Since the dawn of time humans have waged war. Day by day, year by year and generation after generation we have banded together in our tribes and troops to defeat that which we cannot comprehend, the other, each other. After all, all of the great foundational myths and legends are possessed with war, victory and domination – George and the Dragon, Fionn mac Cumhaill and Ragnarok to name but a few. Of all animals, humans have become the de facto experts in war and conflict on planet Earth. Yet, as societies developed and resources grew, the need for war has slowly disappeared. Unfortunately, the desire did not.
To make up for this war shaped hole, we introduced it into everyday life under the guise of competitive sport. Gladiators, wrestling and boxing formed the basis of ancient spectator sport and have been endorsed by crowds, states and empires for most of recorded history – from the Olympics to the Colosseum and now on the electronic arena of the television. A more civilised bloodsport for a more civilised age. Sport is modern society’s way of microdosing war. The tattooed gammon glued to his settee is the distant ancestor of the man in the Colosseum calling for the death of the downed fighter. The perfect catharsis for the working man living in a world which he can no longer affect. Before, he could live and die with pride in war, knowing he played a role in shaping the world for those that followed him. Now what does he have to mimic that great feeling of brotherhood and sacrifice?
Now, he has club and international sport. Colossal arenas, thousands of supporters and two teams fighting for eternal glory or shame. And the stakes are always high. Think Roberto Baggio’s penalty miss in the 1994 Football World Cup Final. The photo of him in the immediate aftermath is a picture of a man at his lowest, and of the moment Baggio said “If I had had a knife at that moment, I would have stabbed myself. If I had had a gun, I would have shot myself. At that moment, I wanted to die.” For many players these losses become a mark of shame that is impossible to wash away. Before the modern day, defeat in war meant a quick literal death. Today it is lifelong, players have to live with the memories and feelings of guilt and disappointment, knowing that millions of people hold them responsible, something internal and infinitely more terrifying to tussle with. But most men don’t live through these moments first hand, they experience them vicariously. Top level sport is an exclusive environment by nature, and only the best can compete whilst others inject it second-hand. Regardless of this reality, these men live and breathe their sport with as much emotion as if it was they themselves out on the pitch. It is every fan’s dream to be on that stage, he may have even had an opportunity at youth level, yet all he can do now is watch from meters away, never to touch the pitch he has longed to stand on since childhood. It is a beautifully sad love affair, but one that can quickly turn sour.
It is easy to take all of the good that sports provide without addressing the problems, as a coach myself I believe it should be a vital part of everyone’s lives in any way it can be, not just as a player but as a coach, referee or fan. However, it is also important for us as a society to analyse the negatives it brings, and where these issues originate from. Not only is there a reason for everything we do; there is also thousands of years of historical precedent. Our past is fundamentally inescapable. The taller the tree grows, the larger the gap between the fruit and the ground, but if one only ever looked up at the fruit, you would forget about the trunk that stops them from brushing the dirt.
England as a modern-day nation was built on the bones of peoples from around the world. By profiting on the suppression and exploitation of all those who were different, whether that be race, nationality, gender or sexuality. ‘The white man’s burden’. Under the guise of the British Empire, there are only 22 nations on Earth that haven’t been invaded by England. I have no problem with this fact featuring in Monday night quizzes down the local, but far too many people in this country retain pride in our colonial past. In fact, one in three Britons believe that the British Empire is something to be proud of, conveniently forgetting the millions that were enslaved or killed in the construction of it. The ‘truth’ of the Empire is now seen through the lens of time, distance has rendered it a blur, and it now sits in the cultural consciousness more as a topic to be learnt in school than the atrocity it was. But I am here to tell you the Empire is alive and well, and the sun hasn’t set on it just yet.
The dregs of this imperial lineage survive in the mind of Man all across the world, and in England rears its head most prominently when things don’t go well on the international sports stage. It is important to us as a nation to remind any team that beats us where they are in the historical pecking order, whether it’s against the forever-surrendering baguette-eating frogs, or those dirty Krauts… remember who won the bloody wars they started?
Xenophobia seems to be racism’s more respectable relative in sport, the gateway drug, the uncle who is allowed back for Christmas dinner each year despite always just slightly overstepping the mark, and who every four years goads grandpa into the usual racist tirade that ruins the pudding.
The culture that we as a nation have built up around sports is supercharged with the tensions of both our near and distant past, and with the England Men’s Football team bowing out of the Euros and World Cup in recent years and a German head coach taking the reins, it is time to take a look at our daily practices to see if we can overcome these petty prejudices.
