Thoughts on Football and “progressive patriotism”

It’s a subject that would probably beg the analysis of CLR James if not for the fact that his background was that of a middle-class Trinidadian primarily interested in the sport of cricket, and the other inconvenient fact that he’s been dead for 32 years.

The English (men’s) football team has naturally been a source of intrigue, and excitement for the tenure of UEFA Euro 2020, owing to their surprisingly impressive performance throughout the tournament. The expression, “football’s coming home” – a line from the chorus of Frank Skinner and David Baddiel’s 1996 single “Three Lions (Football’s Coming Home)” is a nationalistic ear worm burrowed into our collective consciousness deeper than the other three-word national memes like “Get Brexit Done”, and “Vote For Saxon”.

But how does this tie into “progressive patriotism” discourse? The answer is that unsurprisingly, that football is the site of a culture war. When the English (men’s) national football them took the knee, many English football supporters booed. Some defended their discontent saying that politics should be kept out of football (as if politics is out of anything in our social life), but those of us who weren’t born yesterday, see this for the bullshit line that it is whenever England face off against Germany. Or France. Or even Argentina. Prominent right-wing voices such as Nigel Farage have frequently associated Black Lives Matter and Marxism; Home Secretary Priti Patel and Boris Johnson affirmed that fans can show their displeasure as much as they liked. Gareth Southgate, the manager of the squad defended his players’ right to protest. It’s hard to say whether any of the players will turn into England’s Colin Kaepernick – highly unlikely given that Kaepernick’s silent protest occured in the height of the first Black Lives Matter protests, and he’s still out of a job. England’s most visible sports activist at the moment happens to be Marcus Rashford – whose campaign for free school meals is credited as doing what Her Majesty’s Opposition couldn’t: Get the Conservative Party commit to a U-turn. Perhaps the British right were a bit conscious of these things when the tournament began, and expected an early crash-out. But then came a surprise: England started to win. And win rather consistently. They won their group games. They never even conceded a goal until the semi-finals against Denmark. And tonight, they might even win the tournament against Italy.

Over the space of a season, Raheem Sterling went from pillored in the press as a gang-glorifying thug to a national hero. Southgate is the subject of reworded Atomic Kitten songs. What’s going on? Was it that the England men’s football team was strategically reoriented from its reliance on a few good forwards and a really good goalkeeper, to a team that balanced offense and defense effectively? Was Gareth Southgate’s quiet and analytical style proven to be better than Kevin Keegan’s combative and furious approach? Was it that this generation of English men’s football was actually uniquely good? It might be any of those things, or the answer could be in between. In any case, right-wing commentators were given the choice either to eat crow, or jump on the bandwagon as left-wing football observers gave mocking boasts of how “Marxism Wins Matches”, with memes abound of Southgate writing lines of the Communist Manifesto on his notepad, and Harry Maguire captioned as “saying” that the win was inspired by the revolutionary spirit of Rosa Luxemburg. But then sections of the left commentariat began to take the idea on some level seriously, talking about a “progressive patriotism”. And I think that this needs to be unpacked a bit with a few anecdotes.

When I left Ruskin House after the match, I saw an Asian family near another pub opposite the road with the little kids cheering “England, England!” as cars beeped rhythmically. It felt surreal, and even heartwarming. As soon as I got into the tram though, there was a very familiar chorus of “You’re shit, and you know you are!” sang by a group of mostly-white young men. To me, I think that illustrates what the modern football fandom of this country really is like. I saw that Owen Jones video today with him accompanied by Ash Sarkar and Billy Bragg. Jones was quite shameless about him tying the excitement around the game to his politics, which….fair enough. But with Billy Bragg complaining about the “Marxist left” reducing everything to class, and how it would be bad cede nationalism and patriotism to the far-right; and Ash Sarkar talking about her and her partner’s English identity, not to mention that tweet with Paul Mason getting happy-clapppy about the Queen’s thumbs-up, I’m finding it all rather strange.

For myself, I can’t say that I’ve ever been made to feel English. I remember an encounter where one guy in school explicitly hold me that I’m not English, and I took that to heart. No football team, or tournament is gonna change that either. There’s a reason why England football fans tend to behave like such louts, and that is because of the deeply embedded nationalism that they are socialised into. English people have been repeatedly been told that they once held one-quarter of the globe, and encouraged by our media to see these war narratives played out between twenty-two men over two hours. Sure, Jordan Henderson gave a really sweet message to a non-binary fan, and Southgate is taking a vocal stand against racism, but this is a highly commercialised sport, and even if England didn’t even qualify, they’ll still be millionaires. If a “progressive patriotism” exists from football, it’s highly likely that it will be expressed primarily by the footballers with a rather limited (at least for now) impact on creating social change among a nationalist fan base which still doesn’t have the maturity to not bully Danish boys when they win, or think twice before they call a 12-year old weeping German girl a “slag” not having the temerity for being a passionate as they are during a loss. “Progressive patriotism” is subordinate to the social relations of this country – the United Kingdom, and the culure it produces. It stands up to “God Save The Queen”, not “Jerusalem”; it only tolerates players kneeling when they win, and when a bus parade with them occurs, I’ll probably hear a slightly nicer version of “Two world wars, one (euro) cup”. I’ll bet 20 quid on it.