Soccer Politics / The Politics of Football

Tags: Barclay's Premier League, English Football, Football Association, Football League, Professional Footballers’ Association, Rooney Rule

Today’s World Cup matches, alternately exhilarating and devastating, were a powerful demonstration of the global strength of women’s football. Though of course both German and England fans are deeply disappointed tonight, the upending of traditional hierarchies in the game — exemplified by Japan’s surprise victory over Germany — can be read as a good sign for the future of the game. The competition is fierce, diverse and surprising, and it is so despite long-standing inequalities and lack of support from national federations: it is where it is because of the work of devoted and talented coaches and players, a number of whom we say play themselves literally into the ground today.

I expected the France-England match up to be the nail-biter of the day. It certainly was one: grueling for the players, and pretty grueling for fans of both teams too. I went into the game rooting for France, who played beautifully. When you root for France, you often find yourself twisted around on the floor, unbelieving, because so often beautiful play doesn’t lead to wins or goals. Today I felt that sinking feeling several times, and in fact was convinced England was going to win for much of the game, down the end.

The drama of the games was enough to pull my son — normally impervious to the seductions of football — into the fray, and he drew a picture of Jill Scott’s goal against France that somehow captures for me some of the anguish and madness of the game. (He has an illustrious history of drawing soccer games.)

I never stopped rooting for France, but somehow I also started rooting for England too. (I realize this is not really good for one’s mental health.) I couldn’t root against them, as they broke up the French attacks, soldiered on incredibly well despite injuries, into additional time. Their play was tenacious, heroic, and in it’s own way epic. At a certain point, I just couldn’t stand watching the game anymore. I left the room twice — during the last minutes of the game, and again during PKs. I missed France’s last-minute goal, and I watched the penalty kicks out of the corner of my eye, with the sound turned off. Either outcome seemed somehow tragic, for both teams had brought an incredible level of play to the field. Watching this again later, though, I was impressed by the relatively cool and clinical way the last 4 French players shot their kicks, especially given the fact that Abily’s was blocked. Congratulations to France for going to the semi-finals for the first time in history, and equally strong condolences to England who should and could just as easily have been there.

My afternoon plan — to follow the certain triumph of Germany from a distance — was disrupted by the brilliant play of the Japanese. I was pulled back to the screen. That game will probably overshadow the England-France game in the history of the women’s World Cup for many for it’s thoroughly unexpected,  course and outcome. I can only imagine the sorrow emanating from the pores of many German fans, but can’t help feeling elation too for the history-making Japanese team. How are we supposed to live with so much contradictory emotion, so many cross-currents of loyalty and meaning? Football is enough to drive you crazy on a day like today.

The only consolation, perhaps, is what a powerful statement both teams made today about the power and drama of women’s soccer, it’s capacity not just to equal but in many ways surpass men’s teams, and the future it certainly deserves — if only the media and football federations can understand that. These games should push us to begin to think carefully, and comparatively, about how the various professional leagues and academies in different countries have enabled countries like Japan and France to do so well in this cup. We tend to think about this in the U.S. in relation to the high of 1999, and the question of why women’s football has struggled professionally and in a way never gotten back to the level of interest it garnered then. But there’s a much larger global story at work here: the U.S. women’s team deserves tremendous credit for having pushed forward the women’s game internationally, putting pressure on other federations in other countries to catch up. The intensity of the competition this year is a testament to the fact that the U.S. (along with traditional powerhouses like Germany, or else Norway and China which didn’t even qualify this year) will never again be able to assume dominance in the global competition. That is hard, of course, for those teams, but it’s a sign of the health and vigor of the game worldwide.

We obviously should not to be too sanguine about what all this means for the future of women’s football. There has been so much holding back the development of the women’s game, as Jennifer Doyle and John Turnbull have eloquently explained in recent pieces. The low level support given to many women’s teams is despicable, media coverage is still unequal and dogged by sexism, and FIFA and many national federations should be held to account for cynical policies and a lack of commitment to the coherent development of the women’s game. If we are able to be so enthralled by the play in this World Cup, it is only because — against the odds, generation to generation — players and managers have shown a commitment to the development of the game that shone through in today’s exhausting and exhilarating performances.

