Since the Manchester City verdict — guilty on 114 of the 115 charges, nice seasons of “sham” sponsorship deals, revenue overstated by more than £830 million, multiple witnesses the commission found had lied — everything has become a bit Nathan Fielder. In the first season of The Rehearsal, Fielder builds a replica of a Brooklyn bar so that a conversation can be practiced until it has, in effect, already happened before it happens. City’s seasons are the reverse. The match I am watching will probably not count. It is a game that will not have happened.

The news broke on 25 September. I heard it in London, just off a rough and delayed night flight from New York. I was finally in my hotel, napping to Radio 4, and leapt up dramatically. My first words were “bastards”; loud enough to wake my puzzled wife. Then I thought that we — by which I mean Liverpool FC — would get our two or three extra titles, the season we finished a point behind the bastards. A piece by Jonathan Wilson in the Guardian cured me of that. City have cheated each of the other 19 clubs. Once you have read the findings, the word “champions” does not transfer cleanly to the runners-up. Those titles feel soiled. The alternative is that the seasons are simply voided, which has the bizarre philosophical consequence that nearly 20 years of English football did not really happen.

Football came back on 11 October with Liverpool-City at Anfield. Desperate not to watch alone, I went over to my good pal Todd’s place in Dumbo in my full Liverpool training gear, looking like a proper prannet. What was I expecting? Cosmic justice? The universe publicly shaming the cheats? We lost, badly, 3-0, and I couldn’t have cared less. Todd had invited a friend, an Arsenal season-ticket holder no less, and we all talked for an hour afterwards, not about the game or Arsenal’s prospects (they beat us on Sunday!), but about how unreal it all felt, how You Can See Everything it all felt, where the more we see the less we know. Wilson, again, had the phrase for it: ghost football. Like the second after an incident that everyone knows VAR will check, stretched out over weeks, months, years. He is right. I want to identify what sort of ghost we’re dealing with here. 

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England’s blind hope

By Simon Critchley

Our game is called Association Football, and the association is not incidental. Football is the free association of human beings; a team is a fused group, in Sartre’s sense, in which the free action of each player is subordinated to the collective and elevated by it. Bill Shankly, my boyhood hero, called this socialism: “It is a way of living. It is humanity.” Johan Cruyff put it more drily: “I’ve never seen a bag of money score a goal.” And yet the material substrate of the game is (and always was) money — “dirty money, often from highly questionable, under scrutinized sources”, as I wrote in my book in 2017, when Gazprom used to be on all the Champions League hoardings. Its form is association; its matter is cash. I argued then that this contradiction could not be resolved and should not be, that it was “an open wound that we continue to scratch at the beginning of every match, every tournament, every season”. Delight and disgust rotate in every game we watch. Fans are not dupes. They know what is happening. And they know that for a moment, the moment of moments, the form of the game can gleam above its matter. That is what we are there for.

I believed that then. I believe some of it still. What I did not foresee was a third state. The commission did not find that City had too much money; everyone knew that. It found that the matter itself was counterfeit: sponsorship deals that were sham, an owner’s money disguised as revenue the club had earned. Cruyff was wrong. A bag of money has scored a great many goals, and the label on the bag was a lie. The rotation has stopped. What I feel is neither delight nor disgust, but flatness.

Following the great philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, I think that football is play and play is repetition. The essence of football consists in repetition: in this game, the previous game and the next game. There is no original match, no Ur-game in the wet 14th-century grass; each game is as genuine as any other because each is proof that the game goes on. From the repetitions, we build series — a season, a run, a history — and from the series we build what I called, with a slightly pretentious nod to Heidegger, football historicity. To be a fan is to live for a history of moments — for an LFC fan, Istanbul 2005, Madrid 2019, and so on — a shared memory of joy that forms a living archive of meaning from which a team can draw when it needs to come back from three down. The end of the season is unbearable — “There will be no football for months!” — precisely because the chain is interrupted.

You cannot void a moment. Agüero in 2012 happened and happened to everyone who watched it. It was wildly exciting (for non-Manchester United fans). What the City verdict destroys is not the archive, but the chain. A match that may later be annulled is not a repetition of the last game and an anticipation of the next; it is a rehearsal, a performance given for an outcome that may never be counted. This is why I now watch the game I love more than life itself the way I might watch gymnastics or downhill skiing: I can admire the physical skill, but I don’t care.

Judgment must come quickly and with a very fiery sword; but it appears that it will not. City lodged their appeal on 1 October, calling the commission’s opinion “unsafe” and their own evidence “irrefutable”. Under the Premier League’s rules, the appeal must conclude within 12 weeks of its filing, and the sanction is a separate hearing. We’ll know by the new year, perhaps. Perhaps not. Meanwhile, City’s chief executive Ferran Soriano tells the staff that the whole case rests on a “single false accusation”, and ESPN reports that the appeal will argue that the money did not come from the owner at all but from the government of Abu Dhabi — so that the defense against disguised owner funding is that the funding came from a state. Which is a morally questionable defense given the probity of the state in question. 

Everton and Forest broke the financial rules too. They admitted it, took their points deductions and played and the chain held. City deny everything. That is the difference, and it is philosophical. The great and sorely missed American philosopher, Stanley Cavell, distinguished knowing from acknowledging. We know what City did. The commission knows. City know. What is refused is acknowledgment, and in Cavell’s reading of Othello that refusal is tragedy itself: Othello kills Desdemona because he could not yield to what he knew. Cavell also says, “I live my skepticism”. We all do now. Every result since 2009 carries the asterisk of a doubt that no further evidence can remove, because what is missing is not evidence. 

Fans know this, and the comic acknowledgment of it is everywhere except where it is needed: in the gallows humor of the other 19, in Manchester United restoring the counter on the Stretford End that marks the years since City last won a trophy. In humor I find myself ridiculous and I acknowledge it in a smile. City’s fans brought inflatable bananas to Anfield, the toy of the innocent Maine Road club of 1988, and did the Poznan in defiance, which is comedy as denial. The Trumpian denialism that has characterized the club’s abominable behavior since the verdict is the tragic version of the same refusal, and tragedies end with bodies on the bed — in this case football itself, our national sport, the global game, rendered completely meaningless. 

Brighton won. It was a good game. I’d like it to have happened.

There have been plenty of moments over the past few years when the goose that lays the golden eggs has been endangered by the people entrusted to look after it, with their odd combination of complaisance and avarice. But the game has perhaps never seemed more imperiled than it did on Tuesday when Fifa president Gianni Infantino announced his plans to sell off a stake in the World Cup.

The European governing body, Uefa, reacted with horror and issued a terse statement. “This crosses a line that football’s governing institutions should never cross,” it said. “None of us are the owners of football. It is not Fifa’s to sell.”

That conflict has come increasingly to the fore in the past two World Cups. There is a sense that each tournament has run on two parallel tracks: on the one side the outrages, the tolerance for human rights abuses, the naked lust for profit, the sycophancy towards autocratic leaders; and on the other the beauty and excitement of the football itself, the joy of fans, even as they’re squeezed for every last penny.

Uefa has been fighting a cold war with Fifa for at least a couple of years now as Infantino has stepped up his attempts to maximize revenues and to undermine Uefa’s control over the club game. So far, that has amounted to little more than gestures and trolling. Several presidents of European football federations walked out after Infantino arrived three hours late to last year’s Fifa Congress in Asuncion following a trip to Qatar with the US president Donald Trump; they subsequently released a statement criticizing Infantino for pursuing “private political interests”. When the Somalian referee Omar Artan was denied entry to the US before the World Cup, Uefa promptly appointed him to officiate at the European Super Cup final in August.

But this is far more serious. For the first time since 1966, when African sides demanding greater representation boycotted the World Cup, it feels there could be genuine mass action against football’s global governing body by its members. A schism is possible: perhaps the kind that has turned boxing or golf or cricket or chess into a mass of competing federations, rules and competitions. Until recently, this seemed unthinkable in football, which is, after all, a simple game based on legible traditions.

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America: land of the cheats

By B. Duncan Moench

The brink was reached upon the announcement that Fifa has been working with JPMorgan to establish a new entity, Fifa Forward Enterprise, which would sell a 20% stake in the future commercial revenues of the men’s and women’s World Cups and the Club World Cup to investors. The move, it claims, will lead to an increase of “over $10 billion” in funds distributed to Fifa’s 211 members. Thrive Capital, an investment company founded by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law, has been appointed to lead the search for investors.

Perhaps the choice of investment company shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise, given Infantino’s close relationship with Trump. Their love-in culminated in the President being awarded with the inaugural Fifa Peace Prize at the World Cup draw last December — which itself prompted the Norwegian football federation to join the human rights NGO FairSquare in complaining to Fifa’s ethics committee. Trump himself, with his supervillain’s habit of narrating his own malfeasance, seemed to suggest at a dinner in Davos in January 2021 that he and Infantino had somehow, even before he became president, conspired to ensure that the USA, Canada and Mexico won the bid to host the 2026 World Cup.

But this new plan has surfaced a tension long-apparent in football: the governing bodies and lawmakers are also commercial entities aiming to make a profit. That apparent conflict of interest has been evident twice in the past year. First: in the gerrymandering of qualification criteria to ensure that Lionel Messi’s Inter Miami competed at the Club World Cup. Second: in the suspension, after only one game, of a three-match ban imposed on Cristiano Ronaldo, ensuring he could play in all of Portugal’s World Cup group games. Infantino’s Fifa was deemed to be prioritizing marketing concerns — getting the most famous players onto the pitch — over maintaining the integrity of the game.

A still more serious breach occurred when Fifa’s appeals panel seemingly yielded to three phone calls from Trump during the World Cup and suspended a red-card ban on the American striker Folarin Balogun. Uefa said that decision had “crossed a red line”. That’s two lines crossed in three weeks. Little wonder an emergency meeting of Uefa is set for today.

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England’s blind hope

By Simon Critchley

Fifa’s apologists have already argued that the Spanish league sold a 10.95% stake to private equity in 2021. But that argument is easily countered: a league is not a governing body. The sport in Spain is governed by the country’s Football Federation. Fifa, conversely, is supposed to protect the interests of football worldwide. It’s supposed to be a neutral lawmaker. What it’s not supposed to be is in hock to its investors. Under Swiss law, indeed, it is technically a non-commercial organization. It has — and of course the term seems laughable in the context of modern sports governance and Trump — a moral responsibility.

Even beyond ethical issues, it’s worth asking why. Why now? Why does Fifa need outside investment? What will its members gain from selling off a percentage of future revenues? The World Cup has just made a record $15 billion, double what it made in Qatar in 2022. What is it planning to do with the billions of investment? Fifa has suggested that as many as 1.5 billion people watched the final between Spain and Argentina. These figures are always open to question, but the audience in the US was up 129% on Qatar. Does the World Cup so desperately need more marketing today that it’s happy to sacrifice 20% of future revenue tomorrow?

Perhaps some association heads see benefits in taking the money now and leaving the reduced future revenues for their successors to worry about. Indeed, Uefa made the accusation explicitly, accusing Fifa’s leadership of “using our sport to enrich themselves and their friends”.

The letter that member associations received on Wednesday makes clear the calculation many will be making. The initial deal is worth $20 million per association: but any member association that signs up within the next seven weeks can apply for an additional $20 million payment. Fifa insists that the whole process is far more transparent than it was in Sepp Blatter’s day. But a one-off payout of $40 million is likely to be extremely persuasive, not least when no full public study has been done since November 2015, when it was revealed that 81% of Fifa member associations were inadequately audited.

Infantino arrived in 2016 promising to swill out the corruption from Fifa. And his efficiency program involved a drive to reduce the number and size of Fifa’s committees which — since the financially dubious João Havelange became president in 1974 — has been an easy way to reward supporters. Yet none of this stopped Fifa in 2024 from voting to increase the number of standing committees from seven to 35.

It’s not to imply anything corrupt to point out that, while Infantino will be reelected as president by acclamation next year, Fifa’s constitution prohibits him from standing for a fourth term in 2031. (Then again, many thought it prohibited him from standing again in 2027, but he managed to convince them that his first three years didn’t count as he replaced Blatter part-way through an electoral cycle.) Once he has ceased to be Fifa president, he will need a new job, and commissioner of the World Cup would be an extremely lucrative one.

Given Fifa’s one-member-one-vote policy, it’s likely Infantino’s plan will pass, though it’s at least intriguing that Concacaf, the North and Central American confederation, said it was “deeply concerned” with the scheme. Realistically, though, if there’s to be meaningful opposition, it’ll have to come from Europe. The Football Association may have expressed doubts at the plan, but the only realistic option available to Uefa is the nuclear one: a boycott of the World Cup or secession from Fifa.

Of course, that comes with enormous risk. But equally, a World Cup without teams like Spain, France or Germany — and their TV markets — is not a World Cup. As an alternative, meanwhile, Uefa could use the existing Nations League as a base, before offering guest places to the best non-European teams. Suddenly, that starts to look a lot more like a World Cup than whatever rump is left to Fifa. Meanwhile, the threat of major European clubs supporting Fifa is mitigated by the fact that the Champions League, an enormous driver of revenue, is run by an entity jointly owned by Uefa and European Football Clubs, a group representing more than 850 clubs across all 55 Uefa nations.

In the past half-century, Fifa has become increasingly bound up in scandal. Growing frustration led to the toppling of Blatter at the Baur au Lac Hotel in 2015. But the situation has not improved under Infantino, who increasingly governs by fiat. Tellingly, the latest proposal has not been discussed by any Fifa body.

So this could be the final straw: if Europe does not stand up to Infantino now, then when? Yet even if it does, the fallout could be apocalyptic.

I was six the first and only time my father took me to Wembley. It was 1966, and we went to watch England play Argentina in a bad-tempered, goalless quarter-final that passed into legend when the Argentine captain, Antonio Rattín, was sent off, and refused for a small eternity to leave the pitch. He clearly wasn’t a gentleman. Twenty years later, in Mexico, Diego Maradona knocked England out with two goals, one of them scored with his hand. “It was as if we had beaten a country, not just a football team,” he said afterwards; the Falklands War was four years gone, and “we knew they had killed a lot of Argentine boys there, killed them like little birds. And this was revenge.” Football, as someone ought to have said before me, is the continuation of war by other means.

This is the uncomfortable thing the World Cup keeps trying to tell us about ourselves. The tournament is the largest recurring ritual of group identity our disenchanted species still performs, and what it reveals is that the group has two faces.

Consider first the good one. When Jean-Paul Sartre wanted to describe how a mere collection of separate individuals becomes something more, he reached, of all improbable things, for football. In the Critique of Dialectical Reason, he distinguishes the series — the inert bus queue, each of us alone together, a plurality of solitudes — from what he calls the group-in-fusion, in which separate people dissolve into a single acting body bent on a common object. A good team is exactly this: 11 private ambitions subordinated to, and elevated by, a shape that none of them possesses alone. And so is a crowd. What happens in a stadium when your side scores is that a series of strangers becomes, for a few delirious seconds, a group.

Émile Durkheim gave this its name a century ago: collective effervescence, the heat that runs through a gathered crowd until it boils over and lifts each person clean out of himself. His scandalous conclusion was that this, and not any doctrine, is the origin of the sacred. The god, on this account, is the fever of the group. I have felt the fever, and not only at Anfield. I once watched Liverpool beat Bayern in Munich from a Scottish pub in the northern suburbs of Athens, among the Pan-Hellenic Liverpool supporters’ club, and found myself, against every instinct of my nature, high-fiving strangers whose language I do not speak (I am not, in the ordinary run of things, a hugger). For those 90 minutes everything was, briefly, right with the world.

The anthropology here inverts what we tend to assume. We imagine that a community exists first and then expresses its readymade unity in a shared rite. It is the other way about: the rite makes the community. “If one must act as though one believed,” wrote the anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard, “one ends in believing… as one acts.” First you buy the shirt, sing the song, take the same seat; the belonging arrives afterwards, as a gift of the doing. This is why a nation you were merely assigned at birth can be felt, across 90 minutes, as the most intimate thing about you — and why a nation not your own can be borrowed wholesale. 

My first experience of passionate national feeling was for Brazil, in 1970; aged 10, in a full yellow kit, I rolled the names — Pelé, Jairzinho, Rivelino, Tostão, Gerson — silently around my mouth like an incantation. Identity, the World Cup teaches, is not a possession but a performance, and a fluid one — fluid to the point of vertigo. At the 2006 tournament, I watched Serbia and Montenegro play on as a nation that had, a few weeks earlier, ceased to exist, singing the anthem of a Yugoslavia that had ceased to exist before it, and losing 6–0 to Argentina for good measure. My hosts in Belgrade were delighted, rather than crushed: here was a theater not of identity but of its endless differentiation — family, city, tribe, nation — against the forces of fate.

But here is the turn. The very warmth that binds the group is also what curdles into its opposite. Durkheim knew it, and so does anyone who has stood on a terrace. The same effervescence that produces the embrace produces the howl; the fever that makes the choir makes the mob. The going-out of the self is as available to the lynch party as to the congregation. I have heard grown men make jokes about the 97 dead of Hillsborough and the dead of Munich; I have wondered how much of the particular venom aimed at Mohamed Salah, an Egyptian and a Muslim, belongs to this darker order. Years ago, watching England go out of another tournament, I wrote of the “stupid, bloody-minded white tribalism that surrounds the England team, even when most of the best players are black”. That the phrase still fits, 12 years on, is itself the lesson. The fused group needs an enemy against which to fuse, and the World Cup, by dressing the tribe up as a nation and handing each one a flag, obligingly supplies one every four years, with fireworks.

This is not an argument against the tribe. It is an argument for the rule. Every tradition that has taken ecstasy seriously — every mystery cult, every church — has hedged it with ritual, an appointed time and place, a law. The rule is not the enemy of the rapture; it is what keeps the rapture from becoming a fire. Football’s genius, when it works, is to be at once the most tribal and the most rule-bound thing we do: a bounded 90 minutes, 17 laws, a marked and consecrated pitch, within which the fiercest collective passion is licensed precisely because it is contained. Off the terrace, I can loathe Manchester United and still, over a pint, hear out a United supporter’s reasons and grant that they are good ones. The small miracle of football talk is that it holds tribal loyalty and reasoned respect for the enemy in the same hand. If only our politics could manage the trick.

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By B. Duncan Moench

It was Bill Shankly — a socialist who thought the game came down to “everyone working for each other, and everyone having a share of the rewards at the end of the day” — who liked to remind us that the true name of the sport is association football. That is the whole of it. Despite the ongoing horror show that is FIFA, the World Cup is the greatest festival of association we have left, and association is double through and through: the free society of equals and the baying pack are grown from a single root, and the only thing that decides which we get on the night is the rule we agree to keep.

And so, once again, I kept my seat and my superstitions, and gave myself over to the thing that is, as Shankly did not quite say, a good deal more important than life and death. For 55 minutes I even dared to believe: Anthony Gordon put England ahead, and in the treacherous minutes that followed I permitted myself a small vision of the final. I should have known better. I did know better. In the 85th minute, Enzo Fernández rose unmarked to shoot in a cross from Messi; in stoppage time, Lautaro Martínez scored with a header, from precisely the same source. One–two, and it was finished. Two goals, two crosses, both floated in by the little magician who is Maradona’s true heir — though this time, mercifully, he used no hand at all, only his feet, which somehow makes it worse. A decade ago, in the same doomed spirit, I wrote of the “headless chicken panic” that grips England the moment an opponent “dares to cross it into the penalty box”. It is a bleak little consolation to be proved right twice in seven minutes.

But it is never the losing that undoes you. England have a long and distinguished record of contriving to lose to Argentina in the end, and there is a certain grim solidarity to be had in it — the solidarity of the funeral. As Prometheus tells the chorus, chained to his rock, the one gift he gave to mortals was to stop them foreseeing their doom: “I sowed in them blind hopes.” That is the 90-minute anxiety dream — you are trapped, you can see exactly what is coming, and it comes anyway — and it is the tournament’s last and best revelation about the tribe. What binds us is not the certainty of glory but the blind, renewable, faintly ridiculous hope we hold in common: the hope that kills you, and that you would not, for all the world, be without. Spain will play Argentina on Sunday. I shall watch with the serenity of the neutral, which is to say with none at all. There is always 2030.

But victory for the Albiceleste is unlikely to alter the light in which the Argentine team has come to be seen internationally in this edition of the cup — one so different from that of four years ago in Qatar. Then, the Argentines’ pluck, and their star Messi, were easy to love as they wended their way to a third world championship, a journey that ended in a thrilling final against Mbappé’s France. The country was suffering from runaway inflation and seemingly without direction under its hapless Peronist president Alberto Fernández. Argentina deserved a win, it seemed, and its team earned one.

Now, New York magazine dubs Argentina the “surprise villains” of this Cup, while The New York Times reports on how other nations hope they’ll lose. What changed? Under Javier Milei’s new management, Argentines still suffer plenty: both economically, as the effects of Milei’s shock therapy sink in, and in football, where experiencing the trials and tribulations of the national squad is a kind of civic religion. “One must suffer”, fans like to say. “Without suffering, it’s not worth it”.

With the great exception of Messi, Argentina offers little inspiration in the way of tactics or technique. But the grit of its players and fans is boundless and enviable, and as debate spreads over whether Argentina’s neighbor Brazil owes its recent footballing retreat to evangelical Protestantism’s advances, perhaps this secularized Catholic cult — the Stations of the Cross reimagined as knockout-round progression — is helping power Argentine prowess in an age when South American football struggles to compete with the money and training of the European juggernauts.

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But this gospel of suffering is mostly for domestic consumption. Abroad, perceptions of Argentina follow its association, under Milei, with Trump’s America and Netanyahu’s Israel. Latin Americans have long chafed at some Argentines’ superior touting — neither really accurate nor welcome in principle — of their society’s European character. But the current political moment has drawn wider attention to certain darker elements in the national culture.

Back in 2022, in the woke era’s waning years, it was possible to sympathize when, after a Washington Post op-ed asked why Argentina’s national squad lacked black players, the Twitter account of Milei’s party — at the time boasting only three lawmakers — dryly responded: “Because we are a country, not a Disney movie”.

Today, posts like this appear in a more sinister aspect, as another World Cup brings out the worst in Milei’s movement, now in power. “It’s such a drag to be black these days”, top Milei aide Santiago Caputo posted after Brazil lost to Norway, drawing an ugly line under a longstanding racial animosity in some quarters toward Argentina’s northern neighbor, with its large population of African descent.

Just as Argentina’s sclerotic state comes close to resembling the caricature that libertarians elsewhere falsely imagine government to represent, a deep (if far from universal) streak of anti-black racism pervades Argentine society. It creeps into everyday language: negro de mierda (“shitty black person”) is a common term of abuse, directed at people of all races, while quilombo, a colony of runaway slaves, some of which still exist today in Brazil, is a ubiquitous term for chaos and disorder.

A World Cup whose European squads count many non-white players, symbols of the migration of recent decades, has provided further grist for the mill. For an Argentine streaming channel aligned with Milei’s movement, “population replacement” explains Germany’s footballing decline; a provincial official belonging to his party calls France “the African team”. Milei himself recently declared that Europe’s migration policies had brought it “to the brink of extermination”. It’s an irony that a country forged, like all societies in the New World, by the collision of different peoples — indigenous, Spanish, Italian, Lebanese, Jewish, to name a few — could be held up as “conservative” on questions of immigration and national homogeneity against Europe, erstwhile land of the ethnostate.

But if Argentina’s turn to the Right has colored the way the rest of the world sees the team, it has done nothing whatsoever to puncture the love that Argentines, whatever their politics, cherish for their squad. What explains that? After all, other countries in Latin America, where the Right has lately won power, have seen political polarization tear into support for the national team. Many Left-leaning Brazilians are only now returning to old habits of wearing the jerseys and waving the flag, after Jair Bolsonaro’s movement made the yellow-and-green shirt a Right-wing uniform for the better part of a decade.

This year, the same phenomenon arrived in Colombia, when Abelardo de la Espriella — now the country’s president-elect — used the national jersey at his rallies. Espriella’s socialist rival accused him of appropriating a symbol that belonged to the nation at large, and a judge banned him from wearing the shirt, though that didn’t stop him from winning Colombia’s election last month.

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Javier Milei is no libertarian

By Yanis Varoufakis

How did Argentina, so long notorious for political grievances that creep into every corner of society, keep politics out of football? Winning is a universal balm, of course, but there is more to the story. The team does its best to stay out of politics, and has kept Milei at arm’s length as he tries to make the squad’s success his own. It helps that not everyone in the Argentine footballing world likes the changes Milei wants to make to the way football is regulated.

Evangelical Christianity, with its emphasis on morals and individual prosperity, is one force that draws players on the Brazilian and Colombian national squads toward Right-wing politicians — but the movement is relatively weak in Argentina, where Christianity has always been a feebler force than elsewhere in South America. Another key difference is that in Argentina, the political Left is dominated not by socialism, with its internationalist tendencies, but by nationalistic Peronism. The old grudge over the Falkland Islands — which resurfaced at the conclusion of last night’s match, when players raised a banner declaring the “Las Malvinas” rightfully belonged to Argentina — is nurtured almost more lovingly on the Peronist Left than on Milei’s Right, with its suspicious sympathies for Margaret Thatcher.

Ironically enough, one historical reason for this nationalistic unity has to do with immigration. As in the United States, socialism flourished in Argentina in the 19th century, but mainly as a second language, among recently arrived immigrants in an industrializing society. It was kept out of the political mainstream by an entrenched native elite, and when popular demands finally broke through decades later, they did so in a version shorn of international commitments. In this sense, Peronism in Argentina was Latin America’s answer to New Deal liberalism in the United States.

