Nobody told me – when I was eight – that there was any doubt about whether I could be English or British. The first big national question I was personally aware of was this one: would Kevin Keegan be fit enough to play in the World Cup?
England had qualified for Espana 82 but their talismanic captain was injured. He was by far the most famous player – the one footballer that every eight-year-old had heard of – and so I was among those anxiously awaiting every medical bulletin.
Maybe I felt English before I felt British, if only by the coincidence of sporting chronology. That first football World Cup I was conscious of came two years before the Los Angeles Olympics of 1984, though it was also a big deal in our house that Bucks Fizz won the Eurovision song contest, as the United Kingdom, or ‘Royaume Uni’ for those votes cast in French as they topped the scoreboard.
By the time I was a teenager, I had found out how much it mattered to some people that I should not be considered British or English. Though, if you were to call me a ‘Paki’ in the local park or the school playground, you might have got a sarcastic lecture about geography and identity, since my Dad is from India and my mother from Ireland.
The Team GB athletes and international footballers of the 1970s and 1980s did help to change who people thought of as British – and by the turn of the century as Scottish, Welsh and English too. But this was also a time when England fans were associated with the worst excesses of xenophobic nationalism, chanting ‘If it wasn’t for the English, you’d be Krauts’ at anybody foreign. There could be a mixed, edgy atmosphere in the pubs around Wembley near England matches. I would never have risked the hassle of trying to follow the national team to any away game in the years before Euro ’96. Talk about the decent majority may always have been true but the idiot minority was vocal enough to make any game likely to be a mixed experience. Even Euro’96 itself came only months after England’s friendly international in Dublin was abandoned the previous autumn following a riot which the far-right Combat-18 group helped to instigate.
My own experiences of racism on the football terraces had led me to get involved in fan-led efforts to shift the stadium culture. Our grassroots counter-message was simple, inclusive and patriotic. During my twenties, I was often among the volunteers for the ‘Raise the Flag’ initiative at England matches. We put out red and white cards to make up a giant St George’s Cross – with an inclusive message about England, and respect for the opposing team and fans too. The brainchild of Mark Perryman of Philosophy Football, it seemed a pretty good deal: a free ticket for the England match, as long as you turned up several hours early to put the cards out before the stadium was open, and volunteered another hour at the end to pick them up. I was still in the ground, picking up our patriotic litter, after the last game at the old Wembley in 2001, where Germany beat England in the rain, when I heard that Kevin Keegan had resigned as England manager, bringing one cycle to a close.
So the great cultural shift of Euro ’96 and the fever of ‘Football’s Coming Home’ – when England could play a positive role as tournament and festival hosts – were worked for by many fans from below too.
England is a country of evolution not revolution, but the re-founding of England’s football identity in 1996 involved the types of changes that are associated with new nation-states. That summer, we changed the flags to the Cross of St George – Union Jacks had flown around Wembley for the World Cup final in 1966 -– and adopted a new (unofficial) national anthem of ‘Three Lions’.
‘Three Lions’ rewrote the narrative. Telling the story of England from the fans’ perspective showed that the old charge of post-imperial arrogance – that the country that invented the game had never come to terms with losing to foreigners – had long ceased to be true. England did not expect victory any more. We just remained committed to hope over experience.
‘Three Lions’ is a civic anthem that captures what it means to be a nation. The shared moments we experience together, of victory or agonising defeat, turn into not just personal memories but shared stories, new legends about who we are, which underpin our hopes and dreams for the future.
So I did feel much more confident about England and being English after that magical summer. In some ways, the diversity of an inclusive Englishness was more aspirational than actual. It would be another generation before the crowd gradually started to catch up with the idea. But it really mattered, to those of us who had experienced the previous 1980s’ culture, that the ethos was much more of invitation than suspicion, hostility or exclusion.
‘The imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of 11 named people. The individual, even the one who only cheers, becomes a symbol of his nation himself’, the historian Eric Hobsbawm once wrote. Only 3 per cent of people now think it is very important to be white to be truly British. That nine out of ten people now think that Englishness is not ethnically defined is especially a social change driven by our national teams.
A quarter of a century later, two summers ago, I had come full circle. My ten-year-old daughter Indira who was watching live international football for the first time. Having filled in a wall chart at home for Euro 2020, we became quite loyal followers of England’s Lionesses the following summer, following the Lionesses to Brighton and Southampton, visiting the fan-park to try out face-painting, table football. There was even a VAR simulator, seeking to get young girls and boys to aspire to be a referee. When England got to the final, we had the vantage point of the gods, seated in the top row of the top tier at Wembley stadium to see the Lionesses make history as European Champions against Germany. The crowds – just over half female, with many young families – represented as excitable and inclusive an English patriotism as anybody could imagine.
Despite the Lionesses’ inspiration, the England men’s team did not return from Qatar with the World Cup. That was a strange tournament, played at the wrong time of year, in the wrong place, for the wrong reasons. The muted reaction to England’s quarter-final defeat by France – the team had played well, missed a penalty, and lost narrowly to the world champions – lacked the anxiety and anger of some previous World Cup inquests. Gareth Southgate considered resigning but responded to the broad consensus that he should stay.
The youth of England’s talented young team, including 19-year-old Jude Bellingham, meant that there were high hopes for the future. At home, we had played ‘Three Lions’ for inspiration (both the 1996 original and the Qatar Christmas version for inspiration at half-time). We sang it again quietly while walking the dogs after the final whistle and the disappointment of the missed penalty.
An England victory in 2026 – three decades after Euro’96 marked the thirtieth anniversary of the 1966 World Cup – seems almost written in the stars. Sixty years of hurt, for the men’s team, certainly couldn’t stop us dreaming.
Extracted from ‘How to be a patriot‘ by Sunder Katwala
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