The World Cup starts today, with England hoping to be somewhere around the latter stages.
I took my former in-laws to an England game once. They were Asian Doctors, and had lived for decades a few miles from Wembley yet had never been there. It was 2010 and the era of football hooligans was well over. I took them to watch a friendly – England Vs Mexico. Peter Crouch was our star centre forward.
Immediately the national anthem was played the racism started. A bunch of fans taking every opportunity for racist chants, interspersed with No Surrender to the IRA. I am really baffled how anyone can work themselves up with that much hate towards Mexicans, who are about as likeable a bunch as you will ever meet. Even more baffled why they were chanting about the IRA 12 years after the Good Friday Agreement.
Eventually I had to say something, which just made things worse. In the end I was saved by a Newcastle fan, gravy stained black and white shirt stretched tight over a torso that was 90% muscle, 10% thick ginger hair. Like the Honey Monster’s Geordie cousin, but a lot more menacing.
I have been getting in the mood for this years tournament by drinking Stella and throwing garden furniture around while somebody sprays me with a very powerful hosepipe.
I will probably watch the odd game, but my enthusiasm is muted. Partly because so many matches are being played in the United States, whose increasingly crass nationalism under Donald Trump is hard to stomach.
But I will still be cheering England on.
Unlike some on the left, I have never had a problem with patriotism. I am proud to belong to a tradition that runs from Bede through Shakespeare, Blake and Shelley to George Orwell and JB Priestly and from them through to Ray Davies and Paul Weller. To be English is to inherit a long literary and cultural tradition stretching back to the scriptoria on the banks of the Wear in the Dark Ages.
That does not mean ignoring the darker parts of our history. My own family had a tangential connection to the slave trade, and like most British families my life has been shaped by the legacy of empire. History contains much to celebrate and much to regret.
The mistake is to think patriotism requires us to hide the awkward bits. History is not a soft play area. It has rough edges and sharp corners. If we edit out the uncomfortable parts of our collective past, we lose part of our understanding of who we are.
In the run up to the World Cup the BBC are showing Dear England, a TV series about Gareth Southgate’s period as England Manager. Alongside that David “Three Lions” Baddiel has a radio series on the history of the England team.
The most interesting things Gareth Southgate ever did was not tactical. It was cultural.
Southgate inherited an England team burdened by history. Every tournament carried the weight of 1966, every penalty shootout carried the ghosts of previous failures, every generation was measured against myths created by earlier generations.
His great insight was that national stories can become traps.
The stories we tell about ourselves shape what we believe is possible. England had become a nation that expected disappointment. The shirt felt heavy because it was carrying decades of accumulated failure.
Southgate tried to change that. He asked players about where they came from and how they grew up. He contrasted the reality of modern England with the nostalgic picture of village greens and thatched cottages that often dominates discussions of English identity.
The England squad looked like modern England because modern England looks like the England squad. Talented and diverse.
David Baddiel explores similar themes in his BBC Sounds history of the England football team. What emerges is a story of extraordinary change. The England of hooliganism and monkey chants has gradually become the England of Bellingham, Saka and Rashford.
The diversity of the squad is not the result of some diversity initiative. It is the result of meritocracy. Football is too competitive and too lucrative to indulge sentimentality. The best players play.
Unfortunately, that does not mean racism has disappeared. The abuse directed at Rashford, Saka and Sancho after Euro 2020 demonstrated how quickly old prejudices can re-emerge.
If England fail this summer and a black player is seen as responsible, there will almost certainly be people ready to repeat the same behaviour. People on the streets of Southampton and Belfast this week are rehearsing for a long summer of lager, cheap gack and violence.
Which is why Southgate’s argument matters beyond football.
The issue is not whether we remember history. It is whether history becomes a prison.
Karl Marx once observed that people make their own history, but not under circumstances of their own choosing. The past weighs on the present. We inherit stories, traditions and assumptions that shape our choices.
The question is whether we are capable of writing new stories for ourselves.
That is the real argument at the heart of many of our culture wars. Are we a country confident enough to acknowledge its past while building something new? Or are we condemned to endlessly replay old myths about empire, war and national decline? Fear keeps us clinging to old stories, too scared to write something knew. While we were singing “two world wars and one world cup” other countries over took us, and not just on the football pitch.
The England team offers one answer.
Its players are writing a different story about what England is. The question is whether the rest of the country is willing to do the same.
We don’t know if Tuchel is continuity Southgate, continuing the cultural revolution and letting the team writing their own stories. Or if he has been pushed in by the FA to squeeze the flair out of the team and and return to the old failed methods of pragmatism. Is this difficult decision to drop Foden in the tradition of Southgate dropping Dele Ali, or the older tradition of keeping players like Len Shackleton out of the England team.
But the bigger question is whether the England team, and the country can shake off the dead weight of history and start and make history again.
And for those who will be tuning in here is the World Cup Quiz
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002wlk2
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m002qktz/dear-england
https://www.theplayerstribune.com/posts/dear-england-gareth-southgate-euros-soccer
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