (In Edinburgh or Cardiff, it was a different story – the English victory was not experienced as a British triumph. The great Scottish striker Denis Law remembered it as “the blackest day of my life”.)

As late as the 1990 World Cup, England’s turbulent ride through the tournament was still accompanied by the union jack, but at Euro 96 English football and its fans looked different. Although the union jack was not entirely absent, it was, for the first time, completely overwhelmed by the St George’s Cross. By 2006 the flag of St George had left the stadium and gone mainstream. During the World Cup that year, the Guardian reported that 20% of adults in England had bought a flag. Shops began to sell not only flags, but a whole range of England-themed tat – chocolate footballs, school lunchboxes, even plastic chain mail for the full St George look. The English public, in the midst of the country’s longest credit-fuelled consumer binge, lapped it up. Marks & Spencer gave the team its seal of approval, stocking St George’s Cross underpants.

The centrality of football to English culture has been cemented by the commercial ascent of the Premier League, whose revenues exceeded £3bn last season. And although not tied to a conscious nationalist project, the idea that England was the home of football, and that football was the people’s game are longstanding. The national team can be held up as exemplars of both past glory and post–imperial decline, while widespread notions of a distinctive English style of play (rough, honest, manly) made plausible the idea that the England team was a product of deeper national characteristics. The public theatre of England’s performances offered an opportunity for those stories and ideas to be embellished, transformed and challenged by new kinds of fan behaviour and public engagement.

Since the Scottish independence referendum those geological plates have been shifting again. The union has survived but as an ever more distinct and separate Scottish identity takes shape, the governance and the identity of England cannot be ignored any longer. In taking stock of who they are and what they might become, and given the paucity of alternatives, the English can no longer ignore the meaning of English football.

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During the 1980s and 1990s England’s travelling support confirmed all the reasons why unionists of both the left and the right preferred to keep questions of English identity unanswered. Prior to the 1980s, England away supporters could be counted in the hundreds rather than the thousands, but by the early 1980s they were making their presence felt. There were outbreaks of fighting at both the 1980 European Championships and the 1982 World Cup. After the Heysel disaster in 1985, in which 39 people died in a stadium crush before the Liverpool-Juventus European Cup final, Uefa banned English clubs from European football. Without the option of following their club abroad, the hard core switched their travel arrangements: there was a perceptible growth in the numbers and volatility of the England team’s away fans. The “English disease” of hooliganism had been diverted rather than eradicated. The team went to the 1988 European Championships in Germany and played dismally. Around 7,000 England fans fought running battles with German fans and police in the medieval warrens of old Düsseldorf. It was with these events in mind that Italian security forces at the 1990 World Cup opted for a corral-and-charge-first, ask-questions-later policy when policing the larger contingent of England fans.

Throughout this period, England’s support remained a recruiting ground for rightwing organisations, such as the BNP. Matches against the Republic of Ireland provided the perfect stage for a particularly vicious display of British/unionist anger. In 1995 England played Ireland in Dublin. When Ireland went 1-0 up in the 21st minute a group of England fans in the upper level of the main stand started hurling objects into the stand below. A phalanx of Nazi-saluting men formed up towards the front. They were later revealed to be members of the BNP splinter group Combat 18 who had come planning trouble. Fights broke out on the edges where Irish and English fans were not segregated, and progressively larger chunks of jagged wood from the old stadium were chucked into the terraces beneath them while they chanted “No Surrender to the IRA”. Stadium security could do no more than hold its lines, get people out of the way of the missiles and prevent Irish fans from storming the English section. Eventually the riot squad arrived and the stadium was cleared.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Baddiel and Frank Skinner perform Three Lions in 1996

Although England’s narrow semi-final defeat could have led to disaster, Euro 96 was a watershed; generally free of disorder within or around the stadiums. The tournament and the behaviour of the England crowds provided a public rehabilitation of English football. The official song for Euro 96, Three Lions, became a staple of the England crowd’s repertoire. Written and performed by the blokeish comedy duo David Baddiel and Frank Skinner and Ian Broudie, lead singer of the Lightning Seeds, the song’s success rests on the infectious simplicity of its main refrain, “Football’s coming home”. The phrase connected on many levels: the return of English football to Europe after the post-Heysel ban; the end of the game’s pariah status in English culture; the assertion that despite its global reach the English could still claim to be the game’s inventors. Nonetheless, a toxic combination of xenophobia and alcohol remained part of English football culture. After England’s defeat to Germany on penalties in the semi-final there was a night of small-scale rioting in Trafalgar Square, with German cars targeted for burning. There were also violent incidents in the following two international tournaments.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Vindaloo by Fat Les