The Root
But what is it that means we as a fanbase resort to these behaviours when things don’t go our way? Well, the answer for me is a deeply complex cocktail created through the unique interplay of masculinity and identity.
Sport in this country is not just a game, for many men it forms the focal point of their identity, the only means through which they have a social life and a place of belonging. It can be the sweet release from the often-mundane existence of modern life, the chance to unite with thousands of others and to feel a part of something bigger than yourself, a community. This can be a beautiful thing to experience, and anyone who has been to a football game knows it.
However, when sport becomes such a centrepiece to masculine identity, it can also become an intolerable place for all that fails to fit into that space. This explains why there is a huge amount of homophobia and misogyny in sporting culture. Take football as an example; of more than 1,500 abusive posts included in a report on online abuse towards professional athletes, homophobic content made up 40% of posts targeted at male footballers. Is it so surprising then that we are still yet to have a Premier League footballer come out as gay? In fact, only two players in English footballing history have ever had the courage to come out. These men are Jake Daniels in 2022 and Justin Fashanu in 1990. Daniel’s decision was met with support from key figures such as England captain Harry Kane and then Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Fashanu was not so lucky. During his time he was subjected to malicious jokes, crowd abuse, labelled a “poof” by his own manager (England’s sweetheart Brian Clough) and was even threatened and bribed by his own brother to keep his homosexuality a secret for the sake of their family reputation. Fashanu hung himself in 1998 after being accused of sexual assault, his suicide note declared his innocence but revealed his fear that he would be tried unfairly due to his sexuality.
But homophobia isn’t exclusive to the English footballing scene – in August 2022, a German goalkeeper was fined $2,000 for labelling what he saw as weak defending from his team as “gay turning away [that] really pisses me off” in a post-match interview. More recently, Australian footballer Josh Cavallo has spoken out about receiving daily death threats and abuse on social media since coming out in 2021.
When masculinity lies at the heart of a sport, losing becomes a threat to it, and so the natural instinct in this scenario is to attempt to regain that identity. So what can be done? Well, we can either remove our opponent’s masculinity or look at past instances wherein we dominated our opponents in a similarly masculine-coded arena, thereby restoring our own. This is why wars are brought up so often in the competitive sporting world. When football isn’t doing the talking, then one has to look elsewhere for the validation of their manhood. But you’d be wrong to think this is something new and exclusive to the world sporting scene. Sex-related violence is as old as war itself. Throughout time, men have subjected each other to horrific abuse beyond the ‘necessities’ of war. In Ancient Greece, when enemy fighters were captured, it was not unusual for them to be used as sex slaves. Aztecs raped captured combatants as an effective method for intimidating and enforcing domination on enemies.During the Armenian Genocide, many men were castrated, forced to walk naked, or circumcised after being coerced to convert to Islam. One event that gained infamy in more recent times is the Rape of Nanking in 1937, during which Chinese men were raped and forced to rape each other in front of Japanese soldiers. These atrocities remain a stark reminder of how war weaponizes humiliation. War is enacted not only through killing but through the shattering of dignity, by assaulting the very markers of a man’s identity. Whether this was enacted literally through genital mutilation or more symbolically through sexual violence, the result is a brutal assertion of control that reduces the victim to utterpowerlessness. Likewise, in football, winning is never enough. Fans must be taunted with chants, called slurs and sent home feeling truly defeated, beyond the reasonable need for mere spectators. So yes, there may be historical precedent in these behaviours, but how do they manifest in the modern day? Are we acting on an evolutionary need or is this something that can be unlearned and eliminated from our sporting culture?
Up to the Surface
To see the beginning of this mix in real time, all one must do is look to the most popular sport in our country, football. From the bottom-up football is war. We pride ourselves as a nation on our Sunday League, where grown men, hungover from the night before, go and kick lumps out of each other on what is glorified grazing land. Any moment of softness or sympathy is met with the lament “the game’s gone soft”.
The younger generation are encouraged to do the same, with overzealous fathers barking instructions from the side line and referees being abused by castrato boys parroting their favourite prima donnas. At home the patriarch now screams and shouts at the TV, ordering his soldiers on screen to “GIVE IT WIDE” or “SHOOT!” and cursing the day they were born when they fail. In these everyday normalised actions begins the manifestation of the toxic English football fan; a love hate kingdom where anger reigns and players are abused at the drop of a hat, picked back up and told to brush off the dust. Throw racism, misogyny and homophobia into the mix and a Molotov emerges.