Whatever the causes, the effects are clear enough. Right-wing officials and the Peronist opposition jockey to see who can cheer the boys on louder, and no one has a second thought about donning the white and light blue. Countless Argentines who don’t share the views of Right-wing streamers see no reason why they should be associated with them. They want to bring home a fourth trophy, to suffer and celebrate as one. To be loved by your own is to disdain what the rest of the world thinks.

Although Argentina wasn’t part of the British Empire, there have long been strong ties between the countries. British investment in the second half of the 19th century largely drove the Argentine economy as it became a major global player, with most of the infrastructure — banking, railways, shipping — British-owned, and a third of its exports going to the UK. 

Culturally, it was seen as a rugged but reliable place, more akin to South Africa or Australia than to the weird, primitive mysteries of the Amazon. If you came across a minor character in a novel by P. G. Wodehouse or John Buchan whose income came from Argentine shares, he was intended as a steady kind of chap, rather than a wild speculator. If it was not actually Empire, estate agents would certainly have described it as Empire-adjacent. It took to football and rugby, even cricket — up to a point — and was on the side of the Allies in the Second World War, albeit for just five months after belatedly entering the conflict in March 1945.

By then, though, the close economic links were dissolving, damaged by Britain’s policy in the Thirties of imposing tariffs on goods coming into the Empire, and by the nationalizing of public services under Juan Perón in the Forties. But there was still a vague sense of kinship, as seen in the friendly football relations that were established. Argentina played England at Wembley in 1951, and in Buenos Aires two years later, the latter attracting a then-record crowd for the country of 91,000 spectators.

The friendliness didn’t last. The two countries met again in 1966 in a World Cup quarter-final match that was dubbed “the Battle of Wembley” in England, and “the theft of the century” in Argentina. The issue, as England saw it, was the physical aggression of the South Americans. This, said the England manager Alf Ramsey, explained a lackluster performance: “Our best football will come against the team who come out to play football and not act as animals.” Argentina, meanwhile, was raging against what it saw as a biased referee, who sent off its captain and permitted the only goal of the game — scored by Geoff Hurst — to stand, despite a suspicion of offside.

Most of the world seemed to support the Argentine position. There was talk of a South American split from FIFA, and newspapers from Italy and Czechoslovakia to Mexico and Brazil denounced “favoritism for the English team”. In Buenos Aires, the mass-circulation paper Crónica had a cartoon of the tournament mascot, World Cup Willie, dressed as a pirate, and complained that “just as the English pirates stole the Malvinas, they made a deal with the referee to sell us out”.

And there was the rub, the great stumbling block in Anglo-Argentine relations. Las Malvinas — the Falkland Islands, as Britain called them — lay some 300 miles off the coast of Argentina, and there was a long-running dispute over their ownership. They had never been inhabited by Argentinians, Britain had been in unbroken possession since 1833 and, even as the Empire was being dismantled, the couple of thousand inhabitants unanimously wished to remain British. Argentina, however, had inherited a claim on the territory when gaining independence from Spain and had never given up its demand that it be handed over. 

This meant something in Buenos Aires, though most Britons were unaware of the islands’ existence, let alone that there was any controversy. Insofar as they were known, it was probably through Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World (1932). At the end of the book, when the dissident Bernard Marx is being sent into exile, so that he might write poetry without disturbing the stability of society, he asks for the most remote, forlorn and uncomfortable conditions, the better to inspire his work, and is promptly despatched to the Falklands. Thereafter, we assume, he will never be heard of again.

When the central American state of Belize became independent in 1981, the Daily Mirror provided its readers with a list of what was left of the British Empire: Hong Kong, Gibraltar, Diego Garcia, Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Montserrat, Pitcairn, St Helena and the Turks & Caicos Islands. It forgot even to mention the Falklands. 

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There was, therefore, genuine surprise when Britain woke up on an April morning in 1982 to hear the news that Argentine troops had invaded the islands and seized control. There was even more surprise when the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, announced that a military force would be sent to evict the occupiers, should diplomatic means fail. Such resolute determination was not what the British people had come to expect of its post-imperial governments, but Thatcher saw it as a question of principle. “The people of the Falkland Islands, like the people of the United Kingdom, are an island race,” she told the Commons. “They are few in number, but they have the right to live in peace, to choose their own way of life and to determine their allegiance.”

Moreover, Argentina was then a military dictatorship, following a coup the previous year, led by General Leopoldo Galtieri. As Michael Foot, leader of the Labour Party, put it, when some of his MPs expressed reservations about the military operation: “I know a fascist when I see one.”

Ten weeks later, the Argentine forces on the island surrendered, following a successful counter-invasion. Some 900 were killed on both sides in the conflict, with a further 2,400 wounded, but Britain’s objective was achieved. At a time when public services were renowned for inefficiency, it turned out that the armed forces could still be relied upon. “We fought to show that aggression does not pay and that the robber cannot be allowed to get away with his swag,” said Thatcher in the aftermath. 

There were some dissenting voices, but that view was widely shared. In a 1986 episode of Only Fools and Horses, an expatriate South Londoner arrives in the Nag’s Head and begins running down the country: “The stench of defeat’s everywhere,” he says. “The old place has got no guts anymore.” And finally Del Boy loses his patience and his temper: “Somebody else said that a little while ago. A little jumped-up general from Buenos Aires, and if you’re not careful, you’ll get what the Argies got.”

It was also in 1986 that England and Argentina met again in the quarter-final of the World Cup, this time in the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City. It was a difficult time for English football, the very nadir of the hooligan era. The previous year, 39 fans had been killed in the Heysel Stadium disaster in the European Cup Final between Liverpool and Juventus, and English clubs had been banned from European competition as a result. That, combined with the legacy of the Falklands War, ensured that the build-up to the match was dominated by trepidation. 

The crowd was largely Mexican, with only around 10,000 fans of the two competing countries expected to be in attendance, but it was announced that there would be 20,000 police in the stadium, including armed plainclothes officers on the terraces. On one side there were banners proclaiming “Malvinas — always Argentine”, on the other a new chant: “Argentina, Argentina, what’s it like to lose a war?” The press did their bit. The Sun’s front page headline on the day of the match was “It’s War Senor!”, an angle that was mirrored in the Argentine media. It was left to the footballers to try to keep some sense of perspective. “We are not taking guns onto the field,” protested Argentina’s star player, Diego Maradona, “we are not going to shoot anyone. We are going to play football.”

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Maradona turned out to be the story of the match with two contrasting goals in the space of five minutes. The first was a blatant and deliberate handball, the second a sublime piece of dribbling that was later to be voted the Goal of the Century — countered only by a late consolation strike from Gary Lineker. “Malvinas 2, England 1,” exulted the Argentine press, adding “We blasted the English pirates”, a reference back to the 1966 match, and to the Falklands, when a Buenos Aires paper had depicted Thatcher with an eye-patch.

All this, of course, is ancient history now. Except that it’s not really. Argentina continues to lay claim to the Falkland Islands, and this week its foreign minister wrote of the “illegitimate occupation”, renewing the country’s demands for sovereignty talks. More significant, perhaps, were reports in April that Donald Trump — angered by Keir Starmer’s lack of cooperation in the war against Iran — might withdraw American support for British ownership of the islands. The British government’s response was a reassertion of the Falklanders’ right to self-determination; memories of the war loom too large for any sensible prime minister to say anything else.

Meanwhile, that first goal in the Azteca — scored, as Maradona himself said, “a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God” — has passed into English footballing folklore. “Same old Argies — always cheating.” Today’s game, the latest chapter in the saga, sees more at stake than ever: this time it’s a semi-final rather than a quarter-final. But for 60 years this has been about more than sport, and it still is, even if the mood is nowhere near as volatile as it was in 1986.

The rivalry lives on. From a British perspective, there’s something a little reassuring about it. All these years after the Empire collapsed, Britain is still seen as important enough to be denounced as imperialist aggressors. There’s not even any hint of post-colonial guilt — there was no native population on the Falklands to be slaughtered or oppressed. The lives that were lost were the consequence of invasion by a dictatorship.

Following its Falklands humiliation, Argentina reverted to democracy, and diplomatic relations with Britain were restored. The long, shared history of the two countries was soured by the episode, but it hasn’t been lost. Alongside the mutual suspicion, there’s also a mutual respect. Maradona was cast by English fans as a pantomime villain, but his genius was never doubted. His successor, Lionel Messi, is even more gifted and, lacking the street-tough aggression, inspires affection as well as admiration in Britain. At heart, it remains a family dispute.

Yes, Donald Trump may have personally intervened with Fifa to get Folarin Balogun, America’s star striker, an exception on the red card he’d earned in the previous match. But having Daddy Warbucks pull strings for your side can take an athletic effort only so far: in the end, Belgium won the game 4-1. Money and power cannot buy a World Cup. Qatar is a partial exception, but even in the case of the 2022 competition, the team got nowhere close to holding the World Cup trophy over their heads while confetti streamed down.

Corruption in Fifa, much less professional soccer, is hardly new. For years, if not decades, rumors swirled around top Italian club Juventus’s strange habit of winning games at the last minute on highly suspicious penalty decisions — suspicions vindicated by the Calciopoli refereeing scandal that, in 2006, got the club stripped of titles and relegated. 

Put aside the fact that Balogun’s red card was indeed dubious. The same could be said of numerous others, Francesco Totti’s red card against South Korea in 2002 being perhaps the most ludicrous. The injustice of the card is not the point. World Cup history is full of calls far worse, against teams with far greater chances of actually winning the competition, from countries who care infinitely more about the sport than the US, which after last night’s defeat will almost certainly return to treating football as a secondary concern. 

What made Trump’s effort to overturn Balogun’s suspension different is what it reveals about the nature of American political life. Bending the rules — and even outright cheating — is often deemed acceptable as long as it benefits “our side”. Part of American folklore is the belief that the country represents the “last best hope of earth” — a phrase that politicians of both parties still deploy, few realizing they’re borrowing from Abraham Lincoln. 

The 16th president was a man nearly everyone in the establishment still agrees represents the greatest of the American ethos. Yet Lincoln too — just like Trump — bent the rules to get his desired result. When the Southern states expressed their desire to leave the Union, Lincoln maintained that they had no such right, even though the foundational premise of the American liberal tradition is governance based on consent. To this day, that element of the Civil War remains underplayed; to even touch it risks ostracism. We are told that Lincoln used the legal mechanisms available to him to make his side, our side, prevail, and the arc of history bent toward “justice”. But who decides what “justice” really is, and therefore when the established rules and norms are acceptable to break? Those in power, obviously.

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Had Balogun matched his earlier form in the tournament and the US had won instead of Belgium, Trump’s maneuvering to clear the deck for his return would have become the story of the World Cup. In typical Trumpian fashion, he would have made a story completely unrelated to him — the US is finally good at soccer! — about him. There’s no such thing as bad press, as Trump’s notoriously ruthless consigliere Roy Cohn taught him. It’s a sentiment the President hasn’t ridden just to fame and fortune, but to two of the strangest presidential terms and some of the oddest cultural milestones in the republic’s history.

Alongside hosting MMA fights on the White House lawn, Trump must now add to his résumé exposing the truly bipartisan nature of American enthusiasm for corruption. When it was announced that Balogun’s red card was rescinded, the notoriously kneejerk Left pundits, who have made entire careers out of reflexively condemning everything the man does, all of a sudden flipped on a dime and said, more or less: in this one case, corruption and arm-twisting behind the scenes was good. Why? Because it made our side better off. Our tribe — in this case the US national team — had a better chance of winning. 

In a culture that glorifies winning and encourages its members to see the stakes of not only elections, but competitions for college admission or job placement, as existential contests that validate one’s identity, sport is the only place where shared identity is still allowed. Studies have shown that when a fan’s team wins, their testosterone spikes; researchers famously measured the effect in fans after basketball and World Cup matches. Conversely, when their team loses, cortisol surges as though the loss were personal. This occurs, psychologically speaking, because fans’ nervous systems unconsciously treat the objects of their affection not just as extensions of their own identity but, literally, as their own high-stakes competition. So, when American Leftists and other commentators suggested, as Cenk Uygur did on X over the weekend, that Trump’s corruption might be okay in this one particular instance, they were revealing how American politicos — both Right and Left — actually think. 

Put aside debates about Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was “stolen”. If you actually spend time around Democratic Party diehards, they, just like their counterparts in the GOP, will openly express admiration for cheating if it’s used to the “right” ends. Lyndon Johnson, possibly the Democratic Party’s greatest-ever legislative architect after Franklin Roosevelt, is lovingly rumored to have instructed his staff to spread rumors that an opponent had sex with farm animals simply to “make him deny it” in the press. JFK’s father flooded the 1960 primaries with vote-buying efforts, only to have Kennedy joke about the electoral purchases himself, reading from a fake telegram from his father. “Don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary,” it said. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.”

The Democrats are not alone in bending the rules in their favor. Late-20th century political operative Lee Atwater was as notorious as he was admired for his dirty-tricks campaigns against Democratic opponents. Atwater’s legacy is nearly always spoken of positively by GOP operatives. When Atwater rode the infamous “weekend prison pass” attack against Michael Dukakis — outsourcing a brutal ad to a nominally independent group, so the Bush campaign could maintain plausible deniability  — he showed us the future of America’s political present. A place where nearly every YouTube feed in the country is flooded with attacks that recklessly try to recreate some version of Atwater’s one-dimensional tarring of his Democratic rival.

But Atwater — like LBJ, JFK and, lest we forget, Tammany Hall before him — was loved by his tribe because he carried out his dirty tricks for “our” side. Presuming, of course, you have an active dog in the political race. And while more Americans than ever are disgusted with both parties, nearly everyone watching the red, white and blue on the field at the World Cup still feels the primitive pull of the national tribe.

In America, when rule-breaking delivers our tribe a win, our objection evaporates. That reflex, not Trump’s phone call, is the genuinely American thing on display. As for Belgium, they shouldn’t just have complained to the press, they should have flat-out threatened to refuse to take the field. Rule-bending for the powerful — and a public that never mobilizes to stop it — is the new American face of world football, already on full display.

But here is the thing about sport that politics can only envy. The game has a court of final appeal that no president can phone. Trump proved he could bend Fifa to his will. But he couldn’t bend the ball. Ninety minutes after the greatest rule-bending intervention in World Cup history, the beneficiary’s team was down 4-1, its goalkeeper face-down in the Seattle turf, consumed with shame, and the entire apparatus of executive pressure had ultimately purchased nothing whatsoever. The sports gods audited the books and issued their correction. Ball don’t lie.

American politics, however, has no such auditor. No ball and no net. Only the next election to be bent by whichever tribe holds the whip and a public — Right and Left — that has quietly agreed to measure every violation by a single standard. Did it help us win? 

Perhaps England’s beleaguered Protestants have just become inured. Already in the Nineties, Tony Blair was a crypto-Catholic leader, straight out of the pages of 17th-century polemic. As with the Stuart monarchs, or King Ahab, it was the wife what got him. Everyone knew that Cherie took her Catholicism seriously, and that the children were being raised in her faith. But Blair himself, across his 10 years in office, purported to conform to the established Church. He converted just months after leaving Downing Street and one needn’t be Titus Oates to suspect that he had been moving in that direction for a long time. When he prayed on the eve of the Iraq invasion, might he have been thinking unreformed thoughts?

Blair’s reticence on spiritual matters prevented him from claiming the distinction of Britain’s first Catholic prime minister. The distinction is genuinely significant, given that Britain was — and still officially is — a Protestant nation, forged in the crucible of confessional controversy. No, the accolade of being Britain’s “Catholic Obama” descends upon, of all people, Boris Johnson. He cut a different kind of early-modern figure to Blair, a reverse Henry VIII. Baptised a Catholic, he entered the Church of England while at Eton, presumably as part of the High Tory shtick he was then busy cultivating. His first two marriages were not officiated in the Catholic manner. Canon law thus exonerated him on the adultery charges; technically, in the eyes of the Vatican, the two-time divorcé was a lifelong bachelor. Reverting to his childhood faith, he was thus permitted to marry Carrie, his Anne Boleyn, at Westminster Cathedral in 2021.

And now Britain, which has never knowingly elected a Catholic Prime Minister, might soon have another. Andy Burnham was an altar boy. His power base in the Northwest always was a hotbed of Romanism. In the 17th century, Thomas Fuller described the people of western Lancashire as “Popishly affected”. When Sir Henry Spiller went to inspect the county in 1621, he found no fewer than 1,800 recusants. Far from the gaze of Protestant London, it was fertile ground for Jesuits. One priest — a cousin of Guy Fawkes — wrote in 1600 that “Catholics are so numerous that priests can wander through the villages and countryside with the utmost freedom”. Manchester, for its part, was a Jacobite stronghold; it provided the only English regiment in the 1745 rising. The Catholic identity of this part of England was bolstered further in the 19th century by an influx of Irish immigration. Even today, the Northwest remains England’s most Catholic region. If Burnham pulls off the long march from Makerfield to Westminster, he will succeed where Guy Fawkes and Bonnie Prince Charlie failed.

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Though he might have lost out on being the first Catholic Prime Minister, Burnham will be the first to be meaningfully shaped by the religion, and the first to enter Downing Street with a strong British Catholic identity. A decisive personality in his formative years was Derek Worlock, the liberal, anti-Thatcher, ecumenically-minded archbishop of Liverpool. Burnham once remarked that the “political implementation” of Worlock’s teaching was the Labour Party, which he signed up aged 15. Burnham’s politics and his Catholicism were thus always closely linked.

Burnham, like many on the Left, has nonetheless had his difficulties with the Church. In 2015 he confessed that he was struggling with its “obsession with sexuality”. He waxed nostalgic about the Catholicism of his childhood, of Archbishop Worlock and John Paul II, who visited Liverpool when he was a boy. The Church that he had grown up in was “quite forgiving… quite humane, humorous, irreverent”. Things began to sour in 2005, when Cardinal Ratzinger became Benedict XVI and brought a “more judgemental mode” to the papal chair. Yet even Ratzinger’s conservatism could not dent Burnham’s long-held belief that the purpose of the Labour Party was to do God’s work on earth. “The basic tenets of the Labour Party and socialism”, he declared during his first leadership bid in 2010, “are one and the same with those of Christianity”.

There, he was giving voice to a longstanding position within British Catholicism. Thanks to the Irish connection, a general feeling of being outsiders, and a traditional suspicion of liberal and capitalist excesses, British Catholics have tended to lean Left. Catholics have broken for Labour in almost every postwar general election. In fact, it is quite surprising that Labour has never had a Catholic leader (putting aside the special case of Blair). Several have come close: Roy Hattersley, the son of a lapsed priest, wrote a history of the Catholics in Britain; John McDonnell, though now an atheist, speaks about the impact of his Catholic upbringing on his worldview. Yet there is a tendency within Labour to view religious Catholics with suspicion. In 2020 Rebecca Long-Bailey landed in some hot water when it became known that she harbored personal views about abortion, rooted in her Catholic faith, which were at odds with those of the Party. Catholic identity — especially an Irish Catholic identity — might go along well with the modern Labour Party; Catholic beliefs, however, generally do not.

Burnham Country was not only the most Catholic part of England; it was also one of the last parts of England where religion continued to matter. It was the region of England most prone to sectarian violence. Liverpool, the city of Burnham’s birth, was the closest England had to a Glasgow or Belfast. In 1819, an Orange procession in the city caused a riot; 90 years later a Catholic procession culminated in hundreds of injuries and 50 arrests. The only Irish Nationalist MP sent to Westminster from a non-Irish constituency was Liverpool’s T.P. O’Connor. These divisions were still festering when Burnham was born. When his non-Catholic father first met the family of his Catholic mother, he was worried that confessional divides would prove an issue. Thankfully, they were able to find common ground in their shared support for Everton FC.

Football, to use that cliché about modern Britain, and Liverpool especially, is really Burnham’s religion. In 2023, reconciled with the Church of his childhood, he beamingly presented the football-mad Pope Francis with a Manchester United shirt, signed by the Argentine center-back Lisandro Martínez. His campaigning material in Makerfield makes much more reference to football than God. Burnham once said that the most important things in his life, apart from family, were “Everton FC, the Labour Party and the Catholic church — in that order”.

Is it significant that Everton is traditionally regarded as the “Catholic team” in the Merseyside derby? The idea that the rivalry between Everton and Liverpool mirrored that between Catholic and Protestant — an English “Old Firm” — seems to be a myth. Both teams can be traced to a Methodist congregation in the later 19th century; Everton’s first club president was an Orangeman. Still, the myth was widely believed when Burnham was growing up, and he subscribes to it.

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The sectarianism that supposedly once clung to the Merseyside derby, Burnham has said, may have “gone with the mists of time”: but still he has never met a Catholic priest who was a Red. The Eighties, the decade of Thatcher and the Hillsborough disaster, witnessed the formation of Burnham’s worldview, based upon a distinct Northwest identity. “In the 1986 final at Wembley” — Liverpool v. Everton — “everybody sang ‘Merseyside’”. His part of England, though divided by football and religion, finds it must unite against a common enemy: “the London media, Thatcher, the establishment”.

All this serves to give the Northwest a Left-wing, anti-establishment identity, which Burnham taps into. This identity is closely linked to the region’s historic Catholicism; and hence, Burnham’s own cultural Catholicism adds to his carefully constructed image. Cilla Black remarked in 2002 that “in Liverpool… most Protestants were Conservative and most Catholics were Labour, just as Everton was the Catholic team and Liverpool the ‘Proddy-Dog’ one”. The second of those ideas might be a fiction; the first definitely isn’t. It was due in part to strong Protestant (and anti-Catholic and anti-Irish) feeling that Liverpool was solidly Tory for much of the 20th century. When Burnham speaks as though the Northwest is uniformly Left-wing, and that Left-wing values are intrinsically Manchester (or Liverpool) values, really he is appealing to a Catholic history and identity.

Either way, England’s Protestant patriots can breathe a sigh of relief: if the Catholic conquest comes, it will not bring with it much by way of doctrine. Indeed, due largely to the triumph of social liberalism within the Labour Party, British Catholics are no longer even a reliable Labour bloc. They struggle to reconcile their conservatism with Labour policy: Long-Bailey’s struggles aside, Stella Creasy’s successful push for the partial decriminalization of abortion, and Kim Leadbeater’s unsuccessful one for the legalization of assisted suicide, were never likely to keep them red. Burnham abstained on euthanasia when he was an MP, but he appears now to lean in favor. If, as prime minister, he reopens that can of worms, we could witness something similar to various episodes from the Biden presidency, where a socially liberal Catholic leader gets into awkward public conflict with the authorities of his own Church. We might then find that a Catholic Labour prime minister does nothing to arrest the trickling away of British Catholics from the Party. The political implications here will, in any case, be narrowly intra-Catholic ones. They will be of no interest to the non-Catholic and non-religious majority. Once a Roman Catholic prime minister would have been met with cries of “No Popery!”; the striking thing today is how little anyone cares. We have become men, and put away childish things.

Hosting a World Cup normally confers an enormous advantage. The bookmakers shorten the odds on Germany, Spain, Italy, or Brazil the moment they’re handed the world’s most popular sporting tournament. Yet America’s chances currently sit at 60-1, lagging behind both Japan and Morocco — nations that have never lifted the trophy, from continents that haven’t either. Thirty years after America first staged the event, the world’s richest country is still a long shot on its own turf.

For the diehard US soccer fan, it wasn’t supposed to go this way. In the late Eighties, when FIFA first awarded the tournament to the US, the sport was routinely degraded as “un-American” by the country’s sports media. For decades, commentators had mocked it as a “girl’s sport” played by “skinny boys” too timid for the nation’s manly and militaristic alternative. Meanwhile, the rest of the planet remained equally baffled by America’s ultra-violent, heavily padded “hand-egg” offshoot of rugby.

Until recently, indeed, this mutual incomprehension gave soccer a peculiar charge inside the US itself. For Gen Xers and Millennials, the game felt rebellious and punk precisely because mainstream America neither liked nor understood the allure of fútbol. As for the dullards — so the self-flattering story went — they liked helmet-ball for its very ferocity. Before there was MAGA, there were the Nascar fans who voted for George W. Bush and stuck Dallas Cowboys decals on their lift-kit pickup trucks. They listened to Rush Limbaugh and sports-talk radio and mocked the “snowflakes” who played soccer as they planned their next study abroad trip.

As with all stereotypes, there was indeed something to these narratives. In the early 2000s and 2010s, just watching the Premiership in an American bar felt somehow like flipping conservative voters the proverbial bird. We were a different kind of America, the kind that understood the world beyond our borders. Soccer fans were the hip, educated, urban men and women who appreciated craft beers and flew Real Madrid flags in their backyards. Soccer served as a class marker and culture-war indicator long before it became a national pastime for wine moms and heavily tattooed tech bros.

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As with most of the 20th century, there was a moment when liberal America imagined all this would resolve itself in their homeland’s favor. Shortly after the US reached the quarterfinals of the 2002 World Cup — dispatching not only Mexico but also Luís Figo’s Portugal — it became fashionable to call the country the sleeping giant of world football. Reporting on wannabe American soccer hooligans in the mid-2000s, as I did early in my career, the notion that the US would eventually reach the heights of Brazil and Germany was indeed seductive.

Give the West’s largest nation a sport that was rapidly becoming its most popular youth activity, fold in tens of millions of new Central and South American immigrants, then add the presumed superiority of African-American athletes, and the US was thought to command one of the deepest soccer talent pools on Earth. Once the Bo Jacksons and Deion Sanders of the next generation chose soccer over football and baseball or basketball, so the thinking went, American dominance was destined to follow.