The new peaceful majority got their turn in the limelight at the 2002 World Cup in Japan and South Korea. Debarred by police bans and dissuaded by the expensive itinerary, much of the old troublemakers stayed at home. The result was that fewer than 10,000 England fans travelled to Japan. Once there they were surprised to find considerable support, even affection, for them and their team. Alongside the official Japanese-English fans, delegated to support the honoured visitors, the popularity of English music and David Beckham in the country gave the whole chorus an unexpected sheen of contemporary youth cool. With barely any kind of trouble reported, England fans dipped their toes in the water of the carnivalesque, celebrating the defeat of Denmark in the knockout rounds with a thousand-person conga around Niigata Stadium. Chants of “Vindaloo” could be heard, drawn from the popular and bizarre tune of that name. The song’s video was a spoof of the one that accompanied the Verve’s 1997 hit Bitter Sweet Symphony, in which lead singer Richard Ashcroft moodily barged his way down the pavement of a busy market street in Hoxton. While Ashcroft bangs shoulders with a recognisable cross-section of inner city folk, his avatar in Vindaloo encounters an altogether more surreal England. On the street and in the ever-growing crowd following the singer we see chalk-dusted Sumo wrestlers, kids in ice-hockey kits, characters drawn from saucy seaside postcards, naughty schoolgirls, strumpet nurses and a tart in a leather skirt and leopard-print top. Keith Allen, who had also featured in the video of the 1990 World Cup song World in Motion, serves as the maniacal pied piper who rallies the crowd, bringing together the citizens of a mongrel nation bound by its love of football, family and food – especially Indian takeaways.

* * *

What brought about this shift? How did the travelling English football nation mutate from a brawling, xenophobic mob into a boisterous, globetrotting love-fest? In part, it reflected the broader trends in domestic football, where a combination of all-seater stadiums, stewarding and an older, more middle-class crowd had made violence at football a much rarer occurrence. It helped that, under pressure from Uefa and the public, the Home Office introduced tougher legislation to control the international travel of known hooligans. Perhaps most importantly, the idea that one could hitch the notion of white racial nationalism to the England football team and its fans became simply ridiculous, stripping ultra-nationalists and old-school racists of their niche in the crowd.

The challenge to the idea of an unambiguously white England was of course the work of two generations of black players

The challenge to the idea of an unambiguously white England was of course the work of two generations of black players, both foreign and English, who had fought their way past the institutionalised racism of the clubs and the public racism of the stands. Viv Anderson’s first cap for England in 1978 broke the equation of Englishness and whiteness, and the prominent role of players such as John Barnes, Des Walker and Paul Ince in the late 1980s and early 1990s rendered it meaningless. By the 21st century England would field a team that had a majority of black players.

If the presence of black players in the squad made the team a poor place for expressing a racist political nationalism, it wasn’t immediately clear that it made Englishness more appealing to the country’s minorities. The prevalence of the St George’s Cross in 1996 sent ripples of anxiety through the black press, where there remained considerable unease with the notion of Englishness. The lingering air of racism in stadiums discouraged minority ethnic football fans from joining the crowd in the early 1990s, but even this began to change. The journalist Sarfraz Manzoor captured the ambiguity of the shift after celebrating England’s victory over Argentina at the 2002 World Cup: “That night, as Asians, blacks and whites joined together … I remember thinking: this is what patriotism could be like if we could defang it of its nastier elements.” Two years later, the journalist Leon Mann was less ambiguous when describing his trip to Euro 2004: “The first fans I saw were a group of 10 to 15 Asian lads who were draped in the flag of St George – I thought ‘wow’.” Perhaps, at last, the flag had lost its stigma. Speaking of the 2006 World Cup, John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, recalled: “In the city of Birmingham, where a good number of taxi cabs are operated by Asians, often Muslims, the flag of St George became an addition to every cab.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A house in Bristol during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Photograph: Matt cardy/Getty Images

At a distance, united in the stadium, the English football nation appears a homogeneous collective. On closer examination, it is not so simple. The composition of the crowd reflects wider changes in English society in recent years. The middle-aged remnants of the old hooligan firms rub shoulders with members of the official supporters’ club, many of them women, and members of the growing corporate brigade who take advantage of hospitality packages. Alongside these, there are small groups of friends, networks of tournament junkies and stag-party posses. Some will have planned itineraries, others will have taken pot luck on the official website and landed tickets for a whole variety of non-England games; in between they are following England when and however they can.

In terms of identity politics, the picture is equally complex. The English have not quite decided yet where they stand. Though there has been a drift from Britishness to Englishness as the leading identity, the English have not abandoned Britishness en masse. The continuing popularity of British songs and imagery, if not the British flag, among England fans underlines this. “Rule, Britannia!” remains a crowd favourite. The second world war, or rather its cinematic versions, provides an important part of the soundtrack. The Hillsborough band from Sheffield, now officially promoted to be the England Supporters Band, have been a fixture at games since 1996, relentlessly churning their way through the music from The Dambusters and The Great Escape. The England fans still belt out the British national anthem with gusto. The first mutterings have been heard that the English, like the Welsh and Scots, should have their own anthem on sporting occasions, but there is no consensus for change. Surveys of the fans suggest that they are more inclined to describe their national identity as English rather than British by comparison to the general population, but they are by no means convinced of the need for a politically and constitutionally separate England. There remains a significant minority who are shy of all forms of nationalism, while among fans from the north of England there is a sense that the team and its base at Wembley are too closely linked to London and the South.