An irruption of football into an otherwise glum Wednesday afternoon: what could be better?

Even better since it delivered a nice showing today by the French team, to my relief. And in Wembley no less. Between the two teams, France is clearly limping out of the hospital a little more quickly, it seems. Though it must have been a stressful afternoon for Arsene Wenger, as Liz Hottel pointed out.

What is so pleasing about this is that they not only pass the ball around nicely and set up good plays, but the result is actually, with some frequency, the scoring of goals, rather than a perpetual string of near misses. They seem at ease on the pitch, able to build up, with a certain understanding. It’s like watching a real football team! The first goal here by Benzema was inspiring.

Meanwhile, nice to see the U.S. do well against South Africa, and nice too to see the Cape Town Stadium — where I spent a delicious evening watching Holland-Uruguay this past World Cup — being used for the event, a fund-raiser for the Mandela Children’s Fund. Peter Alegi provided this nice preview of the match-up, and of U.S. soccer more broadly, from his perch in Cape Town, and a nice report from the game. I also recommend his excellent dispatches of the recent African Women’s World Cup, also played in South Africa in recent weeks, culminating in a victory for Nigeria.

You would never know it from looking at the results alone–two ties, three total goals–but this World Cup has been a crystallizing moment for American soccer. It’s not a new star, a suddenly higher level of play, or a masterful coach that we have discovered. It’s something both less measurable and more fundamental–it’s an American style of soccer that we’ve put our finger on, or, better yet, the conviction that there is in fact a distinctive national attitude toward the world’s game.

Henry Kissinger was quoted recently as saying that America does not have a “national style” of soccer. (Kissinger himself has of course always been an expert on style.) Until recently, I agreed with Kissinger, whose argument is the corollary in sport of the thesis that there is no American identity, only a series of appropriations from other, more sharply etched cultures.

What’s more, if Kissinger means that America does not play the kind of highly stylized soccer associated with countries like Brazil and France, though more often present in the discourse than the practice of soccer in these nations, then he is right. However, if he means that America has not developed a unique approach to the game, then he is becoming more and more wrong with each passing match in the 2010 World Cup.

What we have seen (in the defiant 1-1 tie against slumping England and yesterday’s stirring 2-2 draw against Slovenia, the best game of the tournament so far) is that American soccer is in a word tough.

It plays you tough, competes with toughness, gives you a tough time, gets tough when the going gets tough, goes into challenges tough, always stays tough. This is an attitude that prevails most clearly in the good high school and college teams around the country, which play with reckless physicality, enjoy competing for balls in the air, kick the ball hard, start many athletes who also play football, baseball, and lacrosse: make the field seem small. On the US national team, this style of tough play is the dominant ethos as well.

The Americans are not interested in being interesting. They are not aesthetes. They are here to get each others backs and pull out the tough win. At its most exalted, American soccer is not beautiful at all. Instead, it plays a Joe Dimaggio game Pete Rose tough. This is what the team has done so entertainingly against England and Slovenia.

Think back on Onyewu’s brave late-game defensive stands against England. On Donovan, sprinting toward the goal from the right corner against Slovenia, and deciding not to pass or to cut or to spin but just to shove it down the keeper’s mouth and see if he flinched. On the refusal of the Americans to take dives against teams who use acting as a lifeline. On Michael Bradley, the coach’s son, near tears after the second tie of the tournament, and promising, “The mentality of this team has always been that no matter what happens, we’re going to give everything we have and fight until the end.” Tough.

Given this attitude, it is fitting that so far in this tournament the driving instinct of the
American team has been to play defense unless forced to do otherwise. On offense, you often have to use individual initiative, instinct, creativity, a touch of the magical, to succeed. The team is almost never comfortable doing this. On defense, though, there is esprit de corps. You pack it in, backs against the wall, all for one and one for all, stick together, and do everything you can to keep those bastards on the other side of the field from scoring.

