July 15, 2024 - 11:00am
Berlin
It was an unusual pleasure being part of England’s rag-tag army in Berlin last night, at least until John Stones’s knee failed to prevent that killer Spanish winner.
The impromptu friendships, the odd mix of ardent attachment to the national cause and exasperation at our heroes (and their opinion-dividing manager), the shared tales of travel mayhem as Europe’s transport infrastructure struggled to deliver maybe 200,000 English fans to the German capital: all this contributed to the fun.
Disappointment after the game did not turn ugly as it might have done in earlier decades. I witnessed the English violence at the 1988 Euros in Germany, often led by young squaddies still based there in their tens of thousands. I remember the dead silence in the packed tube carriage after returning from Wembley in 1996, after another semi-final defeat to Germany on penalties, and warning my German friend Nestor — who got me a ticket to the game at the German end — to keep his mouth shut. I remember being in Germany at the fanfest in Gelsenkirchen during the 2006 World Cup with my two young sons — and Nestor again — when Wayne Rooney was sent off and the boys, nearer the screen, were showered with plastic beer cups.
There is still a hard-core of fans whose boisterousness can tip into belligerence, but it’s much less likely these days. Now, the average travelling fan seems a bit older, with more of an ethnic and social class mix than in the past, and richer. You have to have a few bob to spare, especially to get to the unforeseeable final stages of a tournament. I decided to go with my partner after the semi-final victory last Wednesday partly because, unlike most of my fellow fans, I have a German connection and friends offering free beds to smooth the way.
We had no ticket to the game itself but thought, like many other fans, that we might pick one up as prices fell closer to kick-off. In the end we decided, along with our new friends Wayne and Sean, to stick to the fanzone in the shadow of the Reichstag with its famous Dem Deutschen Volke inscription. In our little corner of the fanzone we were, unusually, outnumbered by Spanish fans, one of whom squirted Sean with water after the second Spanish goal, wrongly believing that he had showered her with beer. He managed to keep his cool.
That cool had been sorely tested on the way to Berlin when our flight to Cologne from Heathrow was cancelled. The Germans on the eventual rescheduled flight might well have been forgiven for believing that slogan that nothing in Britain works properly, despite our new government having had a week to sort it out. Conversely, the much-maligned German rail service delivered us to Berlin without a hitch by lunchtime yesterday.
Other fans had even more dramatic travel stories. A family of five from Sheffield we met flew from Nottingham to Leipzig via Majorca and spent £1,800 each on tickets, partly to mark a son’s 18th birthday. Their disappointment, and that of many others, came with a hefty bill attached.
Some last night wanted to send their bills to Southgate. He was the subject of animated conversations, for and against, before the game in the queues at the beer tent, during the game when the players still failed to click as a team, and afterwards. It was mainly pragmatists versus idealists: “he got us to two finals playing ugly” pitted against the view that with such a talented squad it’s a crime not to play the beautiful game beautifully, as the Spanish contrive to do. Either way, the 58 years of hurt continue. Now, we can only look forward to the World Cup in America in 2026.
David Goodhart is the author of Head, Hand, Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century. He is head of the Demography unit at the think tank Policy Exchange.
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SubscribeI was pleasantly surprised when nothing bad happened when English and Serbian fans got squished up together waiting for the patchy public transport back into Gelsenkirchen in the group matches.
Post-match emotions, probably a warm day, alcohol consumed…sounded like a recipe for disaster. But apparently everyone was really patient and well-behaved and calm. It was quite a refreshing change – from England and from Serbia. Our street has been trashed before by Serbian fans – celebrating a win against Germany in some World Cup or other.
My son was there throughout, and was joined by my nephew (both in their 30s) for the final. Although disappointed with the result, both had a great time.
Over the years, the disappointment starts to fade; not, i believe, through “getting used to it” but simply through putting the game and the result into a much wider context that isn’t quite as obvious when younger. The same would’ve applied if we’d won.
Touring around Germany and spending time among the locals is an education in itself, but of course one has to be open (and sober enough, for most of the time!) to appreciate it. That’s what my son says he’ll remember.
Glad to hear your experiences matched mine. I did hear about some aggro in Düsseldorf after one of the group games. But the only violence I saw (heard) was in the chanting of “you can stuff your f…ing Tapas up your arse..” and even that was kind of mock aggressive and taken in a good spirit by the Spaniards it was aimed at. That and the echo of an earlier era with the “no surrender” (to the IRA) refrain still to be heard after some of the chanting from hard core fans gathered yesterday outside the Adlon hotel.
It’s more than a little annoying that if you Google “England” you get reams of stuff about the F.A.s football team with the Wikipedia entry about the country hidden amongst all this guff!
Is that all we are now? A soccer team with a country attached? The answer, I strongly suspect, is “yes”.
As a patriotic Englishman of the old school I regret to say that I’m rather glad that this version of the new “England” lost – again.
You don’t think that during a major tournament in which England made the final, most people banging “England” into a search engine are looking for results or team news?
Try again in a few months and you’ll see it change
I hope you’re right, but it has been like this for at least several months now.
I wonder though.
British Football violence of the old school was only ever, at best, recreational and ritualistic anyway. It had its rules and its codes. Was based around local pride and folk memory. It Shared a common origin – alongside Association Football, Rugby, The Haxey Hood Game and Shrovetide Football – in the Ur-English game of Mob Football. It’s presiding genius was misrule and the world-turned-upside-down. Yes it was often mindless, deliberately offensive, frequently savage and invariably terrifying. But there you are. So was the London of Shakespeare and the Florence of Dante.
If we were Italian it would have been long understood like Calcio Storico or the Palio to be a cultural artefact to be understood, circumscribed and preserved rather than a social aberration to be eradicated, unlamented.
Now that it is utterly gone, like the Maypole and Bartelmy, and the ideal ‘fan’ is now the utterly passive consumer in his Nike replica top drinking his Budweiser Lager from a plastic cup and giving his feedback through carefully curated social media postings, we may begin to see, too late, that the baby went out once again rather precipitously with the bathwater.
Agree much of it was highly ritualistic, young, male, expression of dominance and solidarity. A non-violent version of it was still on display outside the Adlon hotel on Sunday afternoon, 1500 England fans occupying a key spot in a foreign capital and chanting for hours. The rest of the world could smile and move on. Better than the 1980s I think.
Going from the deafening silence in the media on this, it seems our fans behaved impeccably. As an avid football fan, it does infuriate me that the inability of a small minority to behave like adults gets projected as us being a nation of thugs. Something our European “friends” enjoy making a point of (laughable when you consider some of their hooligan issues), the media and many in the Guardian reading middle classes as well also piling in.
Interestingly, I did hear an increase in hooliganism in this country in recent years was actually down to older fans. Basically, these people used to do it in the 80’s and 90’s, but settled down and raised families. Once the kids left, they decided fighting on the terraces would be a fun solution to a mid-life crisis. Now these guys are just old, it might have stopped for good hopefully.