Yet despite the fact that it’s easier than ever to watch the big European games on American TV, this just hasn’t happened. Forget the betting odds: only the most delusional members of the “American Outlaws” club, as Team USA fans style themselves, believe their boys can so much as reach another quarterfinal, let alone lift the World Cup trophy on 19 July. Some perspective is owed here. Only eight nations have ever held the World Cup trophy, so it’s not so surprising that America has failed to crash the party. There are other problems too. The Yanks, for all their wealth and new attention to the sport, still increasingly field a squad of questionable provenance: at least five regular starters were born and raised in Europe, hold EU citizenship or dual passports, and learned the sport at European academies. Major League Soccer, for its part, may have grown from a laughing stock into a genuine business. Yet in sporting terms it remains a fifth- or sixth-tier league — one that attracts the world’s best only as a lucrative retirement home.

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Unsurprisingly, as with everything in the States, these problems come down to money. To see how, it helps to revisit the most ambitious attempt to explain American soccer’s backwardness. Back in 2001, the scholars Andrei Markovits and Steven Hellerman published Offside: Soccer and American exceptionalism framed around Werner Sombart’s famous question: “Why is there no socialism in the United States?” They argued that the same cultural forces kept football marginal. Nativistic Americans, the authors found, prefer individualistic and militaristic games that mirror the country’s political culture. The premise was sharp even if the execution was not. The book often reads as verbose and sluggish where, given the topic, it should have been as brisk as an Mbappé run down the left flank. Who could make a topic like soccer practically unreadable? Academics, that’s who.

In the early 2000s, the scholars’ thesis at least matched the evidence. Now, though, football is popular from sea to shining sea, yet the national team still languishes. Landon Donovan — the finest player the country has produced — recently put the blame on American soccer’s youth system. His complaint centers on the win-at-all-costs mentality that seemingly grips the system. Parents and coaches, Donovan argues, “get obsessed with winning just as much as the coaches do because they’ve been told that’s what’s going to get their child to college and professional — and it’s all bullshit”. In truth, of course, children don’t need to be the next Pelé in kindergarten; they just need to develop a feel for the game that scoreboards can’t reward.

It’s here where the money comes in. Youth sports in America are now a $40 billion industry — and private equity has quietly captured a great deal of it. Firms such as Juggernaut Capital have rolled up hundreds of local clubs into national conglomerates; 3STEP Sports, backed by Juggernaut, controls more than 1,500 events serving more than two million athletes a year. The tactics are the familiar ones of private-equity extraction: junk fees, long contracts, mandatory and expensive travel circuits. What was once an affordable neighborhood activity has been re-engineered into a maximum-extraction machine, with elite youth club soccer now costing many families upwards of $5,000 a year per child.

The footballing consequences are precisely what one would expect. In nearly every successful footballing nation, the sport remains rooted in working-class life: children play informally and constantly, and the most gifted are then handed to expert coaches for technical training. But just as with the country’s dysfunctional healthcare and university systems, American youth soccer puts profits and protection for entrenched bureaucrats first, and outcomes a distant second. It filters for the affluent rather than those with the most ability — the cost of participating has climbed some 46% in just a few years, and lower-income children now play high-level youth soccer at roughly half the rate of their wealthier peers — and then hands the survivors off to mediocre coaches who are rewarded for winning under-12 tournaments rather than developing players to their full potential.

Markovits and Hellerman argued that American soccer developed along totally different lines from the country’s more mainstream sports. Given the tremendous strength of US nativism, early on soccer was seen as dubiously foreign: both in origin and application. (As late as 2014, Ann Coulter was arguing that the growing popularity of soccer reflected the moral decay of the country.) Yet as that early hipster fandom implies, the opposite ended up happening. Study-abroad trips are expensive, and far from becoming a blue-collar pastime like basketball, American soccer ultimately remained the purview of white suburbanites. Though the US has grown the technical capacity to compete at international soccer, those in charge of running our youth system have optimized the program to extract maximum revenue from bougie parents — hardly conducive to honing talent.

Altogether, then, out from the dugout the real American exceptionalism emerges — the nation’s perennial institutional corruption and un-abashed mammonism. The US didn’t fail to fall in love with soccer because Americans hate immigrant games. Over the past 30 years, it did indeed fall in love with fútbol, only to then do to the game what it does to almost everything else, turning a public good into a luxury for the wealthy alone. Soccer might be a sport that’s harder to make individualistic in the way Americans are accustomed to. But, given proper time and attention, the country’s notorious knack for enterprise has found a way of making it as money-grabbingly American as the Superbowl.

A nation that demonizes politicians who promise public childcare — and that financializes childhood itself at every turn — can’t be surprised when it struggles to manufacture world-class strikers. The raw athletic talent is almost certainly lurking out there, in the immigrant neighborhoods and the public parks. It’s just that we’ve built a machine to price those kids out. Then, we wonder, every four years, why the sleeping giant never wakes.

It’s true that under severe marital pressure I once took to visiting a gym. After a year of grudgingly lifting weights and hanging like an inverted bat from wall bars, the only perceptible difference to my body was a slight increase in the circumference of my calves. So I jacked it in and returned to debauchery and six-course meals heavy in carbohydrates, all of which made me feel a lot more lithe and sprightly. Exercise can be fatal to your health. Having spent a lifetime high on various kinds of dope, Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead was arm-twisted into going to a gym, where he did a few sit-ups and promptly dropped dead.

My churlish attitude to sport is shaped by childhood experience. A sickly, waif-like creature, I was forced to play rugby at school and opted to be a winger, which meant I could race purposefully up and down the touchline avoiding the ball. Over time, I developed the technique of appearing to play rugby but not actually doing so with a virtuosity far superior to those whose heads were stuck in the scrum. At the end of a game, the captain would clap me on the back with a gruff “Well done, Eagleton”, having mistaken taking flight for taking part. Afterwards I would sleep for a day. It’s remarkable how exhausting not playing rugby can be.

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There have been moments, however, when I was proud to be mistaken for an athletic type. I was once in a swimming pool in the United States (I don’t know why, since I can’t swim) when two young boys approached me and asked “Are you a lifeguard, sir?” No doubt they needed a lifeguard present if they were to swim. I conceded rather reluctantly that I wasn’t but returned to my hotel glowing with quiet pride. Being mistaken for a lifeguard seemed second only to being mistaken for Tom Cruise.

So there’s something to be said for sport after all. In fact, it’s hard to think of a brand of popular culture which has such universal appeal as football, yet which combines this mass devotion with such magnificent displays of artistry. According to most theories of 20th-century culture, this isn’t supposed to happen. Instead, culture is sharply polarized between high and low, the former being unintelligible to the latter and the latter being contemptible to the former. Not much manages to slip over this well-policed frontier. There’s Shostakovich on the one hand and the Sun newspaper on the other. Yet football dismantles this opposition. It pulls in millions of ordinary men and women, yet also offers a dazzling display of talent which at times can touch on genius. No other cultural form can equal it in this respect.

It is, in fact, a form of secular religion, vastly more popular than the churches, with its own pantheon of saints, demi-gods, collective rituals, communal ecstasy and time-honored ceremonies. In the United States, the religious fervor surrounding sport borders on the pathological: no political speech is possible without a sprinkling of sporting metaphors. One day when I’ve nothing better to do I might find out what a slam dunk is, since it occurs about as often in American speech as the phrase “proud Americans”. (I know what a slam dunk means, but not what it is.) As for Britain, if you want to bring the place to its knees, ban all football games immediately. The result would be an outbreak of social disruption not far short of revolution. Governments would be toppled, public buildings would be razed to the ground and supporters’ clubs would take over the running of Whitehall.

In reality, football is a cunning way of heading off such turmoil, not of creating it. All ruling classes are aware that it’s not only bread but circuses that keep the common people content. Theater, pageantry and spectacle are crucial ways of keeping governments in power, siphoning off energies which might otherwise prove troublesome. Much of this today is known as television, rather as for the ancient Romans it was called gladiatorial combat; but football offers a great deal more than TV.

For one thing, it allows every plumber and taxi driver in the country to be an expert. People who might have trouble in spelling “fortuitous” can make the subtlest of judgments on whether a player is minimally off-side, or whether someone who’s playing mid-field should be moved upfront. They could also probably tell you when their club last played Everton, and what the score was. In a society for which the past is largely irrelevant unless you can package it as “heritage”, football helps to sustain the idea of tradition. You are heir to a heritage which stretches back far beyond your birth. Not many young Mancunians know who Harold Macmillan or Harold Wilson were, but a lot of them know about Matt Busby and George Best.

Football also allows people an experience of solidarity in a social order sorely lacking in it. It’s true that like many forms of solidarity, this can involve a collective hostility to others. Could there be Celtic without Rangers? But there’s more to it than that. A demonstration is a crowd of men and women united by a common goal — to drive out immigrants, for example, or protest against a war. A football crowd, like an audience at the London Philharmonic, is united simply by a shared love of what they’re witnessing, and that affection is intensified by the knowledge that thousands of others are feeling it too. It’s true that a lot of players are grotesquely overpaid, but many of them would probably want to do what they do even if they weren’t so grossly over-recompensed, which is more than you can say about sausage manufacturers.

Football is a form of collective celebration which includes an appreciation of the individual — of the defensive agility of one player or the strategic sense of another. Besides, football clubs can be the focal point of local identity, in the way that supermarkets or the town hall can’t be. Even those who’ve never been to a game in their lives may well see the club as in some way symbolic of their city. All this, to be sure, has been much diminished by the absorption of the sport into corporate capitalism, a scandal which has politicized many an outraged fan. The obvious solution is that clubs should be owned and controlled by their patrons, not by avaricious overseas businessmen who wouldn’t know a free kick from a throw-in.

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When did I last go to a soccer game? Maybe 70 years ago. I haven’t ever played the game myself, since as I began by saying I have principled moral objections to physical exercise. If others want to shorten their lives by chasing a ball, doing 50 press-ups a day or indulging in other potentially suicidal activities, that’s up to them. This isn’t a popular view in a society which makes a fetish of the body. We live in a culture in which you bear your body around with you like a sickeningly fragile piece of china which might shatter at any moment. In a postmodern world in which people insist on being themselves, one treats the body as though it were someone else’s. One thinks of the unctuous Mr Pecksniff of Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit, warming his hands at the fire as benevolently as if they belonged to a friend. It’s a self-alienation implicit in the phrase “to put something in your body”, as if it were an icebox or a paper bag. You mustn’t put a vaccine in your body, for example, even if failing to do so may inflict a painful death on others. Having to take an aspirin can trigger a panic attack in some young people. A meal becomes as complex, potentially as lethal an operation as defusing a landmine. Judiciously selected items are occasionally placed in the body with scrupulous care, an activity once known as eating. We become custodians of our bodies, attending to their every whim like those of some imperious aunt or querulously demanding pet.

Postmodern bodies also demand their own sealed-off spaces. It’s a far cry from the libidinal riot of medieval carnival, where it could prove hard to say where one body ended and another began. Some people today say “excuse me” if they come within five yards of you. Smoking is forbidden not only because it can kill you but because smoke violates other people’s space. It constitutes a lethal, almost invisible link between them. It won’t be long before we walk around zipped up in astronaut suits and communicating only by radios built into our helmets. Hygiene is a posh word for not interacting with others. In this context, football reminds us of the other meaning of the word “body”, namely a mass of men and women who assemble together either for some practical purpose or just for collective enjoyment. It’s the people’s theater or concert hall. Which doesn’t mean that I’ll be watching the Champions League any time soon…

The match against Gillingham’s Hollands & Blair was not yet 10 minutes old, and didn’t seem destined to be a classic. But the Fisher faithful, whose side plays in the Southern Counties East Football League Premier Division — the ninth tier of the English pyramid — had not come to berate the players for the absence of overlapping wing play. They were there to support their club. Over the next 80 minutes, the team’s most vociferous supporters huddled together in the Dockers’ End, a small stand-cum-shelter behind the goal, its name a nod to the local area’s role in London’s once-booming shipping trade. As they watched, they belted out “When the Fish Go Swimming In”, their briny homespun chant.

Fisher ended up beating Hollands & Blair courtesy of a second-half penalty. But I got the sense the fans would have been just as happy, as they walked back up Brunel Road to the Overground, if they’d been hammered 5-0. Nor are they alone. From Mousehole AFC on the Cornish coast to Northumberland’s Blyth Spartans, gaggles of supporters brave summer sweat and winter snow, as well as some truly dreadful football, to cheer on their sides with a pint and a smile. Taken together, in fact, non-league football offers the perfect antidote to the petty tribalism and disenchantment of big-time fandom — and, perhaps, offers a path forward for society after the final whistle blows.

Non-league football is enjoying a moment. Average attendances in the National League South and the Isthmian Premier Division — levels six and seven of the pyramid, where most clubs are semi-professional — stood at 1,221 last season: up 134% from a decade earlier. Fisher, whose average crowds grew 13.9% in 2024-5, registered its highest ever attendance last November ,when 423 supporters filed through the stadium’s single turnstile to see the team take on Faversham Town. The depth of support in Britain’s football league pyramid is also impressive when compared against other similarly football-mad countries. In Spain, to give one example, the average attendance for the top team in the fourth tier of Spanish football is a mere 852.

The most obvious explanation for England’s non-league boom is the growing sense of fan disenfranchisement with elite football: namely the Premier League, where ticket prices continue to skyrocket. Manchester United’s announcement last season that it would increase match-day tickets for members from £40 to £60, and scrap concessions, as part of a cost-cutting exercise by its petrochemical magnate owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe, was met with protests outside Old Trafford. Leeds faced the same backlash after introducing a 14% markup for its lowest-rate adult rates.

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The malaise also extends to the lower divisions. In the Championship, to give one example, Middlesbrough has faced criticism after increasing its top season ticket price to over £780. “What’s bred such disillusionment in the professional game is the ripping off of supporters,” Fisher’s secretary Jim Maycock tells me over a cup of tea, as we sit in the team’s empty clubhouse one weekday afternoon. “We’re trying to do the opposite. We just don’t see it as something we should be making money out of. We’re here for people to have somewhere to come and enjoy a game of football with their friends and family.” Fair enough: a Fisher’s season ticket will set you back a mere £100, with match-day admissions for adults capped at £8. Children under 16 get in free.

In truth, though, Fisher’s success rests on more than pounds and pennies. Football, after all, often sells itself on the romantic notion that it’s the game of the people: that the clubs would be nothing without their fans. And if that sentiment feels less-and-less relevant at the top, at Fisher it’s literally the case. Formed as a phoenix club out of the ruins of Fisher Athletic — a small team that bobbed about in the minnow leagues for several decades, before going bust in 2009 — it operates as a supporter-run cooperative. Members have a direct vote on who makes up the club’s board, which is responsible for everything from appointing the manager to picking the kit. In fact, Fisher is one of several fan-run clubs operating further down the footballing pyramid. Some were formed in protest at the unscrupulous dealings of their owners, such as FC United of Manchester, which appeared in 2005 following Manchester United’s takeover by the much-loathed Glazers. Others are minority supporter-owned, where fans collectively own a slice of the team’s shares through a fund or trust.

That sense of local ownership is a far cry from the creeping ugliness found elsewhere in the beautiful game: from the endless corporate sponsors to  the sight of children in kits emblazoned with the names of shady betting firms and state-owned Middle Eastern airlines. Then there are those soulless converted retail parks and parking lots that increasingly pass for modern stadiums. “The quality of elite football is probably higher than it was, say, 30 years ago,” says Neil Fredrik Jensen, a football analyst and author, “but the game has never felt less attractive because it’s so corporatized and polarized.” Fans, Jensen adds, are just “customers” now.

Spend an afternoon at Fisher’s and corporate sterility feels a long way off. In the clubhouse, a melange of regulars mingles with groundhoppers clutching matchday programs and pin badges for their collections. During my visit, the bar was doing a roaring trade in beer from a local brewery, and milky cups of tea. At half-time, a makeshift hospitality area was assembled for dignitaries from Hollands & Blair, who stood chatting around a small table piled high with coronation chicken sandwiches and Jammie Dodgers.

All the while, the steel and glass monoliths of Canary Wharf loomed large across the Thames, sparkling like polished diamonds in the sun. From Rotherhithe’s bend of the river, Britain’s financial heartland feels almost close enough to touch. Yet amid the no-frills surroundings of the Dockers’ End, it might as well have been an image beamed in from some distant universe. Beyond the bar-room banter, indeed, non-league football offers authenticity on the pitch as well. Unlike at the big stadiums, you can hear the thwack of the ball, and the crunching tackles, and the corner flags fluttering in the wind.

Free from the clutches of international television networks — which dictate that Premier League weekend games must take place either just after midday or late in the evening — the traditional 3pm kick-offs are also still upheld on Saturday afternoons. “That’s a huge thing that’s worked in our favor,” Maycock explains. “There’s none of these 8pm kick-offs where you end up getting home at midnight. Fans can come and watch us play knowing they can be back home for tea and Strictly or whatever.”

That sense of gentility — of integrating sport into the normal rhythms of life — is arguably also encouraged by the comparatively low stakes. The furious tribalism rife in higher levels of the English game, often not relevant to any real historical enmity between clubs, but a confection borne out of Sky Sports’ marketing departments, is rare at the non-league level. That conviviality makes it appealing to young families, much like women’s football has seen an influx of supporters grateful for an alternative to the toxicity that often accompanies male fixtures. “Non-league crowds have definitely changed,” says Jensen. “There was a time when they were almost entirely made up of men in their 50s with a passion for real ale and trains. Now, it’s much more about families.”

There are other reasons to watch too, for watching non-league football can sometimes be a portal to the bizarre. Where else would you find matches postponed as a result of sheep invasions and Canadian Geese droppings? Where else might an unsuspecting fan be prevailed upon to undertake linesman duties because the official went missing, as one Fisher fan was obliged to do a couple of seasons back?

Not that this amateurishness should take away from the sheer effort that goes into running the clubs and making the match days happen, often solely dependent on volunteers. When I meet Maycock, he had just spent the morning mending a fence and descaling the showers. “It can be hard work,” agrees Richard Davies, treasurer of Welsh semi-pro side Taff’s Well FC, and who also happens to be my brother. “And it’s not just match days. It’s marking out the pitches, cutting the grass, stocking the bar, washing kits. But we all chip because it’s for the good of the club. There are still those working-class values that you don’t see at the big clubs anymore.”

Of course, non-league football is not always a bastion of bliss. Jensen recently witnessed racist abuse while watching his beloved Hitchin Town. Concerns have also been raised over whether some of the jerry-built grounds, however charming they may seem, are truly fit for purpose. In September, one player died after colliding head-first with a concrete wall bordering the pitch at Wingate & Finchley.

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But such tragedies are rare. And besides, what non-league football ultimately offers, above all else, is that elusive sense of connection, whether with one’s fellow fans or indeed with the players themselves. Fisher’s players, Maycock tells me, can often be found in the clubhouse after home matches mingling with supporters over pizza. “Even the referee,” he adds, “will come in for a slice.” Instagram may have made Premier League players appear more accessible than ever, but your chances of sharing a Capricciosa with Erling Haaland remain slim.

Yet if non-league attendances are on the rise, Premier League fans continue to display an impressive following. For all the grousing over being exploited, the waiting lists for season tickets remain long. Despite the team’s ongoing problems on the pitch, the current queue for season tickets at Manchester United exceeds 120,000: with some fans set to wait 25 years for their slot. Average shirt prices across the league’s 20 teams last season crept up to £73, meanwhile, but that proved no deterrent to merchandise-hungry fans, with Liverpool generating $1.8 billion in kit sales alone.

We are unlikely, then, to see minnows like Fisher entirely supplant the bigger clubs in fans’ affections. Maycock still holds a candle for Brentford from his native West London. My brother’s first love remains Cardiff City. And while Wrexham’s ascendancy from non-league obscurity to the Championship, under the celebrity ownership of Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, may have captured imaginations and gained it an international fanbase, it’s worth remembering that the North Wales club has an established history dating back to the 1860s. Its stadium, the Racecourse Ground, is among the oldest on Earth. Wrexham’s status as a “sleeping giant” therefore made it ripe for a renaissance of the sort that most non-league teams could only dream of. Not that the minnows really care: they’re just happy to exist, sustained by peak attendances and the hope, some day, of a televised run in the early rounds of the FA Cup.

All this is also a reminder of Terry Eagleton’s tart assessment of football as the “crack cocaine” of the masses, which he speculated was part of a capitalist plot to suppress appetite for political change. That bread-and-circuses theory might raise some eyebrows, but the fact remains that the sport holds enormous sway over people in Britain in a way other pastimes don’t. When cricket moved from terrestrial television to Sky in 2006, it lost its place in the national conversation overnight, as armchair fans weren’t ultimately prepared to pay.

You could never imagine that happening with football, even for tiny teams like Fisher FC. My most recent visit was for a cup game against Bridon Ropes from Greenwich. It was an early September evening, Canary Wharf now twinkling bright against the dusk. As Fisher eased to a 4-0 win, I noticed a bear of a man in a tracksuit, cooing at a baby and with a side-eye on the game. It was Fisher’s manager Ajay Ashanike. He briefly paused to bark some instructions into a mobile phone to his assistant in the dugout across the pitch — “tell them not to get complacent and take pride in a clean sheet, yeah?” — before returning to the more pressing duty of peekaboo.

Few other observers have kept their counsel in the run-up to Aston Villa’s home tie with Maccabi Tel Aviv. Pundits have drawn attention to the Maccabi fans’ previous misbehavior, others have raised concerns that the same fans will be unsafe in what is seen as a partisan city. Most have agreed that the match would not be untroubled if Maccabi fans turned up. Seeing political opportunity, in September, a local MP, the pro-Gaza independent Ayoub Khan, called for the match to be canceled. Then, amid rising concern, local policing bureaucrats banned Maccabi fans from attending the game — citing safety reasons. Amid commentariat fury at perceived antisemitism, Keir Starmer called the ban “the wrong decision”, and his government said it would find resources with which to get fans to the match safely. Birmingham was suddenly the focus of a furious row about ethnic strongholds and ancient hatreds.

Small wonder, then, that Villa Park has also become a magnet to provocateurs, with the pro-Gaza former mayoral candidate Akhmed Yakoob, a self-promoting lawyer who faces a trial over money laundering, holding court in a Villa shirt. Inevitably, Tommy Robinson, too, has hinted he might pitch up for the game. But while the political class has been trying to play this game to its own advantage, the residents are touchy. It wasn’t just the security guards. “Mate, I’m not speaking about that,” said one man on a smoke break near the stadium.

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Birmingham Perry Barr, Khan’s constituency, is particularly economically vulnerable, with people struggling to put food on the table; the city’s financial woes, meanwhile, have left rats picking over the piled-up bin bags. But such quotidian issues have been drowned out by Khan and his ilk allowing the match to become the platform for their Gaza-sympathetic stance. They’ll feel supported institutionally, since UEFA has recently considered banning Israeli teams from competition, and the UN concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. This does play locally, too. Aston has a large Muslim population: over 73% in 2021. And, according to a recent poll, one in four British Muslims rates Israel-Palestine as their most important election issue. Venture down the main Aston High Street and this would seem to be reflected in the sea of anti-Zionist signs and thickets of pro-Palestine heraldry. But Kefentse Dennis, a former local councilor with a pro-Gaza stance, worries that this increased flagging isn’t entirely local or organic. Activists are imposing their politics on the locals, he suggests. “Food on the table is more important here,” he tells me. And the match has become about more than football because Khan, as he sees it, is part of “a political class”.

All told, then, the area is more complex, than some far-off commentators, might assert. Shopkeepers of South Asian heritage run the off-licenses, takeaways and shops that service fans. “I love the football guys,” beams one in a Villa-branded takeaway. And though Palestinian flags fluttered by the Witton Arms, the old-school Villa boozer, broadly the fans think politics and football should be separate.

In any case, it’s not just Palestine flags you notice when walking around Aston. There are Union flags and St George’s crosses too — something that national reporting has overlooked. The whole flagging trend started in the poorer, whiter suburbs of South Birmingham and while it could be a sign of rising sectarianism here, it is also true that flags of any stripe, Palestine or St George, are becoming symbols of disillusionment. “People are sick and tired,” Dennis told me. “They don’t get to feel pride at being British,” he adds. “Flags have given them something to do.”

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Dennis also contends that the reputation of the Maccabi fan base complicates the allegations of antisemitism. In fact, many in the local Jewish community supported the ban along with the police. While it is true that, since October 7, Jew hatred has soared across the West Midlands, it is unavoidable that the Maccabi fans have previous. Notwithstanding the clashes in Amsterdam, in Israel, police have recently had to intervene in their matches. Not long after the fans were banned from attending the game in Aston, the police called off a Maccabi match in Tel Aviv after violent rioting. You might forgive the police for being cautious — just two years ago, almost 50 officers were injured in clashes with visiting Polish soccer fans. They’re aware of the potential on-the-ground danger for both locals, themselves and potential visiting Jewish fans.

In the end, though, it was Maccabi themselves who chose not to bring fans. Late last month, the club said it would not accept its allocation of away tickets. In a statement, it said that “a toxic atmosphere has been created which makes the safety of our fans wishing to attend very much in doubt”. Closer to home, Ruth Jacobs, a representative for the Jewish Representative Council for Birmingham and the West Midlands, confirmed that the Jewish community were kept in the loop regarding police thinking on the match but the incident has been “frustrating, irritating and sad”. “It should have never come to this,” she says.