You saw this delight in defense in the 2009 Confederations Cup final against Brazil and also in the game against England. Even when all we have to do to win or tie is score a goal, we’d rather defend. The emerging symbol of American soccer is big solid Onyewu in the back. It’s no coincidence that for the last two decades, our best players have most often been our keepers.

When I was a kid, I played eleven years of soccer on the kind of elite travelling teams that are the breeding grounds of American soccer. On such teams, you have it drilled into your head from the beginning that soccer is a game of oppositions. On the one hand, you can be soft, tentative, uncommitted, precious. On the other, you can be hard, selfless, willing to sacrifice, decisive.  You don’t pass up a shot. You don’t go into a tackle half-hearted. You do not, ever, ask to be taken out of a game. Instilled in pre-teens by coaches with sharp jaws, who speak in short clipped phrases, tough soccer takes hold.

On these teams, and even more so in high school, you do very few individual ball drills. It’d be nice to be able to juggle the ball a lot, but when are you going to use that in a game? Instead, players spend most of their time scrimmaging against an opponent or, better yet, doing one-on-one competitions. Soccer in America is more often not about technique; it’s about testing your mettle.

In Franklin Foer’s excellent book, How Soccer Explains the World, he argues that the American middle class has turned to soccer in order to satisfy its liberal distaste for the violence of football, the competitive starkness of baseball, the ghettoism of basketball, and the backwoods Americanism of all three.

There is a great deal of truth to this thesis, but I think that ordinary Americans have also
turned to soccer because it satisfies a different, deeper desire. It is the middle class’s way
of making its boys into men. At the most basic level, the US style of soccer from the travelling team to the national team has taken shape as a response to this yearning.

This is an incomplete interpretation. It does not always hold true. It is complicated by the number of American national team players who play on foreign clubs, and the United States Soccer Federation’s recent efforts to develop the country’s top players in European-style soccer academies. (What’s more, this American team is by no means a group of heroes. It is improving, but it is still nothing more than a decent team in the second or third tier of the international level.)
But this way of understanding American soccer does have several advantages. It begins to explain the character of American soccer as a unique creation with a distinct lineage, a task which has almost never been done. Finally, it also helps to explain why this national team is so sincere, so apparently limited in their aspirations on the field, and so endearing.
I hope they tough it out this year.

I found this image, up at Obstructed View, particularly delicious, though it’s apparently photo-shopped! (Maybe that makes it even funnier?) It’s also up at New York magazine.

The British media was reporting on Sunday (here, and here for example) that fans will be paying less to watch their games at home next season.

The news comes after Ofcom, the regulatory body of the British government, announced measures forcing the TV giant Sky to lower prices perceived as threatening competition. Sky hold a veritable monopoly on football and cricket broadcasting rights; the move by Ofcom would force them to sell significantly cheaper to rival companies. The immediate effect, it is hoped, would be to drastically slash the cost of football and cricket coverage by £10, roughly 40 percent of the actual price for that variety of television programming. The two main rivals of Sky, Virgin and BT, are expected to start a bidding war to lure potentially hundreds of thousands of viewers from Sky.

The news is not without intrigue: Rupert Murdoch-owned Sky are major supporters of the British Conservative Party, currently the opposition party in England. The Conservatives hold power in many areas of British governance, and Ofcom is one of them. This places party leader David Cameron in the unenviable position of upsetting an important contributor to their political success by upholding a ruling in their detriment–it would be unprecedented to overturn the ruling (Sky is naturally expected to file as many legal appeals as possible) and could cause the party major political damage.

While the immediate effect of this would be to take less from the armchair fanatic, what does this say about the political implications of the sport? What we mean is not to measure the political “power” of a sport (for example, to enact social change or revolt), but rather to see it as a “liberal” phenomenon.

When such a sport is spread out into the world at the feet of colonizing industrialists, it comes as little surprise. From River Plate to Athletic Club, all the way to the Marinos of Yokohama or the Super Eagles of Nigeria, there are reminders of the ease with which the sport was globalized, slotting seamlessly into the cultural consciousness of many a distant place. While the original Cambridge rules have gradually been altered here and there, the idea, we like to believe, has been constant. Naturally, there have always been ball-kicking games all over the planet, but soccer as such is a phenomenon of a different world order than, say, the Aztec ullamaliztli or the Chinese Cuju.