Football, for all its intense moments of collective ecstasy, is also about narrative. What football stories have the English told themselves about themselves over the last quarter of a century? As with the nation’s political conversation, the tone has consistently been set by the tabloid press. Until 2012, the tabloids set the narrative arc of every tournament in which England played – from the overinflated expectations that accompany the team, to the splenetic recriminations and vacuous postmortems that follow defeat. A second crucial part of the tabloid coverage has been to overemphasise the importance of the England manager, who has been pursued with a vindictiveness usually reserved for politicians; a strategy that has obscured the real structural, economic and social problems in English football’s recruitment, coaching and development.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The England Wags out and about in Baden Baden during the 2006 World Cup. Photograph: Mark Large/Rex Features

The tabloids have also taken the lead in framing England’s opponents in terms of comically antiquated stereotypes that bind the story of England to British military history. In 1996 the Daily Mirror sent an armoured car to the German team hotel in London. On the eve of the 2006 World Cup the Daily Mail opened the tournament with a football scarf around Nelson’s neck and the headline “England Expects”. Since sex and violence sell, the press have gone looking for such stories. In the 1990s they simultaneously pilloried and delighted in the violence that accompanied many of England’s games. Something similar happened with sex in the 2000s. At the 2006 World Cup, when England was based in the upmarket spa town of Baden Baden, the FA placed the players’ families in the same hotel as the journalists. While the team struggled, the Wags went out on the town, staging opulent shopping trips and racking up fabulously expensive bar bills. The press had a morality tale they were looking for: wastrel women and gold diggers, living it up and stealing the stage, while the nation’s football team went to pot.

If the 2006 World Cup demonstrated how far England’s fans had come, it also demonstrated how far the team and the FA had to go. In 2001, not long into his term as the chief executive of the FA, Adam Crozier ill-advisedly declared that the new wave of players, nurtured in the elite clubs of the Premier League, were the golden generation. He pinpointed 2006, when in terms of age they would be around their collective peak, as England’s best chance to win the World Cup. In fact they were eliminated, again on penalties, in a quarter-final after torpid performances in the early rounds. But Crozier was right in one sense: this was their peak. England failed to qualify for the European Championships in 2008, were knocked out of the World Cup in short order in 2010 and departed in the same way at Euro 2012. At the 2014 World Cup they didn’t even make it out of the group stage. At the moment that the boom years of New Labour came to an end and the financial bubble popped, the stock of the golden generation was properly evaluated and found to be oversold and overrated. It has yet to recover.

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In this more sombre light, stripped of the hyperbole of the boom years, what is the state of the English football nation? Like the nation itself, its identity shuttles between Britishness and Englishness, still tied to nostalgic memories of empire and war. It has, by and large, rejected the notion of an ethnic or a white identity, now borne out by the cross-ethnic appeal of the sport, and the makeup of both crowd and team. It is predominantly conservative, has an overlarge business class component of corporate trippers and sponsors and a radical cosmopolitan wing of old lefties, but retains a small rump of unreformed xenophobes.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest England fans watch the team play Italy at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Photograph: Tom Jenkins

More promisingly, the football nation has continued to embrace the carnivalesque and explore the cosmopolitan possibilities of football fandom. England fans in South Africa in 2010 and Brazil 2014 were more mixed than ever before. As one observer noted, “I was struck by how many women and families were at the England games and people were there for a party.” Building on the success of similar initiatives in Portugal and Germany, English fans played in schools, supported grassroots football projects and visited Robben Island, the townships of Johannesburg, and the favelas of Rio. By contrast, the England team’s engagement with the South African and Brazilian public was microscopic.

England’s campaign at the 2014 World Cup was accompanied by an almost total absence of St George’s flags on the nation’s cars and houses, and the most downbeat of expectations. Shorn of most of the “Golden Generation”, the team certainly appeared more likable, while the measured, unflappable Roy Hodgson brought a welcome degree of moderation to the circus. This was just as well, for one point from three games represented England’s worst performance at a World Cup for over half a century. England’s travelling support - loud, loyal and in love with their hosts - performed far better.

Outclassed and exposed on the pitch, the players apologised, but, as Barney Ronay suggested in the Guardian, maybe the blame lay elsewhere: in the desperate state of England’s grassroots infrastructure and coaching; in the power of the commercial imperatives of the Premier League and its predominantly foreign owners to trump the sporting and cultural imperatives of the England team; in the impotence of the FA, an organisation that could potentially regulate the game’s finances and insist on the importance of the common good. For all its limitations, the England football nation has become a more attractive reimagining of the stateless nation than its commercial football or the national team. But if the English want a team worth watching then it will take more than congas and chants. We must become, as in the rest of our national life, citizens not merely consumers, critics not merely cheerleaders.

The Game of Our Lives by David Goldblatt is published by Penguin

