The Grandstands of Morality: The EURO 2020 Fallout, and Growing Cracks in English Identity

Screams of despair cried out across a nation. After an intense heat between England and Italy in the (delayed) 2020 UEFA European Championship tournament, the worst had come to pass - the final decision would be made through penalties. One after the other, Europe would hold its breath watching both teams take their shot at the championship - the final penalty result being 3-2 favoring Italy. It seemed like such an anticlimactic end to such an impressive journey that the England team, and all their players, had experienced. This was a chance for football to finally come home, and boy, did everyone feel the momentum, not just in the UK, but also worldwide.

The public relations campaign and advertising machine that powered this momentum cannot be understated. Not only in terms of the scale of its outreach - which is truly commendable - but also the narrative it has helped construct. Particularly behind the “Three Lions”, as the three final penalty takers for England have been nicknamed. Wittingly or unwittingly, these three England players are part of a much greater social campaign than just football - as much as the media would like to fashion it in that way..

The England team that Gareth Southgate, a former veteran midfielder and current manager, was subject to a hysterical race-driven media campaign unlike any other. For months leading up to, and during the tournament journalists couldn’t help but remind everyone about how having players of African or mixed-race descent is another sign of the “England for all” and yet another sign of the changing shape of Global Britain™. Of course this is all during the backdrop of the manic times we’re living in post-George Floyd, where American racial politics infect seemingly every other Western nation and institution.

Unfortunately sport, and the  ‘Great Game’ aren’t spared in this culture war.

Football has always had an undertone of politics and national identity; from the Nika Riots during the time of Justinian to your modern day “friendly” match between Balkan teams that ends up stirring some national crisis. Let’s face it, it’s part of the fun - as much as we try to deny it and act within our own politically correct sensibilities. But you cannot deny the feeling you get when you are in a stadium surrounded by thousands of other people cheering for the same thing. It is a metaphysical energy that could bring down a nation, and it almost has at times. Perhaps that’s why the political and media elites have taken such an active interest in trying to stifle the fans from attending matches, and making football a more “family-friendly” pastime.

Now, in the era of ‘Big Football’ these ridiculous, middle-management liberal sensibilities are infecting the very thing that most normal people use as a tool to escape, bond with their friends and strangers alike, and blow off a bit of steam. The sport has a competitive spirit by nature, and it invites peoples worst behaviors. But it’s also an outlet where it can at least be controlled to shit-talking and maybe, the occasional group punch-on between meatheads. That’s the football I remember, and frankly it was better than the vapid solidarity campaigns that the current industry is trying to pull.

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Back to the final. The fallout and the racial grievance that has come from the unfortunate and, honestly, pretty shocking missed penalties from Rashford, Saka, and Sancho, are the result of this hysterical media campaign which has existed for months.

The activist journos and the Big Football executives that enable their outrage culture simply can’t help themselves, and that has been clear for years of kneeling, rainbow corner flags and now wide scale bans under the excuse of disparaging “racist fans”. Ridiculous.

Firstly, one must point out that much of the online abuse didn’t even manifest from England. It was largely from Asian countries - isn’t that funny? As for in the country, I doubt the outrage from some aggrieved and disgruntled fans would have been as large if the preceding months weren’t dominated by headlines like “Our national team proves ‘Englishness’ has nothing to do with race” or the typical Guardian wishy-washy moan about how football isn’t diverse enough - from someone who takes a passing interest