Indeed, soccer (and here I am being deliberate with the term to distinguish it from football, whose meaning has to do with any ball-foot game) has become the global king of sports in much the same way that Coca-Cola became a drink of choice. Like Coca-Cola, soccer is better or worse depending on where you are and your tastes. You might find yourself sipping a delicious Coca-Cola in Mexico (made with real cane sugar, of course) yet not enjoy the pace of Mexican football. Similarly, you could be in England and damning the contemptibly oversweet Coke, yet being distracted from it by what you find to be a thrilling encounter in the Premier League in the dingy pub that you are sitting in.

While the smoke is coming out of Rupert Murdoch’s ears, many a British fan will sit down and drink a Coca-Cola before watching one of their freshly discounted football matches from the comfort of their well-molded sofa, knowing that the can of Coke is all the more affordable. Why not go for the two-liter next game? Invite a friend, buy some associated products like Tostitos or some sort of crisp, etcetera. Make sure to do it in your official team kit (last year’s won’t do, everybody knows you can get those for pennies in the bargains bin once the new one is introduced), and so forth.

Yet, we cannot underscore the symbolic value of the sport. While we can see it as a source of economic exploitation, we can also see it as something that is served, even created simultaneously by the consumer-spectator. Are we to believe that the world is nothing but Homer Simpsons and Peter Griffins lining up to give away their money and their freedoms? Yet would such characters be funny if there were no truth in them? We identify with them as we do with CR7 breaking out a new muscle-pose or Messi scoring a Maradona-goal every so often. And the truly buffoonish nature of our desire is revealed.

In the case of David Cameron (sorry, soccer fans, no relation to Avatar), he is balanced in a position that reveals this dialectical nature of the soccer phenomenon. On the one hand, refuse to stick your neck out for a very wealthy and powerful supporter in Murdoch. On the other, you fear the reprisals of a multitude that you can never quite trust to be completely complacent.

While in some cases soccer has been a protagonist in military wars (as in El Salvador, Algeria, Angola, or even in the hard-hitting hooligan era of 80′s England), the news today is about a bidding war. The hostilities are between large media conglomerates jostling for size in, as the cliché goes, “an increasing global world.” The interventions of a Liberal institution to offer a minimum degree of protection to the constituents of government.

What is most clear though, is the hope that watching English football becomes easier for those of us who have less important addictions. Is this the dawn of the era of a new Fandom-political citizenship?

Tags: bt, Coca-Cola, England, football, ppv, rupert murdoch, sky, soccer, TV, virgin

Here is an interesting article on the World Cup draw “show” and match-ups hosted by Theron.  It was funny how the article mentions, “The only uncomfortable moment came when Blatter forgot the venue of the World Cup’s first match (which, of course, is Johannesburg).  The FIFA president redeemed himself, however, when he announced that the World Cup trophy would remain in Africa, as a gift, after being presented to the tournament winners.”

The article then goes on to say, “FIFA’s desire to leave a legacy on the continent was further underlined by a video presentation that announced investment of more than $40 million in African soccer projects. They might have been better off spending the money on security.”  This brings us back to our conversation on infrastructure projects in South Africa and the true functions for which they are being constructed, as well as their legacies after the event ends.  The article seems to have a rather disdainful attitude on all the money spend on the stadiums and venues when there is poverty knocking nearby.

I’d be interested in seeing how the television rights holders plan on portraying this South African poverty considering that they are “anticipating record audiences.”  If they plan on doing background stories on certain players or teams, like ESPN often does, I would hope that they would include a commentary on the social conditions in South Africa as well.

You have probably heard of Wigan’s destruction while facing Tottenham Spurs this past Saturday. Just in case you have not, here is a link: Tottenham-Wigan Athletic.