With or without Maccabi fans there, the police will have work to do —  over 700 officers, will be drafted in. Hours before the match, a pro-Palestine protest is set to take place, with demands for Israeli teams to be banned from international soccer competitions altogether. And local pro-Palestine activists have voiced concern that “bored, masked youths” might decide to cause trouble. “There are worries that this then confirms the pre-emptive media narrative,” Dennis added.

Perhaps for that reason, this is now a city on the defensive. Ayoub Khan, chatty last month, refused to speak to me. Days before the match, his predecessor, Khalid Mahmood was at first happy to speak, and then simply ghosted me. The police didn’t want to get caught up in politics again.

I understand why locals might have a distaste for probing journalists. Muslims, Jews, and Aston as a whole have all been used to justify grand narratives of some sort. Nuanced safety concerns, the truth of community and grinding economic realism are secondary in angry national debates.

Indeed, poorer North Birmingham suburbs have all proved useful for the type of media criticism we’ve seen building around the Villa match. Robert Jenrick turned up nearby, claiming no white faces could be seen. In nearby Erdington, a majority-white area, a Telegraph reporter found a community that didn’t feel like a community because, as she told it, of rising migrant numbers. Damned be the facts of the matter.

But this national weaponizing of local issues has already dealt a powerful blow to a place which will be left reeling long after the final whistle is blown and Westminster loses interest. Politicos in London won’t have to deal with the reverberating tensions, but locals will.

Back home, in Israel, she led the singing at her beloved Maccabi Tel Aviv’s Bloomfield stadium, telling the crowd how, during the darkest days, soccer helped her. “When I heard in captivity on the radio that we won the championship,” she said, “I screamed even when I wasn’t allowed to.” And when the remaining hostages were released this week, the brothers Gali and Ziv Berman immediately put on their yellow and blue Maccabi shirts and asked the rescuing helicopter to fly over Bloomfield before taking them to hospital. Soccer is often about much more than just soccer.

The decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from their Europe League match against Aston Villa at Villa Park next month is similarly about far more than just soccer. It’s about antisemitism. The group responsible for issuing safety certificates for the game has decided that the risk of violence against traveling Jewish fans is just too high. The Birmingham police have agreed that they cannot guarantee their safety, and that Maccabi fans shouldn’t be allowed to come. This comes barely weeks after Keir Starmer promised “this is a country that stands up to hatred”. And on Thursday, the day the West Midlands Police announced their own inability to deal with a threat to Jewish fans, the Prime Minister was still insisting: “I will do everything in my power to guarantee Jewish communities the security they deserve.”

And yet the Birmingham police have decided that they can’t. Small wonder so many Jewish people are now asking themselves whether they have a future in this country. Emily Damari has said she is “shocked to my core with this outrageous decision to ban me, my family and friends from attending an Aston Villa game. I do wonder what exactly has become of UK society. This is like putting a big sign outside the stadium saying ‘No Jews allowed’. What has become of the UK where blatant antisemitism has become the norm.”

Aston Villa proudly supports No Room for Racism and players still take the knee ahead of kick-off before each fixture “to show their unity against racial discrimination”. Elsewhere on their website, Aston Villa boasts of its righteous history standing up to antisemitism. Under the headline “Villa says No to the Nazis” you can read the story of a series of events in May 1938. On 14 May, at a packed Olympic Stadium in Berlin, the English national team defeated Germany 6-3. The game began with a rendition of God Save the King and the Nazi anthem, the Horst Wessel song. To a stadium swathed in swastikas, the English team were pressured by the Foreign Office and their policy of appeasement to join in the Nazi salute, a direction with which they dutifully complied.

The following day, Aston Villa played in front of 110,000 fans at the same stadium. Some say that the Villa team bravely refused to perform the Nazi salute, indeed that is the narrative told on Villa’s website. But the truth is they did salute at the beginning of the match and while they failed to follow protocol at the end of the fractious game, there is little indication that this was due to dissent; it’s more likely that they just forgot, given that in their following match in Dusseldorf, the Villa players once again raised their arms to Sieg Heil. It would be nice to tell ourselves the story that the British stood up to Nazi antisemitism from the very beginning, but that’s not quite the reality. Meanwhile, at the match against Maccabee, Villa players will be taking the knee against racism inside the stadium, while outside there is, in effect, a bloody great big sign proclaiming Judenrien.

The current tacit policy of appeasement towards those who would ban Jews from our streets is just as disgraceful. Under the guise of public safety, a number of our MPs have celebrated this pathetic decision from the police. “Maccabi Tel Aviv should not even be playing within this international competition,” said Ayoub Khan, the independent MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, who started a petition to ban Jewish Maccabi fans from  his city. “Next, UEFA must ban all Israeli teams,” wrote independent MP Zarah Sultana.

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“Thank you all who put the safety of Aston Villa fans, Birmingham residents and the British public above the Zionist and political pressure to let Israeli hooligans run riot in our country,” said the independent MP Iqbal Mohamed. Zionist pressure? Why not just come out and talk of a Jewish lobby that controls the world?

The West Midlands police are now doing their level best to prove Robert Jenrick right. Last month, the Shadow Secretary of State for Justice was rightly condemned for his comments about parts of Birmingham having a problem with racial integration. Decisions like this will only fan the flames of those who argue that immigration has changed the nature of the UK for the worse. Personally, I don’t want that argument to win. But the Chief Constable of the West Midlands is making things so much harder.

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This Sunday, the Tel Aviv derby will take place: Maccabi Tel Aviv versus Hapoel Tel Aviv at the Bloomfield Stadium, which both teams share. My Israeli family are all passionate Hapoel supporters. We are red, Maccabi are yellow and blue. I don’t suppose we will win. We haven’t beaten them in years. But the atmosphere will be characteristically intense. I won’t repeat what we sing about them, nor about what they sing about us. But it’s no worse than what I hear at the Chelsea. And it’s true that a number of them — the so-called Maccabi fanatics in particular — are no angels. In Amsterdam in 2024, after a match against Ajax, several Macabbi fans tore down a Palestinian flag from a local building and chanted “fuck the Arabs”. Later, five Maccabi fans were taken to hospital and dozens were injured. Prison sentences followed for those who attacked the Maccabi fans. But all this is hardly unusual. In November 2023, at Villa Park, there was a riot at the Europa League match against the Polish club Legia Warsaw, described by the West Midlands police as “some of the worst UK football disorder in decades”. Forty people were arrested, and Legia fans were banned from five consecutive away matches. Yes, there was disorder in Ajax but that was not dissimilar to what goes on at Villa Park.

I have been to a football match before where the away supporters had been banned from the stadium because of safety fears. As it happens, it was in Jerusalem, and the away fans were the Arab team, Bnei Sakhnin. It was ridiculous. The Beitar Jerusalem ultras chanted abuse at rows of empty seats. The Israeli authorities should have done better, and so should we. and so should we. Aston Villa and the local police are not taking the knee to support anti-racism. They are taking the knee to the mob instead of standing up to it.

If the police refuse to protect Jews when watching football, one day they won’t protect them from going to school or walking the streets. This decision is a national disgrace.

That’s not quite the whole of it. After the Munich air crash, which I’d learned about in the school showers after gym, I got teary and possessive whenever United won anything. I’m not sure that either of these is a good reason for supporting a team, but then what is?

The game itself, whoever was playing, did not engage me once genius dribblers with low centers of gravity, like George Best, went out of fashion and commentators talked of “man-to-man marking”. Football as chess wasn’t as good, in my view, as chess as chess. The board grew congested. Players fouled one another professionally and would rather pass the ball than score. They made pretty patterns but didn’t stir the heart.

The game grew too rich for risk, and too international — every team a band of sponsored mercenaries from somewhere else. In what sense, as the money rolled in, was Manchester United Mancunian? And if sport in general lost its local roots, so too did it become more and more disconnected in ambition and technology from its origins in communal play. Tennis has become marvellously refined, but I no longer go to bed crying after a match as I did when Drobný defeated Rosewall in 1954 because I wanted both of them to win. Do I imagine that they each had only one racket? Djokovic, who breaks his back carrying a bag of hundreds, is an extraordinary player, but for years he has looked overstrung, as though every tendon in his body is about to snap. Yes, that makes him worth the cost of admittance, but the joy of winning seems, for him, to have long outstripped the joy of playing.

Call me a sentimentalist, but — speaking as a spectator — I miss the sport of sport. Players and athletes can become too good. It’s said of some writers that they tune language so finely that it becomes a barrier to communion. And so it is with sport, the commonality of recreation mortgaged to the madness of making history and money. Being the best. Being the best ever. Ought there not to be some faith kept with our first impulse to put up a net across the street and hit balls for the fun of it?

No, I am not going to say I enjoy women’s football because its players are less professional than the men. I love it because it has so far retained the original exuberance of play. This is not to damn with faint praise. Quite the opposite. What the women’s game shows is that exhilaration and skill can co-exist. Gusto and flair are no more second-rate qualities than the cynical lethargy of the men’s game is evidence of its superiority. I’m not going to call it innocence, because in a world of over-sophistication that sounds like condescension; but by keeping us in touch with why we played any game when we were young, the joy we experienced in discovering our skills (supposing we had any), women footballers narrow the distance between performer and spectator — even as they do things that at last we never could. This is what makes the Lionesses, whose flair and gusto would seem to be unmatched in the women’s game, so thrilling to watch.

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In their victories over Sweden and Italy they defied likelihood and, at times, justice, by an extraordinary combination of adroitness and ineptitude, messing up wave after wave of attacking verve with sloppiness and inaccuracy — only to land the coup de grâce at last with a deadly sharpness that any footballer would envy.

I don’t doubt there was method in those relentlessly attacking waves. More method still would probably get them off to better starts. But if coming from behind is what they do best, we should salute it. Never giving up is a species of artistry too. And whatever else, it keeps us on the edge of our seats.

“Finding a way to win” is how the Lionesses describe what they do. And to say they do that with resilience and energy is to underrate their invention. Not impossibly, that resilience and invention will fail them in the final. Whichever team they play will be better organized than they are. The Lionesses, I heard a commentator say, are not so good at “keeping their shape”. The phrase sent a cold chill through me. Shape. Woman-to-woman marking. An intimation of the future in which women’s football will, like the men’s game, have its spontaneity and vitality drilled out of it

So we must delight in the Lionesses while they are still wild.

Whether people will actually turn up to watch almost feels like a minor concern alongside the potential ramifications for football and its place in politics. Since 1960, the South American club champions have been playing their European counterparts for a de facto world title. Since 2000, Fifa, the global governing body, recognizing the hold Uefa, the European confederation, has over the elite level of the club game, has been trying to expand that. Cue the Club World Cup: an annual seven-team competition in which a single European side played a maximum of two games. It was done in 10 days, and nobody in Europe paid much attention. So why the massive expansion? The only reason is Fifa’s attempt, in its eternal struggle with Uefa, to increase its influence over the club game and access some of the revenues it generates.

On the face of it, the Club World Cup might seem like a great idea: the globe coming together in sporting celebration. Except we already have such a thing: the World Cup, a tournament for national sides, and which works because there is a rough equality. Since nations have to use the talent allotted to them by geography, rather buying up the best talent from around the world, Senegal can beat England whereas a Senegalese club side would have next to no chance against a Premier League titan. A Club World Cup might have made sense half a century ago, but now the gulf between rich and poor is so vast that mismatches are inevitable.

It’s not just the fans who are unconvinced. Only six months ago, the tournament didn’t have a broadcast partner. Then in February, DAZN, Len Blavatnik’s media company, which has posted losses of at least $1.3 billion every year since 2019, summoned $1 billion to buy the global rights. Given Fox had offered only $10 million for the US rights, that seemed a vast sum. Coincidentally, a few days later, Surj, a company owned by the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), announced a $1 billion investment in DAZN. Two months earlier, after a bidding process widely regarded as flawed, Saudi Arabia was confirmed by Fifa as the host of the 2034 World Cup. Last week, the Saudi PIF and Qatar Airways were confirmed as Club World Cup partners. It’s fair to say it’s highly unusual for major sponsorship deals like that to be agreed less than two weeks before the start of a competition. After all, these are entities owned by the governments of Qatar (World Cup hosts in 2022) and Saudi Arabia (World Cup hosts in 2034), underwriting a Fifa project whose commercial viability has become increasingly doubtful.

Players are already protesting about how many games they are expected to play, but Fifa is determined to press on, for the political gain and the revenues that may in future accrue. The only gap in the football calendar today — at least from a European point of view, and Europe is where the bulk of football’s money is — is in odd-numbered summers, when there is no men’s World Cup or Euros (the Copa América, the South American championship, runs concurrently with its European equivalent). The fact that players and fans (and journalists) find those odd-numbered summers a useful rest-period, perhaps even necessary, clearly means little to football’s administrators.

And in any case, it’s not actually a free summer. Already, Liam Delap, an emerging star of last season’s Premier League campaign, has been forced to withdraw from the England squad for the Under-21 Euros to play for Chelsea in the Club World Cup, while the tournament can’t but deflect attention from the Women’s Euros.

There is then an issue of qualification, which has edged towards the gimmicky even before the tournament has begun. The World Cup has an established process that goes on for a couple of years before the tournament. But qualification for the Club World Cup is by performance in various other competitions. Real Madrid, Manchester City and Chelsea, for instance, are there as the last three winners of the Uefa Champions League. Al-Ain, Urawa Red Diamonds and Al-Hilal are there as winners of the Asian equivalent.

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But at this point, Fifa runs into a problem. You can’t have a team win a league in May and then join a tournament two weeks later. So Fifa is about to kick off a Club World Cup, a competition that at least on some level is about determining the best team in the world, without the reigning champions of England, Spain or Italy, who, arguably, are already at the top of the global game.

Yet once again, it’s hard to avoid the sense that finance trumps integrity. Consider the situation in the US. Here, the season follows a league format followed by playoffs to determine the champion. As Club World Cup hosts, the US gets one additional qualifying slot. It had been assumed that it would go to the overall champion, but Fifa had left enough ambiguity in the protocols that when Messi’s Inter Miami finished top of the table, they were confirmed as qualifiers. For marketing reasons, Fifa had to ensure the presence of Messi, still a great box-office draw. It was just as well that they did, given Inter Miami promptly lost in the playoffs to unfancied Atlanta United.

Messi, though, wasn’t enough. The organizers wanted more. An additional transfer window has been introduced to allow clubs to sign players for the start of the competition. That has two benefits when it comes to marketing the tournament. There is always a glimmer of intrigue, as in pre-season games, in seeing a new signing at his new club, assessing how he fits in: what will Trent Alexander-Arnold be like at Real Madrid?

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But the new window also created the possibility of short-term loans. In the end, Cristiano Ronaldo, now 40 and playing in the Saudi league for Al-Nassr but still a huge celebrity, will not be at the tournament, but there were talks about finding him a club, trailed by the Fifa president Gianni Infantino in an interview with the influencer iShowSpeed.

But there’s something even more concerning going on here: the prize money. The $1 billion pot (coincidentally the exact amount of the Saudi PIF’s investment in DAZN, and the exact amount DAZN paid for broadcasting rights) will have a major distorting effect on local leagues, a significant amount particularly when clubs are scrambling to meet the thresholds for Profit and Sustainability Rules. But that is nothing compared to the impact in, say, Argentina, where Boca Juniors and River Plate will each make a minimum of £11.25 million in geographically weighted appearance money; each of the two league champions in Argentina each season receives just £370,000 in prize money. Boca and River are being handed a mammoth advantage for the next few years — which should secure future qualification for the Club World Cup, a permanent seat on the carousel of cash. Auckland City, meanwhile, play in the Dettol Northern League for clubs in the north of New Zealand’s North Island, where player expenses are capped at £70 a week. They will receive £2.56 million even if they lose every game.

So Fifa is staging a tournament that could effectively ruin domestic leagues as functioning competitions. The Club World Cup could finally release Europe’s stranglehold on the club game and lead to a cadre of superclubs too big for their domestic leagues. And if that cadre decided their future lay not in domestic competition but in a global superleague, that would suit Fifa rather well. But is that good for football? Why would anybody care about that?

Every football fan will tell you that their stadium is a special place. But in an era when the Premier League is dominated by Gulf petrostates, American billionaires and sportswashing autocracies, the 133-year-old Goodison Park stands out. Its old wooden seats and rickety stands, thronging with an aggressive Scouse crowd, distill the mood of a world-gone-by, a throwback, a museum-piece of an old game and an older culture.

The Grand Old Lady juts suddenly upwards from a sea of low-rise, red-brick Victorian terraces. The match-day turnstiles adjoin narrow residential streets, drawing fans into blue-tinged, cramped urban corridors and tunnel-like choke points around strip-lit bars where passing pedestrians jostle with smokers drinking out of plastic cups and Elton John covers belt out of the speakers. Goodison has the highest proportion of season ticket holders as match-day attendees in the league, meaning the crowds are still made up mainly of locals who go to every home game, often down several, usually patrilineal, generations.

The walk to a home game induces a feeling of old-time coziness, like entering a Lowry print — a portal to a different age which doesn’t end inside the ground. We Toffees still welcome a “Toffee Girl” in milkmaid fancy dress to throw sweets into the crowd on match-days as part of an old club tradition. Navigating most of the four stands involves narrow caverns, with fans crammed like sardines towards laughably outdated bars with only a small hope of being served a warm lager or a Bovril before the second half.

But no more. The stands will fall silent for the last time on Sunday after a final match against Southampton — at least until the promised move of Everton’s women’s team gives the ground a renewed feel, and a new, much-welcome but probably more subdued lease of life. Having spent almost a decade under the disastrous stewardship of an Iranian oil magnate, who many said to have been the pawn of a sanctioned Russian oligarch, the club will move to a brand new stadium on the Liverpool waterfront under new ownership in time for the 2025-26 season.

For a while, Everton FC has been as integrated into the globalized, contemporary cash nexus as any other top-flight club, just without being particularly good at operating this new, transnational business model to its advantage. Rather than building patiently upwards with sensible signings of unknown talent from far afield, the boardroom cowboys attempted to short-circuit the game via botched investments in overpriced and aging players, not to mention a superstar manager tasked with leapfrogging us to success. All the while, the structures of the club were corrosively undermined as the owner involved himself in transfer business over the heads of coaches and directors of football. But now, we have just been bought by a film mogul. Dan Friedkin, the new owner, was also Tom Hardy’s Dunkirk stunt pilot, and so will be familiar with our habit of spinning certain inglorious episodes as evidence of the superior spirit of plucky warriors turning things around against the odds.

Any yet, despite the club’s obvious assimilation into all the sullied, pecuniary culture of today’s footballing elite, Everton somehow manages to exude the aura of a scrappy David against cooler, modern Goliaths. We have nine historic first division titles to our name, more than “Big Six” global mega-brands Chelsea and Tottenham put together. But it’s been a while since Everton won any silverware — an FA Cup three decades ago, and no first division title since 1987.

The biggest eruption of Evertonian roars I can remember have been for last-minute winners, the occasional derby victory, or riotous scenes in the midst of ugly relegation dog-fights. Not, alas, for lifting trophies. But any lower-league supporter will be able to attest that these moments of joy are felt just as viscerally, just as intensely, as the lifting of a silver cup at the apex of the football pyramid.

When my dad watched Everton as a young man, he saw plenty of that. We were even known as the “School of Science”, for our progressive, cutting-edge style of play. It was the Guardiola-ball of its time. With honorable, short-lived exceptions, for most of my life a more recent moniker has seemed more apt: the Dogs of War. What we lack in finesse, artistry and star power has been amply compensated for in effort expended and dogged determination. Some likened the approach of our last manager to “Brexit-ball”, meaning defensive, stubborn, not pretty, with lots of long balls reminiscent of the traditional English game.

It’s no accident that two of the biggest “club legends” of recent years, the embodiments of the Everton spirit, have been Séamus Coleman — a long-serving, passionate Irishman bought from Sligo Rovers for the wild sum of £60,000; and Duncan Ferguson — the only man to have been jailed for a foul committed on a football pitch, who famously “filled in” two burglars who had broken into his house in the heyday of his playing career.

A lot of the Evertonian self-image built up over 30 years of hurt is down to the relative success of a strange group of upstarts based just a mile from Goodison, in the same postcode in fact. Readers may have heard of them — Liverpool FC (the junior team in the city by 14 years compared with us, original founders of the football league). And they have just been crowned champions. No matter: their victory will provide much-needed tourist income for a cash-strapped local economy on Merseyside. It’s a matter of real-life poetic justice that our final local derby in Goodison ended as a 2-2 draw after a 98th-minute equalizer from Everton’s big, six-foot, northern English defender who joined the club on a free transfer, prompting scenes of insane, blue bacchanalia.

But the rivalry between the two clubs almost reflects the Janus face of the city itself: Liverpool — brash, swaggering, sharp, bolshie; and Everton — the perennial underdogs, down-on-their-luck, forever gritty, embittered, aggrieved, and ready to argue, with a chip on both shoulders. If Liverpool’s Anfield draws in visitors from across the world for a glimpse of some melodic chanting and Scouse braggadocio, then Goodison is more associated with the atmosphere of a bear pit, full to the brim with naked aggression interspersed with moments of glorious, reckless, chaotic abandon.

For the three previous seasons we have flirted haphazardly with dropping to the second tier, circling the plughole, like the turd that won’t flush. No other team has spent as long in the top flight as Everton. Leaving it would destroy us, a final nail in the coffin; a last, humiliating deflation after years watching the slow, painful decline of a former giant turned garden gnome.

It’s been a harrowing, sorry saga that has removed cumulative millennia off the life expectancy of tens of thousands of Evertonians through nervous exhaustion. Now, as we await a new stadium, many hope we are turning a corner. But our move begs the question: who are we without Goodison Park? Goodison is Everton. Everton is Goodison. How will we adapt to life apart when so much of our own collective Everton ego is wrapped up in the walls of a big blue behemoth among some of the most deprived streets in northern England?

If Goodison Park represents a time capsule, a monument to the old version of the working-man’s game and proletarian nostalgia, the new stadia have adopted built environments that reflect the spirit of the modern sport: more open, more anonymous, more accessible, inclusive, infinitely better but infinitely worse, an almost computer-generated aesthetic with a big gift-shop ready; day-trippers first, “legacy fans” second. What does it profit a fan if he gains a trophy, but sells his soul? Maybe, just maybe, we’ll find out.

But make no mistake, for all the incongruity of a place like Goodison in the modern age, something priceless, something important, something rooted in the relationship between people, history and place, is now lost forever.

It didn’t matter, in the end, that the buyout was secured with a loan that was secured against the club, and that the club would pay the interest. Glazer made no public remarks, but his money did the talking. The following month, he bought the club’s remaining stock. Further protesting would be futile.

We are now 20 years into the Glazer ownership. Malcolm died in 2014, but his sons Bryan, Avram and Joel took over as co-chairmen. And, if cash returns is your metric, the family’s two-decade reign has been a triumph. Turnover, which was £221 million when Malcolm bought out the racing tycoons, is now £662m. In buying the club, Glazer correctly called the rise of sporting globalization, rode the tiger of potentially ruinous loans, and gambled successfully on the club’s untapped commercial potential.

As a result, he has made billionaires of his progeny. Last year, Sir Jim Ratcliffe bought a 27% stake last year, with each Glazer sibling pocketing, on average, £125m. Ratcliffe’s purchase valued the club at £4.6 billion — a near-sixfold increase on the £790 million at which it was valued when Glazer bought it in 2005.

On the downside, United were once perennial Premier League champions but haven’t won that trophy since 2013. Since reaching the final of the Champions League, football’s top club tournament, in 2011, they have featured only intermittently in the competition and never as serious contenders. This season they have reached a further nadir: 15th in the Premier League, three-quarters of the way down a league they used to dominate.

Were it not for those pesky league tables, the Glazers could claim this as one of the great leveraged buyouts of the century. The roots of that financial instrument whereby you purchase a company not with your own money but by borrowing on the value of the acquired asset, go back to the 1950s, but its popularity soared in the roaring Eighties. It was back in fashion again in the loose-lending 2000s, prior to the financial crash, which is precisely when the Glazers exploited United’s vulnerability.

Malcolm Glazer, famously, publicly uttered a mere 39 words about his ownership of that cultural institution, and only when he was doorstepped by a reporter. McManus, one of the two horseracing tycoons beaten to the club’s ownership, was a little more voluble.

“Why are you so interested?” Jim O’Neill, then a United board member and Goldman Sachs man, asked McManus.

“It’s just so cash-rich with no debt! It’s unbelievable!” replied McManus.

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To run a publicly-owned company as though it were a sensible social enterprise was like trailing a bloodied corpse behind your yacht in the Gulf of Mexico. It was shark bait.

O’Neill tried to persuade the United board to launch their own leveraged buyout, just with a different end purpose but in vain because the Glazers had a head start.

The real asset for them was not the club’s bricks-and-mortar. Even the combined powers of the club’s legendary manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, and his charges, such as Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo, were not what made United so desired by the Glazers. What was really valuable was the club’s fans. Some might call them stakeholders; others would regard them as willing dupes, easily monetized.

When you buy, as Glazer did, something that other people consider priceless, you are buying the ability to print money. A chronicler of the Glazer ownership, Chris Blackhurst, pointedly called his book The World’s Biggest Cash Machine. That’s a good approximation for the Glazers’ treatment of United. Since 2012, they have extracted £969m from the club in order to pay the interest on that initial loan. They have also taken £167 million in dividends.

Meanwhile, the Glazers have invested none of their own money. When the sun shone, and United’s revenues were the biggest in the league, they did not fix the roof. Now the Old Trafford roof is in such a poor state that match-goers have been drenched by cascades of rain. That £969 million could have paid for a whole new stadium.