Then comes the intra-league rivalries, the derbies and the title games. No matter whether it’s top four Premier League or 5th tier non-league, a tribalist mentality emerges when three points are at stake. From these clans emerge those bloodthirsty enough to take football beyond the pitch – the ultras, the firms, the hooligans. Football often becomes larger than life for those who delve deeply into it, and with this can come both the highest highs and the lowest lows.
Of course, this issue does not just occur at the societal level of your average working football fan. Culture occurs in many forms, but ultimately it is reciprocal in nature. Culture and those who practice it are a never-ending cycle, of which constant feedback is necessary from many different areas of society to maintain the status quo.
It is here that the media and our school system must have a heavy involvement in maintaining such a culture. The glorification of English football hooliganism through films like Green Street, The Firm, The Football Factory etc. has glorified violence for the sake of football as noble and has created traditional garb for the football-going fella. Rarely will you see a die-hard football geezer without his Stone Island. This uniform brands themselves to be identifiable to anyone in public by a patch placed on the left arm embroidered with the badge of the company, a nautical star affixed to a compass. Remind you of anything?
Football fashion has extended further to non-football fans, with the “Blokecore” trend on TikTok displaying middle class millennials (who have never been within a mile of a footy ground) dressing for their own away days – a visit to the vape store and a bubble tea café. It is interesting that ‘bloke’ is the word used to label this look. It is further recognition from an outside perspective that there is something about being a football fan that is not only masculine, it is something that belongs to the everyman, the average Joe, rather than any other type of man. But it is precisely when the niche is accepted by its antipode within the vagueness of the mainstream that we as the general public must consider the culture it reflects and the ramifications of its normalisation.
Upholding the System
There appears to be a fetishisation in our country of sports that originated in England – the classics: football, rugby, cricket, hockey, netball and tennis. Any sports outside of this are left to flounder and die no matter their worldly popularity – volleyball, table tennis, badminton to name just a few which, although are in the top ten most played sports worldwide, have no confirmed space in our national curriculum. Look up the PE curriculum on our official government website and you’ll see the PDF attached hasn’t been updated for twelve years, and it is felt.
If this wasn’t enough, the sports that are lucky enough to be showcased in the UK are then horrifically barricaded by both class and gender stereotyping. These are the two defining categories you will find in the English psyche of sports; if a sport isn’t deemed masculine enough to play, it can become accepted through association with higher social class.
You want a sport that satisfies the masculine but isn’t very posh? football. Want the opposite? cricket or tennis. But what happens when it is neither? Well then it has to be a ‘woman’s sport’ or perhaps its designation as a sport is called into question altogether. This is the case with the sports mentioned above as they cannot fill the criteria of being a “gentleman’s game” because they are not English.
Rugby (in my opinion) is the only sport I have seen able to satisfy both categories. Why, you ask? Well, perhaps that is due to the violence inherent in it. The masculinity of violence allows for the co-existence of the two. It is also what has allowed such a potent mix of casual homosexuality and blatant homophobia to remain rampant in the sport. All one must do is look at the locker room behaviour of high school students and hazing rituals of university teams for the evidence of this duality. It seems it is somehow less believable when you are able to dominate other men physically that you could possibly be a gay man; they are seen as diametrically opposed.
How can these sports be so entrenched in gender if the government has left the power in teacher’s hands, you may wonder. The school system enables this division to continue through no attempt at making teachers try something different. I can talk of my personal experience going to an all-boys grammar school in the countryside – I can count on one hand the number of times I was shown how to play table tennis, volleyball, basketball and even Tennis. Rugby was the order of the year, with a smattering of Kwik cricket in the summer and a modicum of Football if we begged hard enough. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’d been made to play dodgeball and rounders, however. Was that really a great use of my formative years in learning to understand and appreciate sports? Of course all cultures will have favouritisms towards certain sports, that is entirely natural. This is about the unconscious biases passed down generation after generation. Golf and Table Tennis being labelled as hobbies or games rather than sports, Volleyball being a ‘woman’s game’ played only on the beach in skimpy outfits or Basketball being worse simply because it is American in origin!
The main issue with our curriculum as shown on the GOV.UK website does not instruct that children have to be exposed to several different sports, instead a simple instruction is given: “play competitive games”. This is followed by a list of the sports you’d expect to see there. I imagine this is to allow teachers the ability to choose themselves and therein enrich children with their specific knowledge, but this is precisely why our country is so heavily dominated by a certain set of sports and can barely compete internationally in the rest.
When you never bother to implement variety to the system, those who become teachers end up passing on their skills and passions for the same sports as those before them and even those before them, there is never any variation. Kids become taught less popular sports by footballers who were taught by rugby players who were taught by footballers and… you get the gist. Perhaps this system would be fantastic if all sports had been equal from the get-go, but as it is now, it remains the gatekeeper of a bygone era, less prominent sports just cannot get a foothold.
This even applies to some degree to football. Why have we had to wait for the Lionesses to win the Euros back-to-back for more women to be playing football and wanting to engage in sport generally? What sort of government is satisfied with being an active bystander to positive social change within its own country? In this sense, the organisation of the school system is actively harmful towards sporting development in our country, by upholding decades long power imbalances between sports originally created and maintained by historical stereotypes.
England vs The World
To give the benefit of the doubt to the English, we as fans don’t have it easy. Ever since 1966 we have been constantly yo-yoing between hope and despair, so it’s no wonder tensions have reached where they are today. Partly owing to our expansionist past, England has few allies. This feeling is palpable at every major tournament, hanging over us and flaring the tempers of our supporters and it is undoubtedly felt by our players. I don’t think I can name a country who has more people rooting for their downfall, and I believe this contributes massively to the pressure our players face.
These men don’t just have to beat the team in front of them, they have to beat that team, their fans, the fans of the teams we knocked out, what is essentially the entire globe. Not to mention sometimes our own fans too. Say what you like about how much footballers earn, no amount of money in the world could bulletproof someone’s skin from the vitriol of millions. The mental toll this must have on the psyche; being afraid to make a mistake means never being ready to take risks. Think of how our black players feel knowing if they lose, whether they are to blame or not, they will be racially abused. It is precisely because of this consistent occurrence that seeing the England flag being paraded after victories is both joyous and deeply unsettling. Within that banner lies all that is good and bad about this country, and the bad too often overshadows the good. A flag that flew as our ancestors colonised the world and is currently hung around the country to protest immigration is the same flag held high when these players, products of immigration themselves, lead our team to success.
We bully and belittle our team and then expect them to perform in crucial moments. We taunt our captain for the way he speaks and show our kids that it is not okay to be different, and that even if you become one of the greatest players of all time for your country, you are not safe from being singled out for abuse. If we win something in the men’s game in the next 20 years it will be monumental. The mountain to climb is colossal, not just for the players but for us as a society.
A World Cup will never be won without taking risks – we saw this when the weakest French team in years pushed the very limits of fair play to outmatch us in what was really England’s game to lose in the 2022 World Cup Quarterfinals. As a country that prides itself on our rough ‘n’ tumble football and our “Brexit” challenges, why were we not the ones kicking the French to pieces? Well, because we as a nation have already kicked the shit out of our team before they’ve even got on the pitch.
59 years, hundreds of different players in and out of the squad and so much has changed, yet we still haven’t secured another major trophy. You know what hasn’t changed? Us.
A New Hope
It is no surprise then that we have already attained immense international success with our women’s team – a fresh start unrestricted (mostly) by the history of men’s football and the colonial expectation of the people. In fact, I would actively encourage people to go and follow our Lionesses if I didn’t think they’d poison the well of what I believe to be the face leading the revolution against archaic ideologues around sport in this country. We often discuss the political and socio-economic factors present between the genders in football, especially about how heavily it favours the men. However, one thing I would count the women lucky in is that they haven’t had the same fanbase that has made the men’s game frankly noxious. True there hasn’t been the same funding or exposure. Women were banned from playing from 1921-1971, but one of the silver linings to this was that a much more constructive spirit of the game was developed independently from the men’s game, and success has now followed. A testament to what the beautiful game should be!
In the future I am hopeful there will be change. Perhaps those who deem the boundary of racism acceptable to cross will have spent one too many winters on this earth and with this loss a gradual liberation of sport from the grasps of prejudice will occur. At the time of writing, Thomas Tuchel has just finished the World Cup Qualifiers undefeated, without a single goal conceded and England are looking like a better team than they ever have in the 21st century. Unfortunately, some still lament his German blood, labelling it a disgrace a German leads us given all our ‘history’. Is this really how it is supposed to end? Is there no angry mob or knight in shining armour gallantly arriving to cut down this dragon once and for all? Is the beast that is England’s prejudice simply being left to die of old age, to peter out peacefully on his hoard rather than be slain and for everyone to live happily ever after? Only time will tell, but for now we bar our windows and cower until the next time he comes out of his lair. See you soon, World Cup 2026!