Wigan took their first step towards the Premier League in 1997 when they won the Third Division under John Deehan.  Paul Jewell then earned promotion to the First Division with a points tally of 100 in 2002/03, just his second season at the club. The club promoted to Barclays Premiership in the season of 2004/2005 and have beaten all expectations. Wigan’s first ever EPL game was a home match against  the previous champions Chelsea, which they lost 1-0  as Crespo scored 30 seconds before the final whistle (Crespo\’s goal). After a  successful run Wigan found itself in the 2nd position in the league by November. The Latics were creating wonders in the Football League Cup simultaneously. Having left Arsenal out of the cup in the semi-finals, Wigan reached the final in the same season, losing 4–0 to Manchester United. Latics eventually finished the season in 10th place – the club’s highest ever league placing.

The upcoming years were not that great. The club hardly stayed in the EPL in 2006/2007 and stayed as a mid-class team in the other seasons.  Unorthodox to the way EPL works, the club has changed 3 managers since the season of 2006/2007, Roberto Martinez being the 4th one to continue.

I was very interested in the way Wigan was going to handle the loss. Martinez apologized from the supporters and called the loss ‘unacceptable’. Yet, a bigger move came from the players yesterday. I do not if this will ease the supporters’ anger or not, but the following news is from the Wigan’s website:

Wigan Athletic players to personally refund Tottenham tickets 

The club have announced that the players of Wigan Athletic have decided to personally refund every Latics fan who bought a ticket from the DW Stadium ticket office for the match against Tottenham Hotspur yesterday.

Latics had a sizeable following at White Hart Lane and skipper Mario Melchiot, speaking on behalf of all the players, said today: “We feel that as a group of players we badly let down our supporters yesterday, and this is a gesture we HAVE TO make and pay them back for their tremendous loyalty.

“There is not a lot else to say, just that as a group of professionals we were embarrassed by the way we performed, we feel it was below our standards and this is something we feel we owe to the fans. 

“Now we have to draw a line under the game, focus completely on training this week and bounce back on Saturday. 

“We are professionals, we will take it on the chin and move on but it’s important that we do not take our supporters for granted.”

The club has confirmed that every supporter who bought a ticket for the game from the DW Stadium ticket office should contact the ticket office and refunds must be claimed on or before Friday 4th December 2009.

Karim Benzema, seen during his days with Olympique Lyonnais. The 21-year-old striker was sold to Real Madrid last summer for €35 million. (Wikipedia Commons)

I’m something of a latecomer to following professional club soccer. Although I played the sport growing up in Western North Carolina and have watched every World Cup final since 1990, I’ve been oblivious to the comings and goings of the top European and South American leagues—mostly due to my typically spartan television habits.

That’s all changed. I now subscribe to Fox Soccer Channel, GolTV and Setanta, and tonight, I’ll skip Game 6 of the World Series in favor of DVR replays of Aston Villa-West Ham in their midweek Prem fixture and Lyon-Liverpool in Group E of the UEFA Champions League. If I’m still awake (perhaps after watching the ninth inning of the baseball game), I might zip through Barça-Rubin Kazan in Group F of the Champions League.

One reason I’m finding soccer so interesting is that, because of its global reach and the preponderance of international competitions and freely moving players, it seems more relevant and resonant than the traditional American sports. I love a good baseball or basketball game as much as the next person, but American sports leagues are closed shops, provincial and protectionist. No matter how bad the Pittsburgh Pirates or the Los Angeles Clippers become, for example, their place in their respective “major league” is assured.

There are virtues to the socialization of American sport. The leagues are well-organized and stable, and the owners (with the significant exception of baseball) have entered in agreements that share revenue and limit spending on player salaries. And, for those who think it’s important for teams to perform in an unpredictable fashion from year to year (“parity”), the NFL and NHL offer excellent models—one that Major League Soccer seems intent upon refining further.

Professor Dubois invited me to contribute to this blog, and I think my interests will largely be in the area of business and globalization. In light of today’s game between Lyon and Liverpool (2:45 p.m., broadcast live on Fox Soccer Channel), I want to draw attention to a just-published book, “Soccernomics,” by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the business—and the future—of the game, and I expect to return to it in future posts.