Yet the fans will keep coming. United games might not sell out so easily, but the club remains, to millions of its fans, irreplaceable. To the Glazers, though, these fans are fungible economic units. And in this respect, the purchase of the club seems a product of its era. The mid-Noughties were a simpler period in modern age of globalization, one where markets were opening up and popular dissent was not yet made manifest at the ballot box. Those who worked in manufacturing, though, were finding that their labor could be undercut. The markets, and their countries, had deemed them replaceable.

United’s fans were to make a similar discovery. Older fans would have recalled the 1958 Munich air disaster, which claimed the lives of 23, including eight players. The fans who attended the annual memorial ceremony might quite reasonably have felt their relationship to the club to be more than transactional. So might the fans who simply supported the club through the trauma and cheered the success that followed. But they, too, were replaceable, of no more value to the Glazers than were replica shirt buyers in Malaysia. It took 16 years for a Glazer to meet a fan group, and this took place only when the political winds had changed. The owners of the top English football clubs became so greedy they attempted to join a European Super League, which gave founder clubs like United guaranteed access. The founding Super League documents made it clear they were less bothered about what they dismissively deemed “legacy fans” and much keener on “fans of the future”: by which they meant malleable, younger, less revolting global followers on social media.

Given United’s patchy record in qualifying on merit for the Champions League, the Super League might have been an elegant move, were it not for the unexpected backlash from fans and then Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The Glazers had manifestly failed to read the room, not understanding that, whatever assurances they thought they had, a populist, Brexit-empowered PM was no longer guaranteed to side with global finance.

Economic globalization was no longer seen as an unalloyed good, as President Trump’s administration has now made clear, even if he persistently comes up with the wrong answers to the right questions. Tariffs are catnip for a despairing industrial working class but factories in the USA and UK aren’t going to be reopened. And United will never have the same relationship with its supporters. Even now the Glazers have turned over the running of the club to Sir Jim Ratcliffe, it has only deepened the gulf between legacy fans and management. Season ticket concessions for pensioners and kids have been removed and ticket price increased,

The left-behind fans, the “little people” of Stretford and Salford, who cherish their club and enjoyed watching it succeed, might drown their sorrows with Boddingtons Bitter. But even then, they are no longer sharing in a local institution. In 2004, Strangeways Brewery, which produced the beer, was acquired by AB InBev, owned by Belgian families and Brazilian private equity; in 2005, the year that the Glazers bought United, the brewery was closed.

Still, somewhere in Tampa or Palm Beach, Florida, where Avram Glazer, Joel and their siblings Darcie, Kevin, Bryan and Edward have their homes, they will surely be raising a toast to their stunning success. It doesn’t matter that they and their placemen still have no idea how to run a football club. Once Sir Alex and his sidekick David Gill left, in 2013, things fell apart. The club became the epitome of what European clubs call “stupid English money.” Since 2013, without Sir Alex’s guiding hand, they have spent $1.5 billion net on player transfers, considerably more than any other Premier League club, and registered only one decent signing in that time: Bruno Fernandes.

As a result of this poor sporting performance, the club’s on-field losses have turned into financial losses. A club whose revenues were by far the largest in the Premier League now risks breaking financial sustainability rules.

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All this is a far cry from the way the club was run before Malcolm Glazer arrived. The old board had to provide shareholders a return and was never loved by fans but they had invested in assets such as the stadium, built bridges with the community, and saved up financial reserves for difficult days ahead. The club was, self-consciously, a legacy business, looking to hand over a cultural institution to the next generation.

Jim O’Neill, the erstwhile board member and now Baron O’Neill of Gatley, campaigns for “profit with a purpose” in the global economy these days and invests in tech and science start-ups in the North of England. United, in contrast, have become a totem of what we could term “purposeless profit”: a cash machine rather than a community institution.

The inexorable pull of commerce has engulfed the club and hollowed it out, just as it has to so many other once-singular organizations. Thames Water customers will be familiar with this story, as will consumers of Cadbury’s chocolate, another victim of the dreaded leveraged buyout. Cadbury’s was acquired by US confectionery conglomerate Kraft in 2010, which promised not to close down the company’s Bristol factory, before promptly doing just that and moving production to Poland. The 19th-century founders of Cadbury’s were Quaker capitalists who would have intuitively understood O’Neill’s notion of “profit with a purpose”. They got rich, but they also built the village of Bournville, outside of Birmingham, to “alleviate the evils of modern cramped living conditions” so that their employees had decent homes, good education and green space in which to thrive.

In the era of globalization, those acts of corporate kindness would have put the company at a serious disadvantage. It is an age in which we have been encouraged to trade our local or national identity in exchange for rising living standards. It shouldn’t be a shock to politicians that once the trade-off failed to deliver, people hankered after old tribal loyalties in order to make more sense of life. The dislocation of capital to far-off lands means that the have-yachts can toast their profits while factory workers lose their jobs, water companies flood their customers with effluent, and loyal football supporters are treated like cash machines. That would have been anathema to the likes of Cadbury. Ungodly, even. Though you can almost hear today’s billionaires snigger at their naïveté.

Short Tony’s death was just the latest in a long line of ultra murders. An “ultra” is an extremist football fan, sort of a cross between a hooligan and a Hell’s Angel. Any murder in that netherworld is newsworthy, but this one more than ever: as his dialect nickname implies, Bellocco was a Calabrian mobster, sent north to offer muscle to Inter’s Curva Nord ultras: in return for a slice of the gang’s lucrative businesses.

Bellocco had been one of the key mercenaries in an ongoing battle with a rival Inter crew, the Irriducibili. When that battle was won, Bellocco had become one of the top bosses of Inter’s terraces. Many of us had thought the ultras had already touched rock bottom in August 2019, when Lazio’s top boss, a drug-slinging stoner called Fabrizio Piscitelli, was shot dead as he sat on a park bench in Rome. But what’s happening in Milan takes the ultra story to a darker place: they are now essentially narco-crews, ready to greenlight mergers with organized crime to dominate Milan’s suburbs.

All this is particularly poignant because Milan is the city that claims to be the cradle of ultra ideology. AC Milan’s famous Fossa dei Leoni (“Lions’ Den”) and Commandos Tigre (“Tiger Commandoes”) both claim to have been founded around 1968, before any other ultra group in Italy. Back then, the ultras were not considered criminals so much as teenage scallywags. The real Milanese outlaws came from the Ligéra. Meaning “The Light” in the local dialect, it encompassed an assortment of petty crooks: pickpockets, pimps, bookies and fences that graduated onto kidnappings and bank jobs.

These days, though, the city is bossed by the ultras. Milan and Inter share the San Siro stadium, its helix staircases looking like springs whatever the angle. The teams’ respective ultras take it in turns to skim off the top of the tens of thousands of punters who come to the stadium every week.

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It all started when the ultras turned their collective back on a sacred tenet of ultradom. Until the early Eighties, it had been a foundational principle that being an ultra meant fighting your enemies — above all enemies from the same city. But when, in 1981, an Inter fan was stabbed to death by a Milan fan, the Milan and Inter ultras negotiated a non-aggression pact.

The major ultra groups from both sides — Nord Kaos and Viking for Inter, the Brigate Rossonero and Commandos Tigre for Milan — began using their sheer force of numbers to make money. Organized hierarchically, these crews started taking over the curtilage of the San Siro, selling fake merch, hiring out parking spaces, levering beers and bapping burgers. A few of them also began offering à la carte highs: coke, speed, weed or E.

Though the Milanese ultras didn’t fight each other, they did fight almost everyone else. Nazzareno Filippini was an Ascoli fan killed by Inter ultras in 1988. Vincenzo Spagnolo, a Genoa supporter, was stabbed to death by a hot-headed Milan fan in January 1995. After those killings, there were more peace conferences.

Some talked of returning to the old days when, they claimed, being an ultra was just a way for waifs to get off their faces and stage-manage the Sunday afternoon spectacle of confetti and pranks. I interviewed hundreds of “purist” ultras for my book on the subject, and most of them lovingly recalled tipped-over cars with number plates from rival cities.

They would speak late into the night about their most memorable striscioni — the long, often witty, banners they unfurled on the terraces. “It truly, truly hurts me to see what happens on the terrace now,” one retired head ultras told me back in 2018. “It makes me suffer greatly… we’ve gone from fist-fights to knives, from knives to… ambushes, to Molotov cocktails, to bombs and to pistols. It keeps getting worse.”

This is partly a symptom of politics. In the Sixties, the ultra movement had used names echoing far-Left liberation movements across the globe (“Fedayeen”), or else evoked Italian partisan bands from the Second World War.

During the Eighties and Nineties, however, many crews turned to the far-Right. The full name, for instance, of Inter’s “Boys” gang was “Boys-SAN”, a reference to Mussolini’s paramilitary Squadre d’Azione.

Giorgio Triani is a sports sociologist who wrote two great books about Italian fans in the Nineties, just as the ultra movement was becoming a crucible for the far-Right. “The Left became disinterested in the terraces,” he says, “and very quickly they became perfectly aligned with the far-Right. They had a need to dominate the vulnerable, the opposition, the losers, the blacks…”

Soon enough, it became commonplace for thousands of supporters to grunt at black players, to interrupt silences for drowned migrants in the Mediterranean, to taunt enemies with allegations they were Jewish and would share the fate of Anne Frank. Lazio, Inter and Verona ultras were at the forefront of this political radicalization, often doing straight-arm salutes and waving swastikas. It even infected the players, with Paolo di Canio unable to resist raising a fascist salute to the Lazio faithful in 2005.

All the while, each passing year made the violence of yesterday seem quaint by comparison. It was money that fed the bloodshed: a police wiretap heard Vittorio Boiocchi — an Inter ultra murdered in 2022 — boast that he made €80,000 a month.

Cash sums that size always attract professional mobsters. And so, long before Bellocco arrived in Milan, there were attempted mergers between Calabrian families and northern ultras. About a decade ago, Juventus’s main crew, the Drughi, allowed a Calabrian family to become part of its racket. Ciccio Bucci, one of these Drughi, was also a fan-liaison officer, and was suspected of having snitched on the group. He was promptly beaten up and ostracized. When he returned to Turin, after a year away in Puglia, he jumped from a famous viaduct outside the city.

It’s not entirely clear who approved Bellocco’s entry to the terraces. But he was fortunate that his ascension occurred just as Inter was bossing Italian football, with the team winning seven trophies so far this decade. The deeper a team goes in a tournament, the more tickets get sold, not just for the stadium but for the planes and buses. Ultras bulk-buy accommodation and food, becoming informal travel agents.

When Inter and Milan met in the semi-final of the 2023 Champions’ League, they agreed to share ticket revenues from the final whoever won. Inter went through, but Milan ultras still made money. Rather than going all in — as ultra philosophy insists you always should — they had essentially “shorted” their own team.

It’s anyway unsurprising that the ultras now cover Milan like a spider’s web: if you want to trade, borrow or buy on the streets of the city, the chances are you’ll cross paths with an ultra. Luca Lucci, an AC Milan hooligan who has done time for drugs-trafficking and GBH, has provided “event-management” services — everything from body-guarding to ticket sales — to rappers like Fedez and Emis Killa. Lucci has also opened a chain of tattoo parlours called Italian Ink. It’s a world no more controlled by teenage tearaways but by old men with names like “Il Barone” (The Baron). When he was shot dead, Boiocchi was 69.

There are advantages to both sides of the mafia-ultra merger. When an ultra finds himself needing to overcome rival groups on the terrace, it’s tempting to call in those pros. And for the mercenaries, there’s the lure of a cash turnover in the low millions for which the punishments are negligible. Ticket-touting, for instance, is only given a custodial sentence if accompanied by more serious crimes.

But Andrea Beretta had apparently grown resentful of his thrusting Calabrian colleague, always in his space and living just around the corner. Bellocco had sought to assert his dominance over Beretta, showing him what he called his family album. “My mother has done 25 years in prison,” he was heard on a wire-tap. “She’s still in prison and she’s 74!”

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It’s a story that isn’t over yet. Bellocco was a made man, and his murder will not be without consequences for his alleged killer. Beretta will either enter witness protection and turn on his mates, or else risk a revenge killing. “It was unthinkable 30 years ago that it would have reached these levels,” says Triani. “Back then the terraces were unhealthy, sure, but now [the ultra world] has become a parasitic cancer completely decontextualized from football and sport.” No wonder it’s a movement now more studied by criminologists than sociologists.

Nineteen ultras from both sides were arrested in the aftermath of Bellocco’s killing last autumn. Most are charged with assault, extortion and being part of a “criminal association” (essentially a gang). The Inter ultras are also accused of having “abetted” the ‘Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia of whom Bellocco was part.

This incremental professionalization of ultra gangs goes against another shibboleth of the faith: that no individual makes money from the group. Lucci’s revealing defense is that he’s “only ever made money from drug-dealing, never from being an ultra”. He would rather plead guilty to something the state considers a crime than to betraying the gang, namely by dipping his fingers into his own crew’s till.

Not for the first time, in other words, money and power have flipped a counterculture. And now, commanding voters and consumers by the thousands, they’ve even entered mainstream politics. Again, there’s an overlap of interests: politicians gain street cred from association with organized fan groups, and organized groups can shift electoral results.

Lucci, now arrested, has enjoyed deliberately public handshakes and hugs with Matteo Salvini, the former interior minister (now deputy prime minister), and himself a die-hard Milanista. The former mayor of Catania, Salvo Pogliese, and Daniele Belotti, a former League parliamentarian, have also played on their terrace notoriety to rally fans to the ballot box.

It all feels a long way from those early Sixties days. Back then, the first commandment of ultra faith was fidelity to the borgo, about fighting for your hometown, even if it was just a crappy suburb without hope. But the movement is now as globalized as any multinational, and the striscioni feel like an afterthought.

As well as eight Premier Leagues and three FA Cups they also lifted the Champions League as part of a Treble in 2022-23. Under the Catalan manager Pep Guardiola they’ve also helped popularize a possession-based form of football at every level of the English game.

Now, though, an imminent judgment could transform their fortunes — and could have a potentially seismic impact on the English game as a whole.

The club faces 130 charges of breaching Financial Fair Play regulations between 2009-18 — that is, the first nine years after their acquisition by the UAE. Under the Profit and Sustainability Rules (PSR) introduced by the Premier League 10 years ago, clubs are permitted to lose no more than £105 million over a three-year period. The rules include various allowances for investment in, for example, stadium development, academies and women’s football.

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Last season, Everton were docked 10 points, reduced to six on appeal, for having lost £19.5 million more than the permissible amount. A further two points were then deducted for a loss of £16.6 million over the threshold in the following accounting window — a relatively low sanction, because the club had already been punished for two of the three years in question. Nottingham Forest were docked four points because their losses were £34.5 million over the threshold, which, in this case, since the club had spent two of the three seasons under consideration in the second tier, was £61 million.

Those can be considered benchmark figures. If City are found to be in breach — and it should be stressed that they deny all charges — it could be for hundreds of millions. In addition, Everton and Forest ultimately cooperated with the investigation into them. Of City’s charges, 35 relate to non-compliance. If they were found guilty, the punishment would almost certainly be severe. There has been talk of expulsion from the Premier League, but a hefty fine and huge points deduction is more likely — something that would make relegation all but certain.

That would circumvent the issue that if City were expelled, the Football League, which administers the Championship and Leagues One and Two, would be under no compulsion to accept them. It would also effectively lengthen the sanction to two years – one of being relegated and (at least) one in the Championship earning promotion. There would also be knock-on effects for future PSR calculations given City’s earning power would necessarily be reduced.

City are alleged to have manipulated their accounts in two ways. First, they’re accused of artificially inflating the value of sponsorship deals from companies linked to the club ownership. Second, it’s claimed they made third-party payments to players and coaches to top up their official salaries.

Der Spiegel, for instance, reported that when Roberto Mancini was appointed as manager in 2009, he signed not only a £1.45 million-a-year deal with City, but also a £1.75 million annual salary for four days a year of consultancy for the Abu Dhabi club Al Jazira, which happens to be owned by the City owner Sheikh Mansour.

The leaks that led to the Spiegel investigation also brought charges from Uefa, which initially banned City from the Champions League for two years, only for the Court of Arbitration for Sport to rule that many of the offences were time-barred, overturning the suspension.

There are broader questions here too. After all, some want to scrap the Financial Fair Play rule. They ask: would you interfere with the free market? Why stop owners from spending whatever they like on their clubs?

To which the answers are straightforward. First, it is not a free market if some of the parties involved are the investment arms of states; Saudi Arabia and the UAE are not free markets.

More to the point, sport is not a business like any other. It has a community role, but what is effectively being sold is not the excellence of a company’s product but the competition between clubs.

Two decades ago, I spoke to Zoran Avramović, the marketing manager of Red Star Belgrade, one of the two biggest clubs in Serbia. Nobody came to games any more, he said, because Red Star beat the smaller Serbian sides too easily, and then lost in Europe because their players never got used to having to defend and fight. “What should we do?” he asked plaintively. “Subsidize the little sides?” To which the response can only be: yes.

The Victorians understood this. The English league is the oldest in the world, founded in 1888. It was immediately realized that if a team won, that would attract more spectators. More spectators meant more money, which meant they could attract better players. And that meant they were more likely to win, a cycle leading to monopoly and tedium.

Initially, it was agreed that home teams should pay the away side $10, a levy that from 1918 became 20% of gate receipts, mitigating the advantage of having a bigger stadium. It was abolished only in 1983. In 1901, a maximum wage was introduced. Although the cap soon became seen as repressive, players battling it until it was eventually abolished in 1961, the initial intention was to reduce the capacity of wealthier sides to lure the best players to play for them.

A set of rules known as FFP (Financial Fair Play) was implemented by Uefa at the start of the 2011-12 season. Its initial aim was to prevent clubs overspending and getting into unmanageable debt. This is what happened at Leeds United under Peter Ridsdale, which ultimately threatened the club’s very existence. FFP also prevented owners acting as Roman Abramovich had after buying Chelsea in 2003, splurging cash and distorting the market.

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Nevertheless, City have consistently argued the regulations are unfair and protect the existing elite. They have taken a series of legal actions against the Premier League, challenging PSR under competition law.

City’s challenges reflect a paradox of football: that it is simultaneously a business and not a business, or at least not a conventional business.

This is a point the Crystal Palace owner Steve Parish made at the Financial Times Business of Football summit at the end of February. “We are constantly being told we are not a business but a sport,” he said, “and that we are part of the fabric of the community, and that we need to prioritize winning over everything. At the same time, we’re in court being treated to the Nth degree like a business.”

The Premier League itself operates effectively as a club; it has 20 members, each of whom have a vote. The regulations City keep challenging have all been voted for by the League, which requires a two-thirds majority for any change. And this is where the issue becomes potentially existential.

In an email published by Der Spiegel in 2018, a City lawyer claimed that the club chairman, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, had said that he “would rather spend $30 million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue them for the next 10 years” than accept sanction from UEFA, which is football’s European governing body.

It’s safe to assume that if City are found guilty, they will appeal, and then potentially take legal action to overturn the verdict. They have much greater resources than the Premier League. The costs could therefore cripple the whole system, whatever the ultimate outcome.

But equally, if City are found not guilty, or if they are found guilty but other clubs feel the sanction is insufficient, these rivals could take their own legal action. The precedents of Everton and Forest are there.

There is plenty of fury about City and the way they have behaved, even leaving the specifics of the charges aside. It has even been mooted that a majority of clubs could quit the Premier League to rejoin the Football League, from which they split in 1992. That, frankly, seems unlikely, but it is a measure of the depth of feeling that it is being discussed at all.

And the consequences for City could be profound. Twice before, clubs have been found guilty of making significant illegal payments. The first were City themselves in 1906, the second Sunderland in 1957. Both ended up being relegated soon after. It took City 30 years to recover; Sunderland arguably never really have.

Then there’s the possibility of civil action. In March 2009, West Ham paid Sheffield United around $20 million to settle a claim that they had stayed up at Sheffield United’s expense by fielding Carlos Tévez when he was not properly registered.

If one club suing over relegation was worth $20 million then, what would multiple clubs suing over missed titles, missed qualification for Europe, missed prize money and relegation over multiple seasons look like now? The cost could be billions. Would Sheikh Mansour fund that? Would he retain his interest in the team at all? And if he and his funding went, what would City have left?

For many, the notion of a foreign coach is anathema: isn’t international football supposed to be the best of ours against the best of theirs? At the very least, for England to turn abroad feels like an admission of failure, an acknowledgment that the English system is not producing high-level coaches and managers. And Tuchel is not just foreign: he is German, and for the past century nothing has seemed quite so obviously inimical to England as Germany.

The wars color everything. Even when Germany aren’t involved, it’s common enough to hear England fans singing “Ten German Bombers”, gleefully emphasizing the countdown after “the RAF from England shot them down”, or humming the theme to The Great Escape or The Dam Busters. It’s hard to imagine that changing just because England now have a German manager.

Yet this feels a significant step. When England faced Germany in the semi-final of Euro 96, The Mirror mocked up Stuart Pearce and Paul Gascoigne in military helmets and with the headline, “Achtung, Surrender! For you Fritz, ze Euro 96 Championship is over”. It’s hard to imagine England could even have contemplated a German manager then; even the appointment of a Swede, when Sven-Göran Eriksson got the job in 2001, provoked apoplexy in the Mail, which screamed, “We’ve sold our birthright down the fjord to a nation of seven million skiers and hammer throwers who spend half their lives in darkness”. And yet there is Tuchel, broadly accepted, leading England into a World Cup qualifying campaign.

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Tuchel actually seems rather more popular in England than in Germany, where his neo-vegetarian nerdery sat uncomfortably at Bayern Munich. But when things go wrong for him in the England job, he will be accused of not understanding “our” game. Even his interim predecessor Lee Carsley, who was born in Birmingham but played for Ireland, faced howls of protest in some quarters for his refusal to sing the anthem — not a political act, he explained, but because he felt singing would disrupt his focus. Tuchel has said he needs to “earn the right” to sing the anthem, a politically adroit policy, but whether he does so or not, an awareness of his nationality will in part shape reactions. The entire recent history of Anglo-German relations, in fact, can be traced through football.

There were the tentative early meetings in the Thirties, when England was broadly disdainful of German football and its high-minded decision to remain amateur. This was an ethos that was quickly adopted by the Nazis and repackaged into sensuous propaganda by Leni Riefenstahl. Professional sport, it was decreed after the Anschluss, was a Jewish perversion. As a result, the highly successful Austrian league was forced to return to amateurism and a great footballing culture was destroyed. A month before that announcement, in June 1938, England had already, in the spirit of appeasement, given the Nazi salute before a 6-3 win in Berlin.

There may be a level of irony to the chant of “Two World Wars and One World Cup” — not least because Germany have won four World Cups — but when England won their only World Cup in 1966, beating West Germany in the final, the Second World War was very much on people’s minds, a point made by Duncan Hamilton in Answered Prayers. The evidence of bombing was still evident in many cities, while every adult knew somebody who had been killed in the fighting. The maths is obvious, but the point is worth stressing: that final came just 21 years after VE Day, and the events of the war were less distant than today is from 9/11.

Certainly there was an awareness on the German side of the need for sensitivity. Their coach was Helmut Schön, who had fled the Soviet zone for the West in May 1950. He had been an air-raid warden in Dresden and seen terrible things. “Women lay in the streets”, he wrote in his autobiography, “charred black or dried out like Egyptian mummies. They had children in their arms, bundles of ashes.” When the fires were extinguished, 30,000 charred corpses were stacked up by the Kreuzkirche and the job the firestorm had begun was finished off with flamethrowers. “We were used to gigantic numbers, including the victims of our own country”, Schön said. “That was abstract. Now we could see the reality: 30,000 individual people who had died terrible deaths.”

Yet Schön, who spent five days hunting through the smoking rubble for his father, seems to have harbored no sense of bitterness against Britain. His family was liberal, and had rented out an apartment to a Jewish publisher until as late as 1939. Schön had no doubt who was to blame for the war and told his players before they came to England in 1966 that what mattered was less whether they won than whether they “behaved like gentlemen”. Their job was to rehabilitate the international image of Germany.

Although England beat West Germany in the final, that meeting at Wembley turned out to be the first part of a five-act sequence that would overturn their respective footballing statuses. West Germany achieved a first-ever win over England in a friendly in 1968, a game whose significance was widely ignored in England but gave West Germany great self-confidence. West Germany then came from 2-0 down to beat England in the World Cup quarter-final in Mexico in 1970, before outplaying England in beating them 3-1 at Wembley in the first leg of the European Championship quarter-final in 1972. L’Équipe described the German performance as “football from the year 2000”. In the second leg in Berlin, England, apparently giving up any hope of turning the tie around, played out an aggressive and negative 0-0 draw. In less than a decade, West German football had accelerated past England: it was the future; England some moribund relic. After West Germany’s economic miracle, anybody looking at the relative economies of the two countries might have drawn a similar conclusion.

Although Schön was still manager as West Germany won the World Cup on home soil in 1974, when England didn’t even qualify, he had become an oddly distant figure. The players had threatened strike action over bonuses before the tournament, something Schön, who came from a generation with a clear sense of patriotic duty, couldn’t comprehend. When West Germany then lost to East Germany in the first group stage, he had some sort of breakdown with the result that the captain Franz Beckenbauer effectively took over: the generation of self-assertive boomers were led by one of their own.

But whatever reservations there were, at home and abroad, about the behavior of certain German players, they kept beating England, most notably in the semi-final of both the 1990 World Cup, their last tournament before reunification, and Euro 96, their first tournament as a united nation. Players such as Jürgen Klinsmann, who had family in the East and regarded football as a symbol, perhaps even a tool, of rapprochement, were baffled by the English obsession with a war half a century in the past.

