‘Watkins turns. Watkins scores. Bang on 90 minutes’. The last-minute Ollie Watkins goal that took England to the European championship final was watched by twenty million of us back home – making it easily the biggest collective national moment broadcast this year.
As Gareth Southgate noted in his ‘Dear England’ letter to the fans, ahead of the last European Championships, these tournaments offer ‘the opportunity to produce moments that people will remember forever’.
Almost three times as many of us saw that goal than the 7.5 million who were watching live, across all channels, as the 10pm exit poll on election night projected a Labour landslide.
Yet the unscripted drama of live sport also means narratives about the state of the sporting nation can flip on incredibly small margins. England had been seconds away from slumping out one-nil to Slovakia before Jude Bellingham’s balletic overhead-kick equaliser in the 95th minute. Without that goal, both England’s Euro 2024 campaign and the Gareth Southgate era would have fizzled out in the most disappointing way imaginable. Instead, ‘Hey Jude’ rang out around the stadium, after Bellingham did exactly what the lyrics advise. He took a sad song and made it better.
Some are now comparing England manager Gareth Southgate to the Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Both are liberal centrists, who have led their teams to better results, though armchair critics are frustrated by their caution. One big difference is that Keir Starmer’s government will be ten days old on Sunday, entering a modest honeymoon. England manager Gareth Southgate would be, in political terms, a fourth-term incumbent.
The unexpected magic of England’s 2018 World Cup in Russia is a long time ago now. Southgate seemed to liberate his young England team from the weight of history and expectation. The country – stuck in a Brexit stalemate, where it was often claimed that London and the north, the cities and the towns, now lived in parallel Leave and Remain universes – was happy to be distracted from political polarisation by finding that the England team could still reach across those divides.
Later tournaments were more complicated. It was the argument over racism and taking the knee that saw Southgate decide to speak for and write to England, setting out both his team’s sense of national pride and why they needed to take a stand against prejudice too.
2024 has been more volatile. A talented England have struggled for form. Southgate – even now vindicated by reaching his second final – sounds bruised by criticism. England may be a victim of their own success in making semi-finals seem commonplace.
When England fans first sang ‘It’s coming home’, it was about hosting the 1996 tournament, as much as the hope of finally winning it again. Telling the story of England from the fans’ perspective – ‘But all those oh-so-nears/ Wear you down/ Through the years’ – the point was not that England expected victory and could not come to terms with defeat, but rather that we remained committed to hope over experience. ‘Three Lions’ is a civic anthem that captures what it means to be a nation. It is not about whether we win or lose, but about the shared moments we experience together – whether an incredible goal, or the pain of losing on penalties.
Whatever the result of the England versus Spain final, football is ‘coming home’ anyway – since Euro 2028 will be co-hosted across the nations of the UK and Ireland. Unlike the Olympics, there is no closing ceremony at the final on Sunday – no handover from Olaf Scholz to Keir Starmer in the style of an Olympic torch. Yet Euro 2028 will be unique, with more geographic reach than hosting the Olympic or Commonwealth Games. A UK-wide event where the British teams each compete in national colours has distinct potential to champion inclusive patriotism and sport’s power to connect.
In England, the tournament year coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of Viv Anderson becoming the first black English international footballer. Those pioneers, like Viv Anderson, Cyrille Regis and John Barnes, changed who we think of as English.
Who even now knows that Jude Bellingham and Ollie Watkins were the 98th and the 99th of the 111 black English international players over those five decades? What was deeply contested in the 1980s has simply become an unremarkable social norm. But that has quietly but decisively changed our understanding of what Englishness means and who it includes.
For those of us who first experienced the football culture of the 1980s – when England fans were associated with hooliganism and the most xenophobic forms of national identity, it is worth reflecting on how much has changed. In my twenties, I found the magical summer of Euro ’96 enormously increased my confidence about being English. What I have seen in Gareth Southgate’s England – and in taking my teenage daughters and sons to watch England’s Lionesses being crowned champions – is that football has done more than any other sphere of our national culture to champion a modern English pride and patriotism that can invite everybody to feel part of it. So Gareth Southgate’s team, and the Lionesses, have shown that we can become a kinder, gentler country while wanting our teams to win.
I don’t know if England will beat Spain on Sunday night. I have always believed in this talented young English generation winning the next World Cup in 2026. The perfect symmetry of ending sixty years of hurt, three decades after we began to sing Three Lions in 1996, must surely be written in the stars. England does not need to expect, as long as we can keep hoping. That is why these sporting summers still bring us together.
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