One section is especially interesting and timely. In a chapter devoted to examining why most soccer clubs lose money, there are a few appreciative pages focusing on the rise of Olympique Lyonnais (OL). After the authors argue—at length and convincingly—that the business of soccer is a poor one in theory and in practice, they visit with OL’s owner Jean-Michel Aulas in Lyon, France’s second-largest city, located in convenient proximity to the Alps, to Italy, to Paris, to the Riviera.

It turns out that OL, despite being in existence for a century, has generally been an indifferently performing club  in a bourgeois city more known for food, wine and cinema than for sporting enthusiasm. During Aulas’ two decades of ownership, however, Lyon has become the 12th wealthiest club in the world in 2008, according to the Deloitte Football Money League.

There are a number of reasons for OL’s success, Kuper and Szymanski argue, and most of them have to do with Aulas’ determination to run his team like a real business. Most top clubs, despite being described as “wealthy,” are actually saddled with debt in the hundreds of millions of dollars, pounds and Euros. Liverpool takes the field in Lyon this afternoon as the world’s second richest club, with income in 2007-8 of about €351.2 million—more than twice that of OL. (The others in the top five are, in order, Real Madrid, Manchester United, Barcelona and Bayern Munich.) But Liverpool also carries debt estimated earlier this year of £350 million, while Manchester United’s debt is close to £700 million. (Note the two different monetary units in this paragraph.)

As Kuper and Szymanski explain, there’s no danger that Liverpool and Manchester United and their fellow profligates will fold. But this reckless environment does leave room for an efficiently managed if rather bloodless club like Olympique Lyonnais.

While the authors write admiringly of Lyon’s branding of such things as OL Beaujolais, OL bottled water, OL hair salons and OL taxicab services, what is particularly pertinent in light of this afternoon’s clash is the French club’s strategy on the player transfer market. Every summer and winter, the soccer press is filled with talk of high-profile transfers, but as the “Soccernomics” authors argue, these players are almost always overvalued. Aulas and his team of soccer managers, however, never pay top dollar for an established star; instead, they sign prospects when they’re in their early 20s and then sell them a few years later the minute another club offers too much money for them. Hence, Michael Essien, Florent Malouda, Éric Abidal and Karim Benzema all became superstars in their early- to mid-20s playing for OL before they were sold for big bucks to Chelsea, Chelsea, Barcelona and Real Madrid, respectively.

Aulas boasts to the authors that he has a price on all his players, and that he anticipates big sales by having cheaper replacements for his stars at the ready. Liverpool, on the other hand, is an old-fashioned, badly run club that wins championships in spite of its owners (so desperate are the Liverpool supporters that they are attempting to form their own ownership bid—an effort supported by the British government but thus far unsuccessful).

Right now, the Scousers are in a terrible run of form, having lost six of their last seven matches in all competitions and suffering escalating calls for the sacking of gaffer Rafael Benitez. The principal reason for the team’s struggles, however, is the injuries to their two of their best and most expensive players, Steven Gerrard and Fernando Torres.

A third player, however, is also mentioned in the media’s diagnostic conversations about Liverpool’s struggles: midfielder Xabi Alonso, who was transferred to Real Madrid last summer for £30 million. “If only Liverpool hadn’t sold him,” their supporters—and players—moan. But, viewed through the prism of Lyon’s business strategy as depicted in “Soccernomics,” Liverpool and Alonso were correct to take Real Madrid’s money. Actuarially speaking, the 27-year-old Alonso is at the peak of his game and his marketability. Although he gave his best years to Liverpool, he will collect his biggest checks from Real Madrid.

Where Liverpool failed was in not making adequate preparations for Alonso’s departure and not preparing for the inevitable drop in production and susceptibility to injury of the 29-year-old Gerrard, whom Lyon likely would have sold a year or two ago.

So, this afternoon’s game is a battle between old and new. It’s also a must-win for visiting Liverpool, who will play without Gerrard and without a full-strength Torres—among other hobbled squad members. Lyon, meanwhile sits in first place in the Group with nine points from three games. A win will put them through to the knockout phase early next year.

It’s hard to believe that limping, debt-ridden, dysfunctional Liverpool could be a sentimental favorite. But then, it’s also hard to love a club like OL, whose owner describes his Champions League aspirations thusly:

Aulas says it is only a matter of time before [OL] wins the Champions League. “We know it will happen; we don’t know when it will happen. It’s a necessary step to achieve a growth in merchandising.” (Kuper and Szymanski, p. 67)

Tags: Champions League, Eric Abidal, Fernando Torres, Florent Malouda, Jean-Michel Aulas, Karim Benzema, Liverpool, Lyon, Michael Essien, OL, Olympique Lyonnais, Simon Kuper, Soccernomics, Stefan Szymanski, Steven Gerrard, UEFA Champions League, Xabi Alonso

As an Englishman, I was relieved to see England negotiate their World Cup qualifying group with relative ease, thus banishing the demons of the calamitous Euro 2008 qualifying campaign fought under the tragic stewardship of a hapless Steve McClaren. As an Englishman living in Scotland, I took great pleasure in seeing the Scottish national team fail to make it; tantalisingly close but once again falling short. I have to admit that I laughed when I heard the result.

Such a confession leads me to the point of this post; the United Kingdom Olympic football team for 2012 – who does it represent? There hasn’t been a UK team in the Olympics since 1960 and the vast majority of the players were English. As hosts of the 2012 Olympics, the UK automatically qualify for the tournament, yet the sticking point has been getting the four football associations of the home nations (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) to agree to such a team. While the FA has been pushing for a united team, its Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish counterparts are understandably against such a move, afraid that it would threaten their independence and set a dangerous precedent. FIFA have not exactly helped matters. Sepp Blatter has claimed that a UK team would not endanger the existence of the four nations while also saying that the reasons for having four teams instead of one will be questioned. It seems that no-one can win this.

If such a team could genuinely exist, who would be in the team? Apart from Ryan Giggs (even in the twilight of his career) and Darren Fletcher, would the rest of the squad be English? The Northern Irish Martin O’Neill could be manager, thus making the team ‘representative’. I readily admit that this is a somewhat Anglo-centric viewpoint and some might argue for the inclusion of Manchester United’s Jonny Evans or Sunderland’s Craig Gordon. However, it would still be a predominantly English team, although seeing as the English comprise the vast majority of the population, this could be a moot point. In the end, there has been a political fudge, allowing an English underage team to represent the whole country.

South of the border, many English cannot understand the resistance to a unified team, that the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish are being petty. Yet for many, being English is synonymous with being British. The national anthem of the UK, God Save the Queen, is appropriated by England at most sporting events (but not the Commonwealth Games), whereas the others have their own separate anthems. Many English fans will support the other nations; a form of benevolent paternalism, yet condescending. They will support the other teams when competing, wanting them to do well but not expecting them to do as well as England. When they beat England, the shock is palpable (the most recent example was when Northern Ireland beat England in a World Cup qualifier 1-0 in 2005). The smaller nations metamorphose into younger siblings, junior members within the union in the eyes of the English. Head north of the border and you realise that being British comes a poor second to being Scottish. Finding a Scot that will support England in the forthcoming World Cup will be rare, although not impossible. Dislike, even hatred of the English can sometimes rear its ugly head during these tournaments. With Scotland not in the 2006 World Cup, the Tartan Army had snapped up large numbers of Trinidad and Tobago shirts with “Scotland, 20” on the back (Jason Scotland, a T&T striker then plying his trade at St Johnstone in Scotland). This took on a greater significance when T&T played England in the group stage (England won 2-0). There is little sense of being British up here, especially in the highlands. With the Scottish National Party in government in Scotland, albeit a minority one, the question of independence from the union remains large. It seems that Britishness is a dirty word.

Come the 2010 World Cup, I will be supporting England. Come the 2012 Olympics, I will be supporting the UK soccer team. The question is whether the whole of the UK will be supporting them or whether it will just be the English? For those of you not from the UK, maybe it seems like just a lot of fuss about a small island…?

Tags: England, Europe, Scotland