In the flush of victory in 1990, Beckenbauer, by then the manager, had said that he felt sorry for other nations because a united Germany would be unbeatable. It has not turned out like that, although Germany did win the 2014 World Cup. In competitive games since 2000, England actually have the edge, with three wins to two (including their famous 5-1 World Cup qualifying win in Munich).

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Yet German coaching is far more influential than English coaching. There is a discernible German School, born out of Swabia, that prioritizes winning the ball back as soon as possible by the high-risk deployment of players high up the pitch — Gegenpressing. The likes of Jürgen Klopp, Jogi Löw, Ralf Rangnick, Hansi Flick, Julian Nagelsmann and, yes, Tuchel, led the resistance to the hegemonic possession-heavy style favored by Pep Guardiola.

There is no English School. The Premier League might be the best league in the world. It’s certainly the richest. But what that means is that it imports talent, coaches in particular. There are only two English managers in the Premier League. And that perhaps is why there has been so little outcry about Tuchel. It’s less that England has suddenly become a mature and cosmopolitan nation than that the Premier League is essentially a global league that happens to be played in England.

Just as you can wander through parts of London and barely see a building that isn’t owned by Saudis or Russians or Japanese, so our football clubs are owned by oligarchs, sheikhs and hedge funds. These potentates then appoint the best coaches — or at least the coaches they believe to be the best — with no parochial interest in developing local talent. So everybody gets used to the idea that the best coaches are foreign. And now that English academies have, after their overhaul following the failure to qualify for Euro 2008, begun to turn out high-level playing talent, it seems logical that the best coach to lead them into the World Cup should be foreign, even if he is German.

For a nation that can’t help selling off its assets and institutions, this is a decision rooted in pragmatism. And so we end up with a situation where the man appointed to make it two World Cups would have been on the other side in the two World Wars.

Perhaps that’s just what reconciliation looks like. Perhaps it’s just modern England.

It had been 70 years since that FA Cup victory in 1955, 70 years in which a once-mighty club had swapped trophies for atrophy. It was a story all the more poignant for it mirroring the simultaneous industrial decline of the city and region. And now the story had a happy ending.

This is a city whose football club is its spiritual heart. Walk out of Central Station and you will see St James’ Park, a vertiginous and imposing old stadium, towering over you. In Newcastle, the club is at the center of civic life. As Wembley basked in the glow of regional pride, one could imagine Sir Bobby Charlton, his brother Jack, his uncle Jackie Milburn as well as the likes of Sir Bobby Robson, English football legends all, looking down with pleasure. Nobody could have appreciated this victory more than Newcastle United fans. Only an extreme curmudgeon, or a Sunderland fan, would have remained unmoved.

We might never know whether the news of Newcastle’s win reached Malaz Prison, in Riyadh. Here, the fitness instructor Manahel al-Otaibi is serving 11 years, some of it in solitary confinement, for opposing male guardianship, campaigning against the hijab, and, according to her prosecutors, “going to the shops without wearing an abaya, photographing this, and publishing it on Snapchat”.

So much for the reforms promised by Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince. MBS. His close ally, Yasir al-Rumayyan, is the governor of the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund and the chairman of Newcastle United. As al-Otaibi sat in jail, al-Rumayyan lifted the League Cup.

It is an uneasy contrast, and the imprisonment of al-Otaibi is only one example of the MBS regime behaving barbarically. Take the dismemberment, in 2018, of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi: an operation approved, according to the USA’s Director of National Intelligence, by MBS. Or the 2017 “Sheikh-down”, when the nation’s billionaires and captains of industry were corralled into Riyadh’s Ritz Carlton hotel. Amid accusations of abuse and torture, they handed over their assets and paid fines to the state, now embodied by its Crown Prince, in return for their freedom.

Al-Rumayyan is the Crown Prince’s henchman in matters of sport, in which the Saudis are heavily invested. There is the LIV golf tour, viewed by critics as a hostile takeover of the sport, and there was the successful bid to host the 2034 Football World Cup. The kingdom has thrown money at the Saudi Pro League, signing expensive luminaries such as Cristiano Ronaldo, and has hosted numerous boxing world title fights and Formula 1 Grands Prix. One of MBS’ ambitions appears to be that young Saudi nationals — 60% of the population is under 30 — consume sport as a quasi-religion, it being a safer opiate than the extreme Islam that forged the nation’s most famous citizen, Osama bin Laden. Adherents of this kind of worldview might ask awkward questions about the legitimacy of the al-Saud dynasty.

Given that all this is taking place in a faraway land over which we have little influence, it is hard for football fans to know what to feel. Is the appropriate response revulsion at the sight of another British cultural institution being hawked to the highest bidder, regardless of human rights concerns, as the nation accepts its status as a post-imperial supplicant? Or should fans accept that they can’t change these circumstances and allow themselves to revel in a glorious sporting storyline?

Understandably, most Newcastle fans settle for the latter. A few, including the lifelong fan John Hird, have set up a campaign group called NUFC Fans Against Sportswashing, which campaigns for al-Otaibi and the like. The group holds vigils outside St James’ Park – vigils that are often lonely.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is playing a central role in current geo-political stakes. Last week, in the run-up to the final, Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, was meeting Mohammed bin Salman, and Saudi Arabia was hosting talks between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Ukraine delegation. The Saudis, in short, were brokering peace between Russia and the West. In that context, the Carabao Cup seems a tiny footnote in the kingdom’s broader project.

In keeping with this central role for Saudi, President Trump directed his first phone call after his election victory to MBS. Trump’s first foreign trip, as it was in 2017, is likely to be to Riyadh. The world genuflects at the court of MBS, including the former human rights lawyer Keir Starmer. The Prime Minister, who visited in December, has said his “No 1 mission is for economic growth and for that we need Saudi Arabia”. Indeed we do, especially in a volatile world of Trumpian tariffs and a downgraded economic forecast from the OECD.

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Newcastle fans, though, have been burdened with the outsourced moral angst of a nation. Governments can sup with the Saudis with near-impunity, but football is held to a higher standard, castigated when it joins the gold rush to Riyadh. Naturally, Newcastle fans resent those questioning their joy. The country accepts Saudi money for its regeneration projects in the north of England, clean energy investments and stakes in Uber, Heathrow and Selfridges. Newcastle United happens to be the most visible target.

Newcastle City Council, controlled by Labour until a spate of resignations last November, recently met ALQST, a Saudi-focused human rights organization. But we shouldn’t expect the council to issue excoriations of the city’s new overlords. Aside from needing the votes of Newcastle United fans, the council is hoping that the Saudi state might emulate what Abu Dhabi did in east Manchester when the emirate bought Manchester City.  The area around the City of Manchester Stadium has been transformed: new housing, a health center, and sports facilities, as well as the Co-op Live Arena. The projected PIF takeover of Newcastle Airport may be the first local dividend outside of the football club.

Five years ago, when campaigners tore down the statue of slave trader and philanthropist Edward Colston in Bristol, many cheered, not least those on the Left concerned with human rights. It is easy to be clear-sighted, 300 years later, about the awful contradiction of taking money from slavers to build wonderful churches, schools and civic amenities; it is harder to turn down Saudi money now. That money might improve the lives of ordinary people and regenerate the local economy – just as Colston’s money once did in the South-West.

Though Britain can seem a mere vassal state, the relationship isn’t quite as clear-cut as it appears. In his book States of Play, Miguel Delaney quotes the human rights activist Iyad el-Baghdadi on MBS. “He wants to be loved. And he wants his image [as a reformer] back.”  Another campaigner told me: “The Saudi authorities really don’t like it when you write about human rights issues. They want to be seen as reformers.”

Therein lies the contradiction. Saudi Arabia looks to Mecca in its prayers, but for investment assets and a degree of approval, it looks to London, New York and Paris. This approval is the only leverage that remains. Resisting the lure of Saudi money is like shouting at the moon: all well and good for purists, but ineffectual. Newcastle fans, being impotent, have little option other than to enjoy their moment. But our society should ask tougher questions of the Saudis, and we should not give in to the temptation to ignore the kingdom’s manifold human rights abuses. It is that Saudi longing for approval that provides the best hope of change.

In a sober moment, after the cup final hangovers have faded, perhaps we can remind ourselves that we have been here before. Not so long ago, we embraced an exciting geopolitical and trade partner. Its leaders’ henchmen were investing in soccer clubs and transforming London’s economy. That President Putin seemed such a nice guy.

The match that night at the Groupama Aréna ended well — Keane’s side beat their Dutch rivals 4-3 — but the shift into management hasn’t always been so straightforward for Ferencváros’s boss. Ireland’s all-time leading goalscorer is a pariah back home, and is unlikely to find success in his native land again. The former Tottenham striker’s crime? Managing Maccabi Tel Aviv, Israel’s biggest club, a job that saw him assailed as a “Zionist rat” and “blood money Robbie”.

Ugly language, and a vivid testament to the attitudes of many in Ireland to the conflict in the Middle East. Yet more than that, Keane’s story hints at a broader lesson, of how politics and football are inevitably linked, and how trying to steer clear of geopolitical controversy is doomed always to fail.

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In the summer of 2023, when Keane was offered the Maccabi Tel Aviv gig, he was keen to see the positives. He has always been keen, as he puts it, to experience “other countries and cultures” — and is dismissive of those who have refused to leave their “comfort zones”. Until recently, it’s a philosophy that served him well. Leaving Ireland at 17, and playing everywhere from Italy to India, the striker has enjoyed a far more varied career than many of his contemporaries, struggling with drab managerial jobs at second- and third-flight English clubs.

This time, though, things would be different. Even before the October 7 massacre, Ireland was firmly pro-Palestinian. That stems largely from a general anti-colonial feeling, but it’s also true the IRA long enjoyed close links with the PLO. Stadiums have often been the stage for protest and demonstration, but this issue has a particular prominence because those who follow the Ireland national team are disproportionately drawn from that Left-wing, anti-colonial constituency.

More recently, Ireland supported South Africa’s legal action against Israel at the International Court of Justice, a move that in December saw the Jewish state shutter its embassy in Dublin. Worse was to follow: Gideon Sarr, the Israeli foreign minister, last week accused Ireland’s president of “a cheap despicable provocation” when he referenced the war in Gaza during a speech on Holocaust Memorial Day. These global tensions have often played out on home turf. When Ireland played Greece in Dublin six days after Hamas’s attack, the stand behind one goal was dotted with Palestinian flags.

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Keane has, perhaps naively, tried to stay neutral. As manager at one of Israel’s most popular sides, the Irishman was widely expected to support his hosts — especially after their retaliatory assault on Gaza. Yet Keane was quiet, doggedly refusing to engage in anything beyond football. But merely by remaining in Israel, many in Ireland felt he was tacitly supporting Benjamin Netanyahu and his government.

When he presented caps to players at an Ireland national team get-together last November, Keane was duly subjected to a barrage of online abuse. Israelis, for their part, have criticised him for his reluctance to speak out from the other direction. Nor is he the only one to have suffered. His wife Claudine, who still lives in Ireland with their two sons, has spoken publicly of feeling unsafe. Involved in a series of social media flare-ups, she even requested a meeting with Mary Lou McDonald, the Sinn Féin leader, after a former TD accused Robbie of “sportswashing apartheid and genocidal Israel”.

In a sense, none of this is surprising. The October 7 slaughter, and the bombing of Gaza that followed, has turned football into a battleground. Quite aside from Palestinian flags in the Dublin stands, that was clear last November, when Maccabi Tel Aviv played Ajax in Amsterdam. Maccabi fans targeted Palestinians and other Arabs, while the visitors and local Jews faced antisemitic violence, leading to 71 arrests. Keane himself had resigned five months earlier, walking away from the final two years of a lucrative contract, saying it would have been unfair on the staff he had taken with him to leave sooner.

“Was it tough?” Keane asked last week during a press conference in Budapest. “Unfortunately I can’t control what people say. It is what it is. I’m sensitive to the situation and hopefully, please God, everybody can move on peacefully and I can get on with what I do best and that’s being involved in football. I get it’s a complicated situation.”

Not that Keane’s departure for Hungary is likely to restore his reputation. If he were to set foot on the Dublin pitch now, he’d almost certainly be booed. For the first Irish manager to win a foreign league title since 1935, that’s remarkable — even if it speaks, once more, to the impossibility of keeping football and politics apart. That’s just as true in Hungary as it was in Israel. Ferencváros’s president is Gábor Kubatov, a vice-president of the ruling Fidesz party. Even the Groupama Aréna, the site of Keane’s maiden home win, is a result of the Orbán government’s generous investments in sporting infrastructure.

More to the point, Keane’s tenure in Tel Aviv influenced where he ended up next. Orbán is a close ally of Netanyahu, and at the very least Hungary is one of the few places in Europe where Keane’s last job wouldn’t be an issue. Before the match last week, Hungarian fans were baffled by questions about Israel and Palestine, far more interested in whether Keane had won the Israeli league because Maccabi were good: or because Hapoel Haifa, their main rivals, collapsed.

All the while, Keane seems as anxious as ever to focus on the sport. As the players performed a lap of honor following their victory against Alkmaar, taking a salute from the ultras behind the goal, Keane stood by, watching on beaming. He had been relaxed and uncharacteristically chatty even before the match. When a packed stadium is celebrating his victory, he may wonder if he really needs Ireland. Listening to Keane talk warmly about his new apartment, and the local restaurant scene, he seemed to be reveling in his new Hungarian future.

In footballing terms, Keane’s next task is to win a seventh league title in a row, although Sunday’s 0-0 draw with MTK represented a slightly flat start. Yet here, once more, politics threatens to encroach onto the pitch. At the moment, Ferencváros are second in the standings. Ahead of them are Puskás Akadémia — an Orbán brainchild based in his home village of Felcsút. Given every top-flight club has some relationship with Fidesz, and it becomes very hard to look at the Hungarian league and argue that politics and football can truly be separated.

Keane last week compared himself with Roy Hodgson, who pursued an itinerant career before coming back to manage England. Although he implied he would ultimately like a job in the Premier League, he also spoke of a 20-year managerial career and being in no rush. Politics, though, might already have scuppered any dream of going home to manage Ireland.

Many others piled in. “My mother was born in Nazi Germany and had to flee for her life,” wrote David Baddiel. “I’m OK with it. So fuck off.” Much was aimed at the Daily Mail. One comment which captured the spirit of anti-Daily Mailers simply said: “Ha ha ha ha!.. I’m loving this appointment, if only for how much it triggers the little englander gammons.” A Labour councillor had the same thought: “It’s exactly the kind of pathetic Little Englander comment expected from the Mail.”

The reaction to Tuchel’s appointment certainly reveals much about Britain today. One obvious conclusion is that to be a “Little Englander” remains the ultimate faux pas in polite society, universally understood as a bad thing combining all that is wrong and embarrassing about our country: small-minded, parochial, uncouth and, well, embarrassing.

Rather than being a distinctive set of views, Little Englandism is more of a sensibility marking out the stupid in the eyes of their betters. See, for instance, how the former Sun editor turned anti-Brexit commentator, David Yelland, described the recent brouhaha about Taylor Swift’s security as “utterly ridiculous, Little Englander, pathetic and damaging to the reputation of the country”. What will the neighbours think remains the most powerful instinct in English life and a core tenet of anti-Little Englandism. A large dose of the shame many felt, and feel, about Brexit is reputational.

To admit to being in any way uncomfortable with Tuchel’s appointment is, then, to reveal a characteristic that automatically makes you suspect, perhaps even a little conservative — or worst of all, Brexity. The historian Linda Colley has described Little Englandism as the reaction to the loss of Empire, or “the other side of unparalleled imperial dominion”, as she put it: “A cleaving to the small and the relatively known in the face of alarm or fatigue or disgust at the prospect of the very large and very strange.”

“Cleaving to the known” is not a respectable look any more. What is prized is a sense of well-travelled ease and gentle sophistication: to understand what everything means on the menu and to abhor the kind of English nationalism that is the preserve of the “skinheads, lager louts, and soccer hooligans”, as the New Yorker put it in an essay on Brexit. This was the essential analysis of the Irish historian Fintan O’Toole, too, who believed such Little Englandism had been largely suppressed “until David Cameron blithely gave it a vast stage in June 2016”.

But it did not always carry this connotation. It was originally adopted in the late 19th century to criticise those who opposed the British empire. The term was adopted by Britain’s most enthusiastic imperialists whose poet and prophet was Rudyard Kipling, and who had used his “Recessional”, first printed in the Times in 1897, to warn Britain that it must take up imperial duties, lest:

If drunk with the sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law.

As J.B. Priestley wrote in The Edwardians, not everyone shared that view. “I remain a ‘Little Englander’,” he wrote, irrespective of the label, “believing that no people are good enough to rule other people thousands of miles away.” But this understanding of Little Englandism has almost entirely vanished.

It was during post-war Britain that it changed subtly from meaning small-minded socialist opposition to empire, to small-minded socialist opposition to Europe. In the parliamentary debates over the Schuman declaration of 1950 — proposing a new supranational entity called the European Coal and Steel Community, the precursor to today’s EU — Winston Churchill was mocked from the Labour benches for his “champagne” continentalism, which was contrasted with their “honest draft” of British socialism that they represented. At the time, most Conservative Eurosceptics were “empire loyalists” who could not be defined as Little Englanders because they were concerned primarily with maintaining British power overseas.

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As the winds of change blew through the British empire, the instinct to attack Little Englanders passed from the old imperialists to the new pro-Europeans who saw the EEC as a vehicle to protect British influence in the world. Just as Colley identified Little Englandism as “the other side of unparalleled imperial dominion”, so too is British pro-Europeanism.

For Ted Heath, the first — and last — genuinely federalist prime minister to hold office, Europe was always the means to make Britain great again. From the beginning, then, the animating spirit of Britain’s pro-European movement has been tied up with a desire for greatness — or at least relevance. A good example of this tendency came in an interview with the former head of the Secret Intelligence Service, Alex Younger, who described how he came back from a recent trip around Europe “profoundly depressed… nobody mentions the UK”.

Worse even than the neighbours sniggering at us, then, is the neighbours forgetting that we’re here. Do the Little Englanders not understand this? “What should they know of England who only England know?” Kipling asked. Priestley’s response was simple enough: “A great deal Imperialism chose to ignore.” “While it was busy painting so much of the world map a bright red, hundreds of thousands of houses down England’s mean streets could have done with a lick of paint.” It is an argument that has never really changed.

What is so striking about the evolution of the idea of Little Englandism in post-war Britain is that it managed to retain its negative connotation while completely changing who it applied to. And as with the reaction to Tuchel, it is possible to catch glimpses of this evolution through football.

As Dominic Sandbrook points out in his account of the early Seventies, State of Emergency, when Heath signed the Treaty of Accession taking Britain into the EEC, the Labour leader, Harold Wilson, chose to display his patriotic disinterest by not only staying in Britain to avoid giving his blessing, but going to a football match. He was an ordinary Englishmen.

Attempting to counteract this, Heath tried to sell Britain’s entry into Europe by staging an international friendly football match at Wembley in which a combined eleven from the six original EEC members took on a team from Britain, Denmark and Ireland, the bloc’s three new members. Pat Jennings, Bobby Charlton, Johnny Giles and Peter Lorimer turned out for the “Three”, while Dino Zoff, Franz Beckenbauer, Ruud Krol and Johan Neeskens played for the “Six”. Yet the public reacted with a notable lack of interest, with only 36,000 turning up for the occasion.

Back in the Seventies, English football was far more parochial, with almost all the managers and players either English, British or Irish. Ironically, however, this was also the time of English dominance in Europe. In the 12 years between British entry into the EEC, in 1973, and the Heysel stadium disaster of 1985, after which all English teams were banned from European competition, English club sides reached the final of the European Cup nine times and won the competition seven times — including six times in a row between 1977 and 1982. For all the financial dominion of the Premier League today, and its access to the best foreign talent and managers, it has never come close to the success it knew when it was run by the Little England gammons of old.

Curiously, English football has almost entirely managed to swerve the Little Englandism stigma that has attached itself to other mass entertainments. In fact, so successfully has football adapted to the post-war growth of the educated middle class, that to be a fan today still offers the kind of everyman credibility that it did for Wilson in the Seventies, without any hint of disreputability that might come from, say, a visit to a UFC fight. Today, the Prime Minister is expected to understand and comment about football and even welcome the appointment of the new England manager.

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Just as Britain is much more middle class than it was, so too is football. Our pundits are expected to adhere to the social expectations of its fans, avoiding any hint of parochial backwardness. A host of football podcasts now describe the sophistication and quality of continental football, mocking the provincialism of pundits such as Richard Keys and Andy Gray who dominated in the Nineties before being sacked for “prehistoric banter”. Today, the pair are the highly paid frontmen of the Qatar-based BeIN Sports where they talk about the English game with what today’s generation see as similarly prehistoric views. The stain of “Little Englandism” is now as toxic in football as it is in most other aspects of middle-class life. To be critical of Thomas Tuchel’s appointment is to emit a whiff of that small-minded parochialism.

Such instincts are not new. Even George Orwell, who admired what he saw as the gentle patriotism of the English, remarked upon the “insularity” of his countrymen and their “refusal to take foreigners seriously”. Perhaps this was true in the Forties, but it’s hard to argue that today despite the reaction of some former players and pundits to Tuchel’s appointment.

There is not another football league in the world which is as global in its reach or talent as the Premier League. Where there were hardly any foreign managers in the league in the Seventies, today 80% of Premier League managers are foreign. In fact, since the Premier League’s inception in 1992, not a single English manager has guided a team to the league. Tuchel is the third foreign manager to take on the England job after Sven Goren Erikson and Fabio Capello, neither of whom did as well as Gareth Southgate.

In contrast, not one of Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Brazil or Argentina have appointed a foreign manager to take on their national team. For all the knee-jerk reaction to the Little Englander gammons who criticised the appointment of a GERMAN, English football, much like its economy, is not marked by its insularity but the opposite — its distinctive openness. While the French rule yoghurt manufacturers to be of strategic national interest unable to be bought by overseas investors, we let the French build our core energy infrastructure. The irony of the Little England charge, in other words, is that the real marker of European sophistication would be to be less open to the world — and less English.

The appointment of Thomas Tuchel, then, is not a departure in any sense, but another example of globalised England. We don’t just get the Germans to manage our football team, we have the French running our power stations, the Emirates running our ports and the Chinese buying up pretty much anything they want — provided the Americans don’t notice. George Osborne got a Canadian to run Britain’s monetary policy and wanted an American to head up the police. Perhaps we should put the premiership and Treasury out to tender too. We know what the neighbours think, they are right here. Those complaining about Little Englanders holding the country back have not been paying attention. Little England died a long time ago.

Half an hour before kick-off, an ugly grey-yellow cloud drifted over the ground and unleashed a ferocious hailstorm, worsening conditions significantly. But the decision had been made. A large crowd was already inside. The game was going ahead. Charlie Hurley, Sunderland’s revered captain, missed an early penalty. Even 50 years later, he was asking himself whether things might have been different had he converted it. Then, with 27 minutes played, Clough chased a slightly overhit through-ball. Had Sunderland been 1-0 up, might he have been slightly less aggressive?

Clough stretched for the ball and collided with the Bury goalkeeper Chris Harker. As Harker’s shoulder crunched into high right knee, Clough flipped over the top of him and hit his head on the icy ground. For a couple of seconds, there was darkness. Then he tried to get up but his leg would not respond. He crawled hopelessly and then collapsed; both medial and cruciate ligaments were torn. Clough’s career as a centre-forward was over.

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the death of Clough from stomach cancer at the age of 69. Yet he remains a surprisingly constant presence in the mind of English football, the ideal of a particular type of manager, irascible, unpredictable and charismatic, a leader who inspired his teams largely by force of personality. He lives on in countless clips in which he is outrageous, charming and funny, most notably the episode of Calendar on the day he had been sacked by Leeds in which he and his predecessor Don Revie go toe-to-toe.

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It’s extraordinary television and has drawn comparison with the debate between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960 when those who listened on the radio thought Nixon had come out on top, while those who watched on television believed the handsome Kennedy had run rings around his sweating opponent. Here too, if you actually listen to the words, Revie makes some good points, but it doesn’t matter, because he is ponderous and thickset, while Clough is nimble, sharp and amusingly provocative. He is also, fairly obviously, pissed.

It wasn’t until the late Nineties when the Arsenal captain Tony Adams spoke publicly about his struggles with addiction that football began to take its relationship with booze seriously. That Clough descended into alcoholism is well known but it tends to be an addendum to his story. His appearance in his final season at Nottingham Forest, when he oversaw their relegation 16 years after he’d led them to promotion, couldn’t be ignored, his skin turned now red and blotchy. It happened to be the season of great change in English football when the First Division switched to the Premiership and the sense was that the new football had no place for mavericks like Clough.

It was a convenient framing. The iconoclast who, armed with little more than a sharp wit, dragged himself up from Hartlepools, got Derby promoted and won the league with them, blew up at Leeds, served his time in the wilderness at Brighton and then returned to lead Forest in the space of four seasons to promotion, a league title and two European Cups, before finding the economics of football had rendered obsolete his brand of messianic unorthodoxy.

And it wasn’t untrue. But there is another way of looking at Clough’s story. He was a prolific and brilliant goalscorer for Middlesbrough then Sunderland, scoring 250 goals in 271 league games before the injury, all in the Second Division. His only top-flight goal came in one of the three matches he played as he attempted a comeback in 1964-65 before accepting, aged 29, that his career was over. Even in the second flight, though, he’d forced his way into the England reckoning; there’s a not especially fanciful alternate reality in which he didn’t get injured, Sunderland were promoted in 1962-63 (rather than missing out by a single point having played half a season without his goals) and he was in the England squad when they won the World Cup in 1966.

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Before the injury, Clough was almost teetotal. “He never had a smoke or a drink — well, maybe a half, you know, when he went out,” said his Middlesbrough team-mate Derek McLean. Clough and other Boro players used to go to a café owned by popstar Chris Rea’s father, Camillo, who persuaded him to replace his regular milkshakes with Oxo as a healthier option.

But the injury changed him. After an operation, Clough was in plaster for three months and admitted he would lie on his bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking of how little he had to offer. Brian alone among the eight Clough children who survived to adolescence had failed his 11-plus. He then failed an apprenticeship at ICI. Without his goals, he was just somebody who hadn’t been able to cut it as a turner-and-fitter. He went through arduous rehab, running up the steps in the stadium and along the beach at Roker, but it wasn’t enough. He showed some promise coaching the youth team but Sunderland, desperate for the insurance money that would come when it was confirmed his injury was career-ending, were callous in letting him go. He became embittered and began to drink.

Clough clearly idolised his mother who, at least in his telling of the story, prioritised academic achievement over anything else. Failing his 11-plus clearly hurt, and he seemed never quite to forgive his brother Bill for mocking him over it on the day he got his results. The “immaculate” Bill, he said, “was Mam’s favourite son. I never was. Perhaps it was because he won the teapot in a ‘lovely baby’ competition and I didn’t. Still… I had a reasonable consolation prize by winning the European Cup — twice.”

It’s a strikingly odd comparison, but it’s one that recurs. “I don’t have any O-levels, I don’t have any A-levels,” he said in a TV interview after his retirement, “and when my children chastise me and give me stick… I put my European Cup medals on the table, my Championship medals. I’ve got a tableful — they’re my O-levels and A-levels.” Throughout his career, Clough was reliably anti-intellectual, and yet his 11-plus clearly haunted him. There’s a sense even that his entire managerial career was an attempt to make up for that failure with his mother.

Clough’s Derby County were controversially beaten by Juventus in the semi-final of the 1973 European Cup. In both his autobiographies and countless interviews, he spoke of his distress that night, coming home and receiving the phone call that his mother had died. But it wasn’t true. She had actually died a month earlier, on the night that Derby had beaten Spartak Trnava in the quarter-final. Is it too much of a stretch to wonder if he conflated the events because he had vowed in his own mind that winning the European Cup would earn his mother’s approbation, and that, as he saw it, cheating Italians had stolen that from him?

If that is the case, if winning the European Cup to honour his mother’s memory became a grail, then suddenly his otherwise incomprehensible decision a year later to take over at Leeds United, a club he had repeatedly attacked, becomes explicable: as league champions, they were in the European Cup and so offered an immediate pathway to his ultimate goal. As it turned out, he lasted just 44 tempestuous days at Leeds and the European Cup wins came in 1979 and 1980, with Nottingham Forest. 

The achievement was remarkable, but behind it all lay booze. When a friend visited him in his hotel in Leeds to help look for a house, Clough preferred to lie on the bed, drinking cans of beer, watching the cricket on television — as though perhaps he knew even then that there was no point buying property there. There was booze to calm everybody’s nerves on the night before major finals, booze to celebrate wins, booze to deal with the eternal grind of one game after another, booze to deal with the pain of his break-up with his old friend and assistant Peter Taylor and, in the end, booze just to get by.

The European Cup in 1980 was Clough’s last great success. There were League Cups after that but by the early Nineties, idiosyncrasy and eccentricity had become unreliability and rudeness, his genius had curdled into cantankerousness. After relegation came treatment, excruciating television appearances, illness and death.

Clough’s brilliance is undeniable. Only three other managers have ever won the league with more than one club, and nobody has done it with two medium-sized provincial sides; he had an extraordinary gift. But he never escaped the shame of his 11-plus, never got over the knee injury that denied him playing glory, never perhaps felt he had earned the love of his mother. And his response was to drown himself in alcohol.

His story was one of greatness, but behind the charisma and the outrageousness, it is also one of tragedy.

While the players themselves stayed at a remote castle, the WAGs and other family members were billeted at the luxurious Brenners Park Hotel, on one side of which green screens, reminiscent of those they put around stricken horses at the Grand National, were erected so they could sunbathe on the lawns unmolested by the paparazzi. Which meant that when they did venture out, there was a feeding frenzy.

It was unlike any other tournament I’ve covered. On one morning, I went for a run along that path and was almost flattened by a photographer falling out of a tree as he strained for a shot over the screens. At the time, it seemed an entirely mundane occurrence. Every night, after hearing rumours about their location, we’d rush off to see a large group of WAGs at a club or in a bar or dancing on the table at an unsuspecting Italian restaurant, surrounded by their entourages and photographers and reporters, as the well-heeled elderly tourists who comprise much of Baden-Baden’s regular summer population watched on in bemusement. Occasionally, the players would come to visit. Rio Ferdinand pushed in front of me in the queue at a gelateria.

For those journalists fortunate enough to be staying at the Brenners Park — how long ago expense accounts like that seem now — there was a rich harvest to be reaped by hanging around the bar, listening to second-hand accounts of what the players were saying, who was slagging off whom and who was sleeping with whom. It was gossipy, bitchy, enthralling and exhausting. It was the moment when English football definitively became part of celebrity culture, and totally unsuitable for the business of winning a major football tournament. Perhaps in hindsight, even though 9/11 had happened and Iraq had been invaded, there was an air of complacency, everybody high on Germany’s Sommermärchen in the days before the Crash.

England went out in the quarter-final and Eriksson, who died yesterday aged 76, resigned soon after. By then, there was a sense of frustration, a feeling that he had not quite got the most out of a fine group of players cursed by Adam Crozier, the chief executive of the Football Association, with the Golden Generation tag. It felt the off-field activities had become too big a distraction — the affairs, the endless endorsements, the Fake Sheikh sting. Certainly, Eriksson didn’t seem able to deal with the fact that the Golden Generation didn’t really make sense as a team, that one or more needed to be dropped so a less glamorous figure could offer defensive cover, a coherent midfield sacrificed on the altar of celebrity.

But there was no great sense of bitterness. Eriksson was too charming for that. His great strength had been that he didn’t ever seem that bothered by anything, that he treated triumph and defeat alike with a sigh and a drawn-out, “Welllll….” Given his predecessor as England manager Kevin Keegan had tearfully quit in the Wembley toilets after a World Cup qualifying defeat to Germany, such calmness was both welcome and invigorating. What if we treated players like adults? What if management was not about spittle-flecked sergeant-majorly bellowing but about consensus?

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Turning to a foreign manager was, effectively, an admission of defeat by England, a recognition the system had failed. Justifiable concerns about whether it was really the done thing for a major footballing nation to appoint a foreigner bled into base xenophobia. Others might have quailed before that. Eriksson shrugged. And it helped, obviously, that he got results.

Towards the end of his first year in the job, in September 2001, 10 days before 9/11, England went to Germany needing a win to have any chance of beating them to the one automatic qualifying slot. Given England had not won in Germany since 1965 and Germany had lost only one of their previous 60 World Cup qualifiers, few gave them much chance. But it was one of those hallucinatory games in which the usual rules seem not to apply. England went behind but then equalised, then took the lead, then kept on scoring, eventually winning 5-1.

Sven, as everybody by then called him, suddenly became a messianic figure who transcended football. Sales of Ericsson mobile phones went through the roof. A 10-year-old boy had his hair cut to resemble Eriksson’s. It took an injury-time David Beckham free-kick against Greece, but England did qualify for the 2002 World Cup ahead of Germany. It was, though, Germany who, having gone through the play-offs, late got through to the final, while England went out to Brazil. Had Beckham not just returned from a fractured metatarsal, might he have made a better fist of stopping the break that led to the equaliser? Perhaps, but Eriksson was never going to drop Beckham.

Yet alongside the celebrity worship, there was a willingness to embrace youth. It was Eriksson who made Wayne Rooney the youngest ever England international before Euro 2004, and until Rooney broke his own metatarsal in the quarter-final, he looked capable of dragging England to glory almost single-handed. As other major names faltered, England looked like potential winners, even if a midfield of Beckham, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard and Paul Scholes lacked width on the left, pace on the right and solidity in the middle.

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By 2006, in truth, it had all gone a little stale; the porous midfield had become a little too familiar. Eriksson was the first manager to lead England to three successive quarter-finals, but the last was by far the least impressive of them. Treating players like adults, it turned out, led to Baden-Baden. Gareth Southgate’s assessment from the Brazil defeat in 2002 seemed damning: “We needed Churchill but we got Ian Duncan Smith.” England, seeking difference, turned to an Englishman and then to a martinet, but miserable reigns of Steve McClaren and Fabio Capello only served to cast Eriksson’s stint in a rosier light.

To remember only Baden-Baden, though, is to ignore what a great manager Eriksson had been. He was only 30 when, in 1979, he was appointed manager of IFK Gothenburg. He was a revolutionary, heavily influenced by English football and, in particular, by the success of Bobby Houghton with Malmö and Roy Hodgson with Halmstad. It was one thing for English managers to come to Sweden, bin the libero and play with a zonal system, but when a Swede started doing it, it caused an outcry; to some, he may have been too Swedish for England, but he had once been too English for Sweden. One newspaper jokingly printed an advert offering the middle of Gothenburg’s pitch for rent, given Eriksson’s direct style meant it wasn’t much used during games.

But it brought two Swedish Cups and a Uefa Cup — the first European trophy ever won by a Scandinavian club — and earned him a move to Benfica, where he won three Portuguese titles and reached a European Cup final. He capped two decades of success in the club game by leading Lazio to only the second Italian league title in their history. And he did it all with a sense that life was there to be lived and that it wasn’t really worth getting too worked up about anything.

Perhaps the most emblematic story came from Didi Hamann, the German midfielder whose goal at Wembley led to Keegan’s resignation and Eriksson’s appointment. He played under Eriksson at Manchester City and recalled one morning on tour in Thailand in 2008. Everybody knew Eriksson was on his way out of the club and Hamann, considering his own future, was sitting pensively alone on a sunlounger by the hotel pool. He looked up and saw Eriksson approaching, carrying a tray on which sat two glasses of champagne. He handed one to Hamman, who asked what they were celebrating.

Eriksson touched his glass to Hamann’s. “Life, Kaiser,” he said, “Life.”

While David Peace’s Munichs, published this month, centres on one of English sport’s worst tragedies — when, on 6 February 1958, a plane taking Manchester United back home from a European match crashed on take-off at Munich airport, leaving 23 passengers dead, including eight players — his setting is broader.

This is a story of Fifties England, regarded by the nostalgic as football’s golden age. It is also a story of modern England, a reflection on what we have lost.

These were the days when the game was dominated by clubs in the industrial heartlands of northern England and the Midlands. Wolverhampton Wanderers, one of the founding clubs in the Football League, won three titles that decade and beat some of Europe’s best in floodlit games televised by the BBC. TV ownership boomed in the coronation year of 1953, allowing the nation to watch two Lancashire clubs, Blackpool and Bolton Wanderers, contest that year’s FA Cup final. The sport of the industrial working class had become the national game and the country had never felt more united.

It was in the mid-Fifties, as “austerity Britain” turned into “modernity Britain”, that a young Manchester United team emerged to rival Wolves for glamour. The press began calling them “the Busby Babes”. When the Irish football broadcaster and former Manchester United player Eamon Dunphy first saw them as a youngster, he was struck by their “trim and dashing” modern V-necked red shirts. As he describes in his biography of Matt Busby, A Strange Kind of Glory, the Busby Babes were “unearthly, handsome creatures from another planet, more heroic than any movie star we’d seen or could imagine”. Football fans crowded grounds to see them play.

When news of the crash broke, millions followed the reports on their televisions. A stoical nation was broken. There was some initial cause for hope: Duncan Edwards, the 21-year-old shining star of the team, already capped by England 18 times, clung to life in hospital for 15 days. In Peace’s prose, sometimes sentimental, always heartfelt, Edwards was “a magnificent boy, always cheerful, always smiling, always ready for a laugh and a giggle; he was a lovely lad, and now he was gone”.

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As the mourning begins in this powerful and moving story, Peace sees colour being drained from the nation. On the day of Edwards’s funeral in Dudley, he writes: “That Black Wednesday in the Black Country, the world was white at first that day, with sleet, with snow, but then was turned to grey and black and into slush and mud by the thousands upon thousands.” But the generosity of this novel lies in its refusal to elevate one player above another, a democratic style and spirit that is both intrinsic to how Peace writes and in tune with the team he describes. “We don’t like picking out individuals at Old Trafford,” is how Jimmy Murphy puts it, the Manchester United coach who had the grim task of putting together a new team after the crash.

The approach can be demanding on the reader. Munichs skips none of the funerals, including those of the club officials and football reporters who died in the disaster, and we are made to feel each loss, in all its draining detail. Precise funeral routes are to Munichs what league tables and crowd figures are to The Damned Utd (2006) and Red or Dead (2013), Peace’s earlier football novels.

Matt Busby survived the disaster but did not want to go on living. He was unable to forgive himself for taking the club into Europe and for not protesting when the pilot insisted on another attempt at take-off. The book has him attending his first match after the crash, still on crutches, but he can’t see the game properly for the “young, red ghosts”.

I picked up Munichs sure that its redemptive climax would be Manchester United’s European Cup final triumph of 1968. That revival, the greatest story in English club football, came 10 years after the tragedy. It was the day when another scarred survivor, Bobby Charlton, fell onto Matt Busby’s chest in tears, the day when the ghosts of Munich were laid to rest.

For David Peace, though, the climax comes three months after the crash, that same season, when Manchester United reached the FA Cup final. The story he tells is one of overcoming and of hope. It includes the less celebrated role of Jimmy Murphy, right-hand man to Busby, who carried his own guilt for not being on the fatal flight. The new team he assembled was made up of reserve players — some who’d carried their teammates’ coffins — untried teens and the few traumatised survivors. Getting to Wembley should have been impossible.

Manchester United were carried to that final on a wave of popular emotion. It wasn’t just the city behind them, it was a nation. That feeling was still there, 10 years later, when they became the first English team to win the European Cup in 1968. If some accounts are to be believed, the moment was celebrated as enthusiastically across the country as England’s World Cup triumph two years earlier.

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The choice of title for the novel is a curious one to me. As a more partisan and aggressive fan culture took hold in the Seventies, “Munichs” became a collective term of abuse for all Manchester United fans, just as chants of “Munich 58” and “Who’s that dying on the runway?” would be directed against them. Liverpool fans were the most persistent offenders, resentful of what they saw as a media obsession with their by then inferior rivals and apparently forgetting that Matt Busby had once played for Liverpool. Astonishingly, Manchester City fans did the same.

Something had become twisted in the people’s game. One night in May 1985, 39 fans died in Heysel Stadium after a charge by Liverpool supporters. As the cameras ranged across the wreckage after the riot, flags with the slogan “Munich 58” were still proudly displayed on the terraces. Liverpool fans only stopped singing about Munich after the Hillsborough disaster.

In The Game of our Lives (2014), David Goldblatt suggested that the post-war image of the English as a “big national football family” was a “cosy” one. Peace’s novel is saved from a cosy nostalgia, an idealisation of an age, by portraying some of the harsher sentiments present even in those days. On a visit to Burnley, soon after the crash, Manchester United players faced abusive chants. “IT’S A PITY THEY DIDN’T ALL DIE!” Following the game, Burnley’s chairman, Bob Lord, suggested Manchester United should remember that there were other clubs in football and not just them.

Munichs will no doubt provoke thoughts about today’s game. Reading about Tommy Taylor, who came to Old Trafford from a Yorkshire pit village with his football boots wrapped in brown paper and an “earnest desire to want, to really, really bloody fucking want to play for Manchester United”, makes you want to press the novel into the hands of the some of the red-shirted multi-millionaires who have strolled the pitch in recent years, looking like they felt they should be somewhere better.

But the passing of a more dignified, self-effacing footballing age is perhaps not the principal regret of this novel. Reading Munichs, I found myself thinking back to an earlier David Peace novel, GB84 (2004), his epic story of the Miners’ Strike set a generation on from the Munich disaster. As well as being the “backbone of the nation”, the mining industry was the backbone of British football success, giving us the three greatest managers of the post-war era: Bill Shankly, Jock Stein and Matt Busby. GB84 shows how the miners were turned into the “enemies of the people”, how entire communities — those that gave us three of the Munich dead as well as Bobby Charlton, perhaps the greatest of English footballers — were criminalised and brutalised and never recovered from the traumatic blows.

In the Eighties, football looked like it would be going the same way as the industrial towns — down. Today, the game thrives even in “left-behind” places like Bolton, Burnley and Stoke. Match attendances across the country are at levels not seen since the early-Fifties. As Jonathan Wilson recently observed, football is a source of civic pride and belonging, “pretty much the only marker of identity” when “there is nothing else”.

This is a troubling thought. The rich associational culture of post-war England, with its high level of engagement in political parties, friendly societies and churches, has long disappeared, and the public realm has been hollowed out further in the years of austerity. The destruction of Spellow library in Liverpool during the recent rioting provoked outrage, but since 2010 a fifth of all public libraries have been closed by hard-pressed local authorities with little protest. In our impoverished social and cultural landscape, with populist and anti-immigrant parties filling the void, it can seem that football is the only positive thing to bring people together.

Buried within David Peace’s story of a devastated football club is this idea of a greater loss: of solidarity and collective feeling. He is not only remembering a past era, when the English working class was held in high esteem, but writing for today. We can only hope that, within the wreckage of the past and the story of the rebuilding of a football team, there might lie inspiration for the present.

Yet as it happened, fears about an orgy of racist violence proved unfounded. It may even be, as a couple of official bodies acknowledged privately, that the return of football helped mitigate the threat of further discord.

It might seem flippant to suggest that there’s no time to riot when you’ve got Coventry away, but the links between football and the far-Right can’t be denied. The English Defence League (EDL) emerged in March 2008 when a group calling itself the United People of Luton organised against local Muslims protesting the return of troops from Afghanistan. Common cause was found with various hooligan firms associated with football clubs, and by the summer there were EDL branches run by firms across the country.

This sporting symbiosis is not unusual, and certainly not unique to Britain. For those seeking to deploy bodies on the streets, hooligan groups are enormously useful: they are organised, have a clear leadership structure and are used to fighting the police. In 1997, for instance, when the mayor of Cacak, Velja Iljic, led the march on Belgrade that culminated in the toppling of Slobodan Milosevic, he was joined by the Delije, the hardcore fans of Crvena Zvezda who had formed the core of Arkan’s troops during the civil war. In Argentina, meanwhile, the barras bravas football gangs have essentially become muscle for hire.

Even so, it would be wrong to see Britain’s recent riots as eruptions of football hooliganism — or at least to see them purely as such. As Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said last week, while some of those who have been convicted have football banning orders, around 70% “have previous convictions for weapon possession, violence, drugs and other serious offences”.

Rowley spoke of “thugs and criminals”, but there is a sense of groups intersecting. The riot in Sunderland came the night before three skinhead bands were scheduled to play in the city at a “Blood and Honour” gig which, according to Hope Not Hate, drew neo-Nazis from as far away as Stoke-on-Trent. A sense of being left behind seems to play a part: according to the Government’s Indices of Deprivation, seven of the 10 most deprived towns in the UK have witnessed riots, although it may be that Right-wing groups have targeted those areas rather than the violence being a spontaneous outbreak of despair or nihilism. Covid vaccine-scepticism seems to have radicalised another tranche of society, sending them into the orbit of the far-Right.

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But it’s also the case that some find rioting intoxicating. Talking to hooligans in Eastern Europe for my book Behind the Curtain, a recurring theme was how many just enjoyed fighting: it wasn’t a by-product or a means to an end; the fighting was the point. In a Czech bar near Moscow Zoo, I met Oleg, a heavyset member of a Spartak firm in his forties. “The best thing,” he explained, “is fighting with police in other countries. You throw things at them and then they run at you and you fight.” This is also one of the key insights of the US academic Bill Buford’s 1991 book Among the Thugs: for some, violence is fun.

The easy mistake is to see far-Right attitudes as characteristic of football. Given how violence has largely been eliminated from stadiums, it’s debatable to what extent the remaining hooligan groups can even be considered a football problem. The yob fan was always a lazy and misleading stereotype, even in the days when stands were urine-stained theatres of violence, neo-Nazis a visible presence at games and racist chanting commonplace. Leeds United fans, for instance, ran a successful campaign against the National Front in the late Eighties, based around the fanzine Marching on Together. Today, Britain’s most influential national football campaign is arguably Kick It Out.

In reality, football has always been too big to be defined by one outlook alone. Rather, particularly in post-industrial provincial cities, it has become a signifier of a place’s identity. If, say, Sunderland or Leicester are thought of at all by the wider population these days, it tends to be in the context of football. Even large British cities are now best-known globally for football: ask a taxi driver in Beirut or Bangalore what he knows of Liverpool, and he’ll probably be aware of the Beatles but will almost certainly have heard of Mohamed Salah.

That gives football a curiously powerful role that still hasn’t been fully appreciated. Take the Indices of Deprivation: of the 12 most deprived towns in its list that have suffered riots — Middlesbrough, Blackpool, Liverpool, Hartlepool, Hull, Manchester, Blackburn, Nottingham, Sunderland, Stoke, Bolton — only Hartlepool has not had a Premier League club in the past two decades.

And perhaps this shouldn’t come as a surprise. For all that it’s gentrified over the past 30 years, for all the glamour at the elite level of the game, for all the domination by overseas investment, football remains the great sport of the industrial heartlands. When there is nothing else, with churches, trade unions, even political parties in retreat, football becomes pretty much the only marker of identity. If you were an agitator wishing to gain ready acceptance in one of those towns, the easiest way would be to pull on the shirt of the local team.

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That has led to a curious subtext over the past fortnight: the attempts to control the message of the shirt. While a handful of the rioters in Sunderland were wearing SAFC shirts, the following day a far greater proportion of those who volunteered for the clean-up were wearing them. It’s an issue of which the MP for Sunderland Central, Lewis Atkinson, who turned up for the clean-up in an away shirt from the Seventies, is acutely aware. “When I got dressed that morning,” he said, “I just knew I wanted to wear that shirt. To me it stemmed from a determination to not allow a minority of thugs to own the most precious identity in Sunderland, to show that it was those of us sweeping away the shards of hate who were the true Sunderland.”

The point here is that while there is a relationship between football and the far-Right, there is a stronger relationship between football clubs and their local communities — even as top-level clubs increasingly come to feel like quasi-global franchises. And those communities, as the clean-up operations and the anti-racism demonstrations have shown, are opposed to the riots.

At 11.19pm on the night of the riots in Sunderland, Sunderland AFC posted a message on X condemning the violence, saying it did not “represent our culture, our history, or our people. Our great city is built on togetherness and acceptance, and Sunderland will forever be for all.” This was a club not as an inadvertent projection of regional identity, but one embracing its role as a community leader. And in doing so, it confirmed something important: the rioting is not a football problem, but football has a role to play in the aftermath.

Southgate’s contract expires in December, an enlightened piece of timing that means a decision on his future, whether he will lead England into the next World Cup, does not have to be taken in the emotionally heightened circumstances of the immediate aftermath of the Euros. The sense of stability is unprecedented in English football; the contrast to what is going on in British politics unavoidable. Barring something remarkable between now and the election on 4 July, Southgate will have been manager under five different prime ministers — and he missed David Cameron by only a couple of months. Even Alf Ramsey, who spent more than a decade in the job, only got through four. 

But perhaps the inversion makes sense as politics has become increasingly footballised. As Westminster has become characterised by hyper-partisanship, leaders playing to their base with outrageous claims and demands for a change at the top as a panacea to any ill, so the England manager has become increasingly statesmanlike. 

And yet, it is precisely because of Southgate’s achievements that there is pressure, precisely because he has been there for so long that there is some impatience. If England can’t win something now, then when will they ever break the drought that has endured since 1966? Since the 2018 World Cup, the narrative has shifted: Southgate is no longer the waistcoated magus, conjuring remarkable performances from an unexceptional squad; he is the dull bureaucrat holding back a generation of unprecedented creative talent. Perhaps a Keir Starmer parallel is a stretch, but sometimes the country just needs a refreshing dose of dullness.

The boring truth, as ever, lies somewhere between the two extremes. Southgate’s three unexceptional years in charge of Middlesbrough — which ended in relegation — would never have been enough to have made him a serious candidate for the England job in normal times. But in the context of Sam Allardyce having been forced out just 69 days after his arrival by the Telegraph’s underwhelming sting — which revealed nothing more than his willingness to accept huge sums of money to give speeches overseas and to offer advice to agents seeking to comply with the Premier League’s third-party contract regulations — England just needed somebody available and uncontroversial.

Southgate had been England’s Under-21 manager and was working with the FA on its various development programmes — making him at least partially responsible for the glut of attacking talent he is now supposedly restricting. He never sought the top job, rather it was thrust upon him. As he led England through qualification and then to the semi-final of the 2018 World Cup, there was a sense of him as a Richard Hannay figure, an accidental hero. Set against the chaotic backdrop of the Brexit negotiations, Southgate seemed an old-fashioned English hero, modest and decent in his waistcoat, his strength nothing flashy or extravagant but a quiet determination, backed up by dogged research. 

For the first time at a World Cup, England won a penalty shoot-out, the result of diligent practice and work with psychologists. Set-plays became a major weapon: again, something planned, but an unglamorous way of winning. The country was gripped by a strange euphoria. England had been dismal in every tournament since Euro 2004; this was the unleashing of a great pent-up patriotic wave.

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Tournaments are deceptive spaces, their place in the popular consciousness far more down to their vibe than any actual detail. In the aftermath of their elimination by Iceland at Euro 2016 under Roy Hodgson and then his successor’s rapid departure after being caught on camera apparently drinking a pint of wine (Allardyce was obviously drinking water, but reputation sometimes skews the perspective), England were a laughing stock and so to reach the semi-final was a remarkable achievement.

But England did lose as many games as they had won in that tournament and the draw had been very kind. There was also a sense that the semi-final against Croatia represented an opportunity missed. England had gone 1-0 up and then had apparently frozen with the line in sight. Southgate had responded slowly to Croatia taking control of midfield. Both issues would be raised again at Euro 2020.

That competition really was a golden chance squandered. Again the draw was relatively gentle — even offering up a fading Germany for a cathartic 2-0 win. The tournament was spread across Europe but, because of differing Covid regulations, England ended up playing six of their seven games at Wembley. In the final against Italy, they went 1-0 up. But again England froze as their fingers closed on the prize and again Southgate was slow to react. 

Even then, they might have won on penalties. Southgate was meticulous. He had done more work on penalties than any previous England manager. He had ended the hoodoo. If Marcus Rashford’s penalty had gone three inches to the right, England would probably have won. But it hit the post and bounced to safety, then Bukayo Saka and Jadon Sancho missed. England had fumbled the opportunity again. 

This time, there was far less sympathy. This time, as the three players who had missed were subjected to racist abuse on social media, there was a reckoning, less of Southgate than of fan behaviour at the final. A day of heavy drinking, cocaine openly consumed on the street and a fan sticking a flare up his arse culminated in a surge on Wembley and several hundred fans getting in without tickets, and fighting on the concourses. The glee of 2018 had curdled.

Southgate had begun to lose support on the political Right because of his support of players taking the knee. Then, at the World Cup in Qatar in 2022, he lost support from the Left because of his reluctance to be overly critical of the host nation.

But perhaps what is most striking is how calm he has remained discussing such subjects. He has never attacked the questioner, never sneered, never become flustered. He’s always been quite willing to discuss wider issues, when it would be very easy for him to insist that he’s just a football man. You don’t have to agree with everything he says to recognise a value in his tone, to wonder whether life mightn’t be better if more press conferences were conducted with similar consideration, thoughtfulness and graciousness.

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In terms of the football, England played well in Qatar. They were more expansive than they had been at the Euros, seemingly more confident in their creative abilities. They lost in the quarter-final but in a close game against France that could have gone either way. Maguire headed against the post at one end then Olivier Giroud’s effort at the other flicked his head and flashed in. Harry Kane missed a penalty. Another referee might have decided Saka was fouled in the build-up to France’s opener. 

Perhaps Kane’s miss from the spot eight minutes from time was a result of anxiety but this was a different quality of exit; there was no real sense of a chance wasted, just two good teams going at each other and the margins favouring France. To an extent, it was a measure of how far Southgate had brought the side that England went into a game against the reigning world champions as their near equals. And yet, the nagging thought remained that England always lose when they face good sides; it’s a thought that is not entirely explained by the fact that few teams look particularly good once you’ve beaten them.

And so Southgate goes again, into a fourth tournament. There is real expectation. Germany, Portugal, Spain and Italy, possibly the Netherlands and Belgium all look dangerous, but England and France have the best squads. Southgate’s selection has prompted talk of his ruthlessness in leaving out Marcus Rashford, Jordan Henderson, James Maddison and Jack Grelaish, as though this was a new decisiveness.

The truth is he has always been ruthless, as Joe Hart and Wayne Rooney discovered when they were left out of the squad for Russia in 2018. Southgate has always been his own man, ignoring the clamour for certain players and claims he is over-loyal, never afraid to dispose of a player if necessary; it’s just that his air of reasonableness means it often goes unnoticed. He said very early on in his reign that he wanted to stand or fall on his own terms and to that ideal he has remained true.

He has been an excellent England manager, the best since Alf Ramsey, who also battled constant accusations of overcaution. If he could only react quicker to in-game problems and get his players to lose their fear of success, he might actually win something.

Once, the rich and powerful built cathedrals or temples; now they build stadiums. The Olimpico in Rome was Mussolini’s reimagining of an amphitheatre, positioning himself as emperor. The concrete sweep of the Maracanã in Rio de Janeiro was modernism tempered by a Latin sensuality entirely in keeping with the optimistic Brazil of the late Forties. Al-Bayt, a tent emerging from the desert north of Doha, was a vast symbol of Qatar’s welcome to the world. The Groupama Arena, you suspect, is how Viktor Orbán’s Hungary likes to see itself: energetic, modern and yet rooted in history; before the main entrance are three statues, of the former players Sándor Kocsis and Flórián Albert, and of the first chairman of Ferencváros, Ferenc Springer.

As thousands mustered in support for him at the weekend, few would dispute that Orbán’s rule has been illiberal, but his achievements, at best, have been mixed. Where he has unquestionably succeeded, however, is in football. Why does it occupy so much of his energy?

Sport lies at the heart of Orbán’s project and football is his greatest love: the Groupama Arena is one of more than 40 football stadiums refurbished since he returned to power in 2010. Orbán used to play for the youth team of Videoton, a club based in Székesfehérvár near his home village of Felcsút, while his first official overseas trip in his first stint as prime minister was to the 1998 World Cup final. In 2007, when he was out of office, he founded a football academy in Felcsút, naming it after Puskás, Hungary’s greatest ever player. Six years later, the academy team was promoted to the top flight for the first time and has since qualified for Europe three times.

This was, of course, something of a political victory, too. All 12 sides in the Nemzeti Bajnokság have some sort of link to Fidész, the governing party, though none more overt than Ferencváros, who in April sealed their fifth Hungarian league title in a row. Their president since 2011 has been Gábor Kubatov, an MP and vice-president of Fidész. When we met last month, I wondered how willing he would be to get into the politics of it all — but within seconds, the familiar Fidész lines were spilling out. “We are a Christian country 1,000 years old,” he said. “We protect our heritage and history. We look after our culture and beliefs. We stopped migration at the border and we don’t allow gender ideology. As a result, Hungary has become the most secure country in Europe. You can walk safely at night in Hungarian cities.”

As for so many in Fidész, for Kubatov 2010 — the year of Orbán’s return — marks year zero. Everything is before or after that date. And for football, the picture has transformed radically for the better. It’s not just the tax breaks that have allowed the rash of new and refurbished stadiums. Before 2010, grassroots clubs were disappearing; often poorly maintained, few protested when their pitches were built over. Since 2010, however, resources have been found to build 1,590 new pitches and refurbish 2,800 others.

But why? György Szöllősi, the editor of the national sports daily Nemzety Sport, and a former head of media at the Puskás Academy, often talks of the need to reverse the underinvestment of the immediate post-communist years — but there are other more obviously important demands on the public purse, notably health and education.

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Tracing the results of investment in football infrastructure is never straightforward, but there are worse places to start than 2016, when Hungary qualified for the European Championship, their first appearance at a major finals since 1986. Although they’ve missed out on both World Cups since, they also qualified for both Euro 2020 and 2024 and will play in the highest tier of the 2024-25 Nations League, having twice beaten England in the last edition. And, for the first time in a long time, there is a clutch of Hungarian players at top European clubs — notably Dominik Szoboszlai at Liverpool and Péter Gulácsi and Willi Orbán (no relation) at RB Leipzig. Progress for club sides has been less striking but since 2010, the Hungarian league has risen from 32nd in the Uefa ranking of coefficients to 23rd.

The other big change in football since 2010 has been the crowds, which are slowly growing again. Last season, the average attendance was 3,541. That’s still well down on the mid-Fifties when 15,000 or so was standard — but, excluding the Covid lockdown, the average has risen every year since 2015, when they hit a low of 2,502.

The make-up of crowds is changing as well. Kubatov remembers with shame the monkey-chanting that greeted the visit of Ajax to Ferencváros in 1995, or the way ultras would habitually mark Hitler’s birthday with antisemitic songs and gestures. He has attempted to tackle that in his time as president, with the result that ultras boycotted Ferencváros games for three and a half years. Lighting flares and invading the pitch have been criminalised, while improved security at games, with cameras and tickets that carry biometric data, means that perpetrators can be isolated and prosecuted. “When they’ve been fined 2 million Forints (£4,400),” Kubatov said with a slightly alarming relish, “they’ll think twice about it.”

Which all sounds very much in line with Fidész’s tough stance on law and order, but it doesn’t tally with memories of the last Euros, when black-clad Hungary fans directed monkey chants at France’s players and brandished homophobic banners. Jude Bellingham and Raheem Sterling were also racially abused during a World Cup qualifier in Budapest in 2021. And when England last played in Hungary, in the Nations League a year later, it was in a stadium from which adult fans had been banned because of racist and homophobic chanting. “The committee that makes a decision like that,” Hungary’s foreign minister Peter Szijjarto said, “is a pitiful and cowardly body. They should be ashamed of themselves.”

Those black-clad fans are the Carpathian Brigade, the result of a Fidész policy that seems to have backfired. In 2009, party leaders met ultra groups from various clubs and, in an attempt to curtail neo-Nazi violence, formed the Brigade. Initially, it was supposed to bring fans together behind the national team while helping various charities. For a while it worked, but as the Brigade grew in popularity, the far-Right element took control and there was violence at games against Romania in 2013 and 2014. Which presents Fidész with a problem. On the one hand, the ultras are on their side on most culture-war issues — but on the other, they have the potential to be an embarrassment while at the same time representing a dangerously anarchic force.

Since the Fifties, football terraces have been a locus of dissent, the weight of numbers providing a measure of security, which perhaps explains why Kubatov is so keen to crack down on misbehaviour. But hooliganism also puts off the families and wealthier fans he wants to attract for business reasons; he has even discussed a fast-track system for stadium entrance for those willing to pay for it. But football, as many illiberal regimes have found, is not readily controllable; club affiliation offers an identity that can challenge the regime.

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This makes Orbán’s obsession fascinating. It’s not as simple as bread and circuses; even if the trend is upward, attendances at Hungarian league games are simply not big enough for anyone to think they serve as a mass distraction or opiate. Rather, there is clearly a sense that, by staging major events, Hungary, in a less dramatic way than Saudi Arabia or Qatar, is positioning itself as a major player in global sport with all the attendant benefits that brings in terms of influence and prestige. Budapest’s vast Puskás Arena, it was announced in April, will host the 2026 Champions League final.

Orbán himself overtly harks back to the early Fifties when Hungary was widely regarded as the best side in the world, as though trying to portray the present as the start of a second golden age. The problem with that, though, is both a sense of Puskás-fatigue and the fact that, while the early Fifties might have been a great era for Hungarian football, the economy was collapsing and a backlash was beginning against Mátyás Rákosi’s hardline Stalinist regime, leading ultimately to the 1956 uprising and the mass defection of players, including Puskás — something of which Orbán must be aware.

Orbán, a keen reference of the importance of 1956, no doubt knows this. In the end, his investment in football may come down to nothing more complicated than the fact that he really likes football.

Just as Rishi Sunak has now pinned his electoral hopes on changing inflation figures, Prime Minister Harold Wilson saw a small window of opportunity to go to the polls. There was just one problem: as Wilson himself recognised, “the conflict with the World Cup had to be considered”. If England were defeated just before polling day, the Government would surely suffer. But when the “mystical symbiosis”, as Roy Jenkins described it, of Labour and the England team winning in harmony was put before them, they had little option but to take it.

Wilson understood the fortunes of the England football team mattered more to people than the fortunes of his government. He had tried to use it to his advantage in 1966, when he ensured he was the keynote speaker at the launch of the tournament and made a rapid dash back from Canada on the day of the final to make sure he could bask in the glory of victory. Later, he joined the team at the Royal Garden Hotel to celebrate.

Some in the government believed victory in 1966 could turn the British economy around. Richard Crossman hoped it would “be a decisive factor in strengthening sterling” with the banks inspired by England’s “gallant fight”. But as the government continued to lose standing in the country and the polls, it proved to be a false dawn.

Rishi Sunak is the only other Prime Minister in half a century to pitch his hopes against the backdrop of an England campaign. Just like Wilson in 1970, he has been waiting for the first glimpse of economic good news to call it. And just like the England team in 1970, our boys head to Germany this summer as the favourites to win.

Had Sunak’s team looked at the Wilson campaign, however, they would have seen how quickly events on the football pitch can shape the feel of a campaign. And the omens do not look good.

Back in 1970, things started badly for the government when the arrest of England captain, Bobby Moore, in Colombia — for allegedly stealing a bracelet from a jewellery shop — derailed the launch of their manifesto. Politics was knocked off the front page for days, while Wilson attempted to intervene to release him. When Moore was eventually let off without charge, Wilson was quick to claim credit. He even accused the Conservative leader, Edward Heath, of wanting England to lose. “Is there no triviality to which this man won’t descend?” replied Heath.

On the ground, it was clear that World Cup fever had gripped the nation more than the election, as MPs wondered why people were not turning up for their meetings. Roy Jenkins even moved one rally to accommodate England’s fixtures but was furious when only a “hundred or so people” turned up. The buzz around the tournament even reached the orbit of Tony Benn. After a hard day’s campaigning, he reflected in his diary that the mood in the country was changing after England lost to Brazil and that the “political effect, can’t be altogether ignored”.

The slow-paced nature of the group stages allowed the public to dip their toe into some of the election arguments — many of which will again play out this summer. On housing, Wilson “bitterly regretted” that his government had failed to meet demand. Meanwhile, rising immigration was put on the agenda by Enoch Powell who issued his own manifesto to “halt immigration now”. Tensions boiled over at one meeting where Powell was met with 300 protestors; it was reported that “punches were exchanged” between stewards and demonstrators.

Wilson advised his Labour ministers not to engage with Powell, who had huge appeal to working-class voters in the Midlands. Tony Benn took the bait but, by and large, Labour focused on the economy. “The biggest challenge facing any industrial nation today is how to expand the economy without pushing up its costs,” read its manifesto. “The answer lies in increasing our productivity.”

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At first, Wilson’s safety-first approach appeared to be working. Crossman noted in his diary that the country was ready and willing to accept another six years of Labour that would allow them to firmly establish themselves as a natural party of government. England’s football team also appeared to be dominant. On the day they were due to face West Germany in the Quarter Finals, the Liberal leader, Jeremy Thorpe, made a speech in Devon where he all but conceded defeat: “It is now clear that nationally the Labour Party is romping home.”

And as Harold Wilson settled down along with 20 million others to watch England race into a 2-0 lead against West Germany, everything appeared to be going to plan. But in a moment that would enter political and football folklore, Sir Alf Ramsey took off Bobby Charlton to preserve his energy whereupon England slumped to a crushing 3-2 defeat. In an instant, England were no longer world champions; the nation’s pride had been shattered.

On the campaign trail, MPs reported back that few seemed interested in politics; people only wanted to talk about England’s poor performance. The heatwave ended and the reality of the team’s defeat sank in. Undermining his campaign, new trade figures showed that the economy was not doing as well as Wilson had thought. Just 48 hours before the polling stations opened, the Board of Trade announced that export-import figures were £31 million in the red. The shadow chancellor, Iain Macleod, argued that it showed exactly why Wilson had wanted to cut and run. “The honeymoon after devaluation is over,” he declared.

But Heath confounded the pollsters to pull off a stunning upset. In the aftermath, people wondered whether England’s defeat had led to a change in morale that altered the outcome of the vote. And while it is impossible to pinpoint the exact causes of late shifts in voter behaviour, David Butler and Michael Pinto-Duschinsky concluded in the British General Election of 1970 study that England’s defeat “may have contributed to a switch in mood”.

Since 1970, politicians have increasingly sought to use football to create their own narratives about patriotism and national renewal. In Euro 96, as the tournament opened in England, John Major declared that the “economic prospects are bright” and that “we have a lot to be positive about in this country”. Tony Blair tried to link the success of the England team to his aim of developing a winning mentality within Labour. “Second place is not the goal,” he wrote. “The high of watching success is incomparable. In sport as in politics, a well-fought campaign for second place means nothing.”

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For the Tories, things can only get worse

By Tom McTague

By Euro 2020, however, supporting England had become a contested political issue. Conservative figures such as Lee Anderson boycotted the team after players took the knee in support of Black Lives Matter protests. Recent Labour convert Natalie Elphicke, suggested Marcus Rashford should have spent more time “perfecting his game” rather than “playing politics” over his free school meals campaign. By contrast, leading Labour figures such as Keir Starmer and Sadiq Khan tried to claim Gareth Southgate’s “progressive patriotism” as their own.

When England kick off their Euros campaign next month, both Starmer and Sunak will look to tap into any feel-good factor that emerges in the wider country. Yet in truth, the timing of the “Euro’s election” is a bizarre one. By holding the election on 4 July, England will have only played their three group games and one Round-of-16 match by the time the voters head to the polling stations. The really big games will come afterwards, leaving the next Prime Minister with a potential golden run of a Quarter, Semi, and a Final in a frantic two-week period. Back when Euro 96 fever gripped the nation, England beat Scotland, the Netherlands and Spain in a week. One journalist observed that in the days after, you could “plunge your thermometer anywhere in England’s psyche today, and it emerges glowing red with patriotic fever”.

If history were to repeat itself, Sunak’s final act could be to gift Starmer the opportunity to spend his first few days as Prime Minister overseeing scenes of national celebration not seen since 1966. Starmer would have a free shot at pinning his arguments about a decade of national renewal to the success of a young and vibrant England side. In other words, Sunak would have scored an own goal.

And just as Wilson could always say that only under Labour have England won the World Cup, Starmer could say the same about the Euros. Faced with such a scenario, downtrodden Conservatives could be forgiven for feeling left with only one choice: hoping that England fail miserably and are out of the competition before they are out of office.

This is, however, more than a story about a triumphant underdog. It raises the question: why is such a victory not more common? How has football, the great universal phenomenon, become a sport in which only a tiny handful of clubs can win? It’s not just in Germany, where Bayern Munich had won the previous 11 league titles. Juventus won their ninth in a row in Italy in 2019-20. Paris Saint-German have won nine of the last 11 French titles and will surely make it 10 in 12 this season. In Spain, Real Madrid are likely this season to make it 19 of the last 21 league titles for them and Barcelona. Even in England, defeats for Liverpool and Arsenal on Sunday make Manchester City favourites to claim a sixth league title in seven years.

In any competition there is the obvious problem that the more successful a team is, the more prize money it will accrue, and the more interest it will generate, drawing increased revenues from gate receipts, broadcasting deals, sponsorship and merchandise. The more money a club has, the better players it can sign and so the more likely it is to win, which in turn generates more revenue, creating an unhelpful cycle in which the rich increasingly dominate.

When the first professional football league was established in England in 1888, that danger was understood and measures taken to combat it. It was a very different world, in which gate receipts represented almost all a club’s income. Initially, to offset the advantage of popular clubs with large stadiums, home sides paid away sides £10. From 1919, this became 20% of gate receipts. Meanwhile, to reduce the bargaining power of labour and with it the advantage of the richer clubs who could afford higher wages, the system of hire-and-retain was established by which clubs held the players’ licences: it meant that even when a player’s contract had expired, he could not move to a new club until a deal was agreed to transfer his licence. Having reduced the mobility of players, the League in 1901 instituted a maximum wage of £10 a week.

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Why I never gave up on Manchester United

By Hanif Kureishi

As crowds declined through the Seventies, the financial struggles of league football led, in the Thatcherite economic climate, to the abolition of the levy paid by home clubs to their opponents in 1981. But its influence can still be felt today. Unlike in Europe, which never adopted the levy, English football for a long time didn’t develop a superclub model, and even now, the most successful club in English history, Manchester United, have won only 16% of all English league titles, while Juventus have won 30% in Italy, Madrid 38% in Spain and Bayern 53% in Germany. But there have also been changes from 1981 onwards: Liverpool, the most successful side up until that point, had won 14% of all league titles; since then, Manchester United have won 32%. In fact, five sides — United, Liverpool, Manchester City, Chelsea and Arsenal — have between them claimed all but five titles since.

Meanwhile, the advent of the Champions League in 1992 has radically increased the income available from European football — not just in terms of matchday revenue, but commercial deals and broadcast revenues too. The European Cup was launched in 1955 as a knockout competition but, after Real Madrid had beaten Napoli in the first round in 1987-88, Silvio Berlusconi, at the time the owner of AC Milan, pointed out the absurdity, as he saw it, of having the champions of Spain and Italy, two huge markets, meeting in a direct eliminator so early in the competition. The outcome of his lobbying was a group stage and, gradually, an expansion so that, rather than just the champions, the competition now includes up to four sides from each country. After another rejig, two countries next season will have five. The result has been that the competition has become an increasingly closed shop: it’s 20 years since a side from outside Spain, England, Italy or Germany won; in the 20 years before that, nine different countries provided European champions.

In that, football follows the model outlined by Thomas Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century: the rich getting richer from 1980 or so onwards as income is drawn increasingly to capital — that is, the results of past success. For Piketty, what is unusual is less that trend of increasing inequality than the fact it was reversed in the mid-part of the century, something he puts down to large capital shocks between the beginning of the First World War and the end of the Second, including the devastation of infrastructure during the wars, nationalisation, inflation and the high growth during the period of reconstruction and demographic transition, leading to higher bargaining power for organised labour.

Counter-intuitively, English football put in place its measures against inequality during the Belle Epoque, when capitalism seemed to lead inevitably to JP Morgan-style monopolies. Although football had effectively become a business from the moment professionalism was legalised in 1885, it was underpinned by a spirit of mutual support. But even if it wasn’t publicly acknowledged at the time, competition is good for the business of sport. Football is a curious enterprise from a financial point of view, in that while each club strives to be the most successful it can be, what is actually being sold is not their excellence, but a series of contests between clubs.

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Thomas Piketty's failed revolution

By William Davies

Some spectators perhaps enjoy watching an expensively assembled team of stars turning tricks to destroy an opponent that is little more than a patsy, in the manner of the Harlem Globetrotters, or the ancient clashes between lions and Christians. It is true that viewing figures went up for golf and athletics when Tiger Woods and Usain Bolt were in their prime, but there is a difference between witnessing a supreme athlete pushing the boundaries of human possibility when it seems the opponent is less other golfers or sprinters than nature itself; ball sports feel futile if the opponent is just other less expensively assembled humans who are obviously less good at the sport.

Certainly that is the conclusion drawn by the major American sports, all four of which — basketball, baseball, ice hockey and American football — operate effectively as a cartel in which measures such as the draft (in which the weakest side gets first pick of the next year’s talent) and salary caps help ensure the franchises are as evenly matched as possible. What sells, they have concluded, is competition. That was always the view of Richard Scudamore, CEO of the Premier League from 1999-2018, who pursued a policy by which the team finishing first in the Premier League would receive a maximum of 1.8 times more in broadcasting revenue than the team finishing 20th. In Spain that ratio at one point reached 17:1, although a recognition of the problems it caused has brought it back to around 4.5:1. Scudamore has no doubt that relative equality has been a major factor in the Premier League’s global success.

But inequality is growing, even in the Premier League. Scudamore’s principle of the division of broadcast rights has been skewed by the increasing importance of overseas deals. Multi-club networks are becoming increasingly common, as the giants buy up smaller subsidiaries in other countries. Premier League clubs, with foreign owners, managers and players and, increasingly, foreign fans, are now essentially global brands that happen to be based in England, altering the relationship between the club and its immediate community in ways traditional fans find unnerving.

Attempts to impose spending caps have proved extremely difficult to implement (witness the 115 charges City still face for alleged offences, some of which date back over a decade) and, in their present form, arguably petrify pre-existing financial stratification. It’s no coincidence that Premier League clubs, looking at how to revise the existing Profit and Sustainability Regulations have happened on a similar solution to that proposed by Piketty: a luxury tax. But it faces the same problems as Piketty’s: how can it be enforced globally? And what restraint is it really when two of the major players are as extraordinarily wealthy as the investment arms of the states of Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia?

In his exploration of the Rawlsian nature of much of Piketty’s analysis, Martin O’Neill observes that his argument against financial inequality is not only that it “undermines equality of opportunity in the next generation and… undercuts the political equality needed for a well-functioning democracy” but that “inequality is often counterproductive in terms of growth and economic efficiency”, which perhaps helps explain why, complacent on their own success, the likes of Juventus and Bayern can lose their grip.

It’s a more straightforward tactical point to note that when teams are much better than their domestic rivals, winning most games easily, they lose the capacity to defend, which perhaps explains the tendency for high-scoring games and dramatic comebacks in the latter stages of the Champions League in recent seasons (although that may be beginning to change).

Leverkusen are the exception, just as Leicester were in England in 2015-16. But one freak winner does not change the fundamental picture. This is football’s Belle Epoque moment. It is fashionable and popular, glamorous and at times thrilling. Crowds, at least in England, are bigger than they’ve been for 60 years, and yet player wage inflation means that debt is a permanent state for most of the league. The sense is of growing inequality creating a mounting tension; the big becoming so big that the pyramid that has sustained football for almost a century and a half is crumbling under the strain. Leverkusen’s success and the joy it provoked in an unremarkable mid-sized town on the Rhine is a reminder of what football can bring, and what it is in danger of losing in the superclub era. It’s a sport in desperate need of the modern equivalent of that £10 Victorian levy.