This Side of the Pond

To support England’s national soccer team has always been a harrowing commitment to stress, dashed hopes and heartbreak, over and over again…but not any more. On Sunday, we came a single kick from winning the UEFA European Championship (better known as the Euros) for the very first time.

We lost, it’s true, but I’d like to explain why that isn’t really the point. To do that, I must rewind to the old days, when we were notorious for having all the talent in the world and failing to live up to it.

You may remember I mentioned this championship a few weeks ago, at which point I said we were unlikely to get past the quarter finals because the luck of the draw had pitted us against Germany, one of the best teams of them all. To the surprise and delight of a nation, we beat them.

That wasn’t supposed to happen – beating Germany is not something we do. We went on to win our semi-final bout against Denmark and reached the finals for the first time ever. It was, in fact, the first final of an international championship that we’ve reached during my lifetime.

It’s difficult to explain how meaningful international soccer is to the English. For many of us, it’s patriotism in its purest form. So deeply do we care that we are oft accused of arrogance.

The rest of the world simply cannot fathom why we shout so loudly for a team that isn’t anywhere close to the best. We don’t win, seems like we can’t win, so why do we always act as though we’re going to?

It doesn’t help that our most popular football anthem repeats the words “It’s coming home” in the chorus. We’ve been singing it since 1996, when we last hosted the Euros.

The chorus was meant to celebrate the tournament being played on English soil, while the rest of the song predicted that England would muck everything up and “throw it away” like we do every time. It’s a lament, a ballad of hope when there seems no reason to be hopeful, but I can understand how time has eroded the point, especially for the rest of the world.

The problem has always been the same: we should have been so much better than we were. Not only are we the country that birthed soccer, it’s our national sport and we also boast the world’s most popular soccer league.

And then there’s the men wearing the Three Lions on their shirts. Superstars the likes of David Beckham, Gary Lineker, Paul Gascoigne, John Barnes, Rio Ferdinand and Wayne Rooney.

They may not mean much to you, but they’re household names to us. These are the men upon whom we pinned our hopes and dreams, and we couldn’t understand why they kept disappointing us.

Every two years, we played a World Cup or the Euros, and every time we crashed and burned. Since our only win in 1966, every event has ended in tears and crushing disappointment, culminating in the 2016 Euros when we were sent packing by Iceland, a team that theoretically shouldn’t have stood a chance.

It’s only now that we understand the problem. Our team couldn’t thrive precisely because we were pinning our hopes on those individual players.

It might seem obvious that a team needs to gel in order to be successful, but we didn’t realize what was happening behind the scenes. Our players ordinarily compete in separate teams and are often bitter rivals, and there was no real effort to foster camaraderie for those bi-yearly international events.

In fact, it seems our players suffered for years under the effects of cliques, rivalries and a lack of support from the Premier League teams, which preferred their players to dedicate as little attention to their national duties as possible. We should have been so much better, but nobody made sure we could be.

Things changed a decade ago, when the Football Association developed a ten-year plan that involved dedicating attention to the young players coming up in England’s football academies. It meant changing the culture, getting the Premier League teams on board and turning individual players into a team.

The icing on the cake was Gareth Southgate, the player who missed the very penalty that sent us home in the semi-finals of 1996 – the year our anthem predicted we’d throw it all away. It didn’t seem he’d ever live that moment down, until almost by accident he was appointed as England’s manager.

Since then, he’s brought together a new generation of players who have flourished under the new regime and taught them that team comes before self and we’re all in this together. His calm demeanor, focus on personal responsibility, impeccable decision-making and willingness to build a relationship with the press – and thus the fans – have made him a national hero.

Now we have players who don’t just thrill on the field, but have made a point to be role models. Jordan Henderson, who rallied all the team captains in the Premier League to raise money for the NHS; Marcus Rashford, who single-handedly convinced the UK government to continue offering free meals to vulnerable kids when the school vacation arrived during the lockdown.

Bukayo Saka, who got top scores in his school exams just months before he debuted for England because his parents taught him to work just as hard inside the classroom as on the pitch; Raheem Sterling, my personal favorite, celebrated for his activism against racism. (His older sister is pretty popular now too, since he revealed that she took him to training every single evening when she was 17 years old and had better things to do, but never once complained.)

I could go on – these are admirable men, with the courage to go out in front of millions of spectators who are more invested in their success than a reasonable person should be. We have more to be proud of than the fact we can finally rely on our team to produce consistently excellent performances.

The Football Association had a ten-year plan, and it ended with reaching the finals of this tournament. It worked, and who knows what they have in their next list of goals.

But we didn’t win the Euros. Despite all that effort, our age-old enemy of the penalty shootout came back to haunt us.

All most of us wanted to do was tell our boys how desperately proud we are. They gave it their all, and the country responded accordingly. For days, “it’s coming home” was all you heard.

Some were less well behaved, sending racist messages to players who missed penalties or rioting in the streets. Our years of pain and desperate wish to succeed were the reasons, but never an excuse.

Those people missed the point. They focused so narrowly on the trophy that they forgot we’d developed a team of sportsmen that represent the best of us – a team the whole country can be proud of.

Through those players and their manager, through their work on and off the pitch and the self-respect they were determined to instill, and through the solidarity with which the nation came together to support them, we stumbled across the meaning our national sport should have had to us all along. At that very moment, with the cheers of a grateful nation still echoing around the stadium, football finally found its way home.