High drama last month as the England team lost in the European Championship football final, and the press agonised about ‘heartbreak’ and ‘devastation’ amid photo spreads of downcast faces and slumped shoulders. ‘Everyone was truly gutted’, said one player. Well, perhaps gutted is the wrong word. Gutted is being made redundant, or homeless, or being turned down for an operation, or having to face a Job Centre inquisition or go to a food bank three times a week. These affable young men get paid around £200,000 a week, while their manager earns £5m a year. The poor lambs will no doubt get over their melancholy.
The press were inconsolable though. How much longer does England have to wait for a Euro or World Cup title, they sobbed. It’s been 58 years!
But wait, what about when England won the European Championship in 2022? Don’t the women count? Oh dear, this is awkward. The women’s game is not the same, you see. There are even those who mutter that women don’t really play football, they play at football. Perhaps those critics don’t realise that women’s football used to be hugely popular and drawing crowds of 50,000 until it was summarily banned by the all-male FA in 1921, supposedly for being too unladylike, but really for eating into the FA’s profits. Even today there’s a built-in bias. At a UK average height of 5’3″, women have to play on the same standard pitches with the same goalmouths as average 5’9″ men, meaning that they have to work harder than men to play the same game (tinyurl.com/mrxvxyzw).
As a reminder, England’s women managed to do what its ‘young lions’ couldn’t do in two generations, beating Germany to the title in front of a mixed stadium crowd of 87,000 ecstatic, flag-waving patriotic loonies. Now there’s nothing but silence and collective amnesia. 58 years, wails the press. The women ‘lionesses’ who held up the trophy to that deafening applause must view all this in bafflement. “Er, hello… hello?”
But seriously, some women have bigger things to worry about than equality on the pitch, like getting a post-footy kicking from violent spouses. A 2013 Women’s Aid survey showed a rise of 38 percent in domestic violence incidents when England lost a major game. And, tragic but true, they’re not even safe when the match goes the other way. A 2022 report from the Warwick Business School notes a 47 percent increase in domestic violence whenever England wins a World Cup or Euro match.
The Independent quotes one woman: ‘So now I don’t follow any football, my fiancé is not into football and if I’m being honest I don’t think I ever would have got with somebody who had a big interest in football because it’s just left me scarred and for me it was just filled with fear, and fear of what mood he was going to come home in, and just walking on eggshells.’ To underline the message, Women’s Aid took the Baddiel and Skinner Three Lions song tag ‘Football’s coming home’ and turned it into the darkly sinister ‘He’s coming home’.
Women aren’t the only ones who need fear the outcome of football matches. Many sports fans, watching the England side’s successful five-out-of-five spot kicks against Switzerland in the quarter-final penalty shootout, will have remembered the sickening racism following the failure of three players (all of them black) to score in a similar shootout against Italy in 2021. The three players endured hideous online abuse that resulted in a police investigation and 11 arrests. Tory politicians including the Home Secretary Priti Patel duly weighed in with official condemnation, after having previously scoffed at the England team ‘taking the knee’ in support of Black Lives Matter, describing the action as wokism and ‘gesture politics’. Justifiably incensed, footballer Tyrone Mings scored a sizzling counter-strike on Twitter: ‘You don’t get to stoke the fire at the beginning of the tournament by labelling our anti-racism message as ‘Gesture Politics’ and then pretend to be disgusted when the very thing we’re campaigning against, happens’.
And indeed it did happen. A study by a number of universities showed a 30 percent rise in racial hate crimes in London in the weeks following that match. The researchers were interested to know if such ‘trigger events’ caused increased incidents generally, or in a more uneven and localised way. In fact the increases were seen most in boroughs already known for such violence: ‘This supports the assumption that trigger events do not have a homogenous effect on societies, but rather reinforce existing attitudes.’ Well no surprise there. Guns only shoot people if they’re already loaded. One scrap of positive news is that the reverse might have some effect too: ‘The Egyptian-born, Muslim striker “Mo” Salah joined Liverpool FC in 2017, which, according to a different study, led to a significant decrease in Islamophobic violence and attitudes in the city’ (tinyurl.com/y248y54t).
People who follow sport but not politics might believe the one has nothing to do with the other. But sport is political, and politics is often sport. Many stayed up late, or indeed all night, to watch the 4 July general election results come in, as the micro-dramas including the toppling of ‘big beasts’ made for compulsive viewing. Arguably Britain’s first-pass-the-post electoral system is better understood as a championship sporting event than as any serious and legitimate exercise in democracy. And just like a sport, everyone knows it makes no real difference who wins. Monday morning, it’s back to the same old slog.
And that slog is capitalism, the enslavement of the vast majority by a tiny bunch of super-rich crooks. There’s a way to beat that rigged game, but only if the world’s disempowered workers stop growling at each other, and start working as a team with a serious common goal. Let the lions and lionesses come together. Their roar would shake the world.
Paddy Shannon
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