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[Alfred E. Neuman]

The Financial Times

Won for all

By Simon Kuper
Sep 17 2004 14:30


It was the biggest communal British experience of the year. On the evening of Thursday June 24, nearly 24 million Britons sat on their sofas watching the England football team lose its penalty shoot-out against Portugal in the quarter-final of Euro 2004.

That figure excludes the eight million people who, according to the British Beer Pub Association, watched the match in pubs and clubs. In short, more than half the population shared a single event.

Many of them were sufficiently moved afterwards to set fire to police cars, besiege a Norfolk pub full of Portuguese people, and, in Liverpool, to cut off a man’s ear. Britain - and particularly England - achieved greater unity on June 24 than any other big European nation experienced during Euro 2004, or than the US achieves with its most popular annual television programme, the Superbowl.

“Football is the national game in a way it never was before,” says David Winner, author of a forthcoming cultural history of British football called Those Feet.

In the past, Britons shared non-sporting events, usually royal jubilees, weddings and celebrations. As late as 1987, the Queen could draw 28 million viewers for her Christmas speech.

But the royal family has lost its pull since the Saturday morning seven years ago when the country’s shops closed for Princess Diana’s funeral. Last Christmas, the Queen attracted only 6.5 million viewers. That leaves her far behind Wayne Rooney, Tim Henman and even the runner Kelly Holmes.

Britons have spent this summer watching even more television than usual, segueing from Euro 2004 to Wimbledon to the Olympic Games. Test cricket, the Tour de France and Manchester United’s meaningless summer tour of the US have filled the holes in people’s lives in between.

Television audience figures are a good proxy for the nation’s pulse, and several sports events this summer have drawn more British viewers than even the most popular episodes of the soap opera Coronation Street. Meanwhile, the English pay more to watch league football on television than any other people in the world. Clearly all this tells us something about them.

You had to be in Portugal, host country of Euro 2004, in June to realise how exceptional Britain is. One Sunday morning I took a bus from Porto to Leiria to watch Croatia-Switzerland, which predictably turned out to be the worst match of the tournament.

On the bus were a few Portuguese not going to a football match, four Swiss fans, and otherwise only Englishmen, most of them middle-class people reading broadsheet newspapers. Not only do the English watch their own team’s matches in unparalleled numbers, but they watch everybody else’s too.

What noise there was at the France-Greece quarter-final, played a day after England were eliminated, came from English fans chanting, “Ingerland!” Jos de Kruif, ticketing manager of Euro 2004, told me that Britons had bought a fifth of all tickets for the tournament legally, plus a sizeable slice on the black market from Portuguese people.

The next largest contingent of visitors came from Germany, a larger country that accounted for just 10 per cent of the tournament’s fans. By contrast, Italy, which has also more inhabitants than England, sent so few of them to Portugal that at two of the team’s matches the stands were half-empty. “I think you could fill the whole stadium with English,” marvels Marc Timmer, a senior security official with the European football authority Uefa.

It was similar in Euro 2004’s media centres: row upon row of British journalists, instantly distinguishable by their appearance from, say, the French. They were feeding a media that is unique in Europe.

It’s not that Britons are the only people who enjoy reading about sport. In southern Europe, many of the biggest daily newspapers are dedicated solely to sport: L’Equipe in France, Marca in Spain, Gazzetta dello Sport in Italy.

The two best-selling Portuguese dailies are both in effect football newspapers with a thin coating of other sports. But in southern Europe, newspaper circulations are relatively low.

In northern Europe, most quality newspapers run only a page or two of sport each day. Le Monde until 1998 barely covered it at all. Oddly, the most sports-mad northern European media outside Britain are probably in Sweden. But Britain stands alone: the only country in which several daily newspapers, with a combined total of 10s of millions of readers, regularly run more sports pages than news pages. This is true not only of the tabloids but also of the country’s so-called quality newspapers. In 1996 - another “summer of sport” - some broadsheets began publishing daily sports supplements, and even when that summer ended they never quite stopped. Sport infests the national conversation whether or not there is a big tournament on. In February 2003, for instance, with the Iraq war approaching, a bigger story in several British newspapers was the boot that Manchester United’s manager Alex Ferguson is alleged to have kicked at David Beckham. It is sometimes said that sport offers people some distraction from war and politics, but in fact nowadays many Britons refuse to let themselves be distracted from sport.

Football began to grow into a communal British obsession in 1990, when 26 million people (but far fewer journalists than today) watched England lose its World Cup semi-final to West Germany. The cliche is that this is when the middle classes suddenly discovered football.

That explanation is wrong. I was at university in 1989, the era when football was said to be “a slum sport watched by slum people in slum stadiums”, and I remember almost every male in my college packing the common room to see the crucial Liverpool-Arsenal league match. Middle-class men discovered football decades ago. What changed in 1990 is that it became respectable for them to discuss it, particularly in the media. That gradually helped draw more women to the game.

It is no coincidence that the growth began in 1990. A year earlier the Berlin Wall had fallen, ending the cold war and leaving Britons with the conviction that whatever happened in world politics, it would not affect their lives. Gradually British newspapers stopped running lengthy articles on miners’ strikes in Romania.

Soon most of them stopped covering foreign countries at all: the tabloids now mostly suffice with show biz correspondents in New York and Los Angeles, plus the Beckham correspondent in Madrid. In domestic politics, only sex scandals, racism or squabbles between politicians of the same party arouse much interest.

Possibly Europe is living under a terrorist menace that will kill hundreds of thousands of people soon. But for now this prospect feels abstract. Western Europe since 1945 has been the safest region in the history of the world. That explains why, in a poll a few years ago, only 15 per cent of Britons said they were interested in politics, less than half the proportion that was interested in sport.

The change is dramatic. In 1945, half the British population followed the election debates between Churchill and Attlee on the wireless. Today, the struggle is to get people to bother to vote. The media has spotted the change.

The arrival of satellite television had in any case meant that the quest for viewing figures was replacing the Reithian mission. The epiphany came one evening in early June, when a British television channel ditched a planned debate on apathy in favour of live coverage of the Portuguese football manager Jose Mourinho’s move to Chelsea.

Football mania is a symptom of dumbing-down. The same mania is taking hold in most of western Europe, for much the same reasons, even if Continental newspapers still display some nostalgia for their old-fashioned role as guardians of democracy.

The total European television audience for the first round of Euro 2004 was estimated at 26 per cent higher than for the same phase of Euro 2000. In Italy, for instance, 21.4 million people watched the country’s match against Bulgaria, fractionally more than had watched the Azzurri play the tournament’s final against France in 2000.

Germany’s final group match was watched by 24.1 million Germans, almost seven million more than had seen their team lose to England in 2000. Yet in no other large European country did as large a proportion of the population watch Euro 2004 as in England.

Clearly this communal viewing is a form of nationalism. England v Switzerland offers football of a lesser quality than Manchester United v Real Madrid, but more people watch the England game because it is the national team. They wear England shirts and reclaim the flag of St George. However, in England and in other western European countries, nationalism is no longer what it used to be.

Sports events in the past were something of an existential affair. For many people, the point was to prove that their country was in some intangible way superior. Football matches supposedly set honest English battlers against little Continental tricksters. Many English people thought their team should be best in the world, even if it somehow never was. This sense of destiny is fading.

Nor do Britons any longer need sport to compensate for the frustration of being dismissed as the sick old man of Europe. Britain is now more of the drunken young rich man. The country’s sports teams have become competent, and the economy is thriving. Portuguese taxi drivers loved the England fans at Euro 2004 because they were so rich - handing over 10-euro notes and saying, “Keep the change.”

All over Europe, even though more people watch football, sporting nationalism has lost some of its bite. Once there were football rivalries based on past wars that meant something to people.

When the Netherlands beat West Germany in 1988, for instance, more than half the Dutch population congregated on the street on a Tuesday evening in the largest public gathering since the Liberation. Many cried with joy. “Of course it has to do with the war! Strange that people deny that,” said Lou de Jong, the official state historian of the Netherlands in the second world war, who confided that he had danced around the room when his team won.

Emotions in Ireland were similar when their team beat England that same summer. France v Germany or Poland v USSR used to be games with a genuine grimness that derived from outside football.

No longer. Europe has become a tame place, and this is reflected in its football rivalries. This summer, the press had announced a number of games that were supposed to be historic “battles”: Netherlands v Germany, Portugal v Spain, England v France, Denmark v Sweden.

All passed off not only without violence but virtually without “needle”. At Netherlands v Germany, Dutch and German fans sat happily mixed with barely an insult thrown all night.

“It was world peace in action,” says the security official Timmer, himself a Dutchman. The Dutch and other Europeans are losing their fixation with Germany, as the Continent’s bloody history fades into the past.

Similarly, on the afternoon before Portugal v Spain in Lisbon, a group of Spaniards and Portuguese stood around the statue in the city’s Rossio square chanting “Espana!” together.

A couple of streets away, a Spaniard duelled with two Portuguese toddlers, all of them using mock swords. And there are allegations that the Danes and Swedes, supposedly fierce rivals, arranged the 2-2 draw they both needed to reach the next round.

Players of different countries are no longer separated by cultural gulfs. Wherever they come from, most of them now play for the same few big clubs and look, dress and play almost exactly the same. English players now “dive”, looking for free-kicks, just as Continentals do, and are as thin and as skilful as the Continentals.

In short, football tournaments are no longer battles between Us and Them, “war minus the shooting” in Orwell’s phrase. Admittedly, they still sometimes look and sound as if they are.

British football journalists and the few remaining hooligans continue to use warlike metaphors, but since none of them any longer have any experience of war these have become merely tired cliches.

Evidence of this is that the imagery is derived exclusively from the first and second world wars: “trench warfare”, “invasion of Europe”, chants such as, “If it wasn’t for the English you’d be Krauts”, and the theme tune from the film The Great Escape.

All this is now like folk music, enhancing the carnival that is Euro 2004. However, few of the participants have any warlike intent: in fact, many English fans in Lisbon spent their evenings in the Bairro Alto singing with foreigners and trying to pick them up.

The European football championship has become a sort of festival of European harmony that probably deserves funding from the European Union as a large-scale enactment of the pan-European ideal. It is bizarre that the media focus on the few hooligans, although admittedly they are starting to tire of this.

There was no hooliganism at any Euro 2004 match. The only fighting that occurred was in the Algarve resort town of Albufeira, and in English provincial town centres. The British press made an enormous amount of this.

However, the astonishing fact was how little violence there was. The British hobby of binge-drinking is responsible for a large proportion of the country’s crime. On June 24, with an estimated 12 million more pints than usual being served in British pubs, and millions of drunks leaving the pubs at approximately the same time, it is surprising that only a couple of thousand of them caused trouble. This was simple drunken yobbery, nothing to do with re-enacting the second world war.

People support England not because they hate foreigners and are desperate to see England win, but because football is fun and the national team gives them a rare taste of national community.

As is often noted, communal institutions such as trade unions and churches no longer provide much of a glue. Nor do neighbourhoods, now that the average Briton moves house once every seven years.

The chief emotion evoked by royal events is irony. Thus the best chance Britons get to bond with each other, unless they are lucky enough to experience a paedophile witch-hunt in their neighbourhood, is through the national football team.

This is nationalism, but it is a jocular variety, which idolises chunky anti-heroes such as Paul Gascoigne and Wayne Rooney rather than the perfect David Beckham or Michael Owen.

Significantly, the most popular anthem of English football nationalism, “Football’s Coming Home”, was composed not by Elgar but by two comedians, Frank Skinner and David Baddiel. Furthermore, English football nationalism is inclusive: in Portugal and at the World Cup in Japan I was struck by how many British Asians there were among the travelling England fans, and increasingly there are women too.

Euro 2004 is something to talk about with strangers and in the office. When England lose, as inevitably happens, nobody despairs for more than a few hours. The next morning life resumes, with its daily updates on David Beckham’s love life.

When Portugal played Greece in the final of Euro 2004, BBC anchorman Gary Lineker opened with a joke: “What do England and Portugal have in common? They’re both at home for the final.” This is hardly anguish.

By then, in any case, the British media were busy covering Tim Henman’s annual march towards elimination at Wimbledon. Henmania is a smaller phenomenon than the football. Henman’s biggest matches draw 11 million to 13 million television viewers. A difference with the football is that more than half of them are women.

However, the great similarity between Henman and Beckham is that neither athlete is required by his fans to win. For most Britons, Wimbledon is not so much a sporting contest as the evocation of a bygone English pastoral idyll, with its lawns, strawberries and cream, and Royal Box.

Henman, a polite upper-middle-class boy from Oxfordshire, is the idyll’s perfect leading man. If his fans were particularly interested in winning, they would have given up on him after a decade of defeats.

Outside Britain, Wimbledon excites little attention. The 2003 men’s final drew a worldwide television audience of only 15 million. The event has meaning chiefly if you are British, just as the Tour de France, the evocation of a bygone French rural idyll, means most to the French.

Cricket, too, is the evocation of a bygone English pastoral idyll. I spent the first day of the Test between England and West Indies in July drinking beer with a friend in the Mound Stand at Lord’s, and the scene was England at its best.

On a sunny day, with Old Father Time, the weather vane, motionless beside us, England batting beautifully, and the pavilion looking splendid, you could fall in love with London.

At tea, a lady in the press box informed the journalists through her microphone: “Just a short announcement, before you all panic: there will be cake in five minutes. Please don’t riot.”

The sad thing is that cricket has become a sideshow, ignored almost as if it were elections to the European parliament. The denizens of the Lord’s pavilion, in their egg-and-tomato ties, get older each year, and rarely does the average television audience for any day of a Test exceed three million. It is 23 years since Ian Botham’s exploits in the Ashes series sparked a communal emotion to rival Euro 2004, and it will probably never happen again.

In mid-August, when the Olympic Games began, cricket was virtually forgotten. The Olympics, as a global competition with millennia of tradition, have potential. The problem is that few Britons are interested in the main sports on offer. In the four years between each Games, only zealots bother to watch the swimming or, say, the shot put.

Yet whenever a British athlete is thought to have a sniff at gold, the nation will sink its weary backside into the couch and sit through it. When Paula Radcliffe dropped out of the marathon, 10.7 million people were watching. When she dropped out of the 10,000 metres, there were 12.8 million.

Kelly Holmes, who not only managed to finish her races but actually won gold, could not match those figures. But at no point in the Games was there the flag-waving and national euphoria to match Euro 2004, or, say, VE-Day 1945.

You might wonder which event would draw more British television viewers: the UK going to war, or England playing a major football match on the same evening. I stopped wondering about this on the first Sunday of the Iraq war, when US tanks began their race for Baghdad.

That afternoon I visited a newspaper office in Turkey, a country at the heart of the war. In reception, porters and visitors sat glued to a television set. They were watching league football. It wasn’t even a particularly big game, for crying out loud.

Simon Kuper is the FT’s Saturday sports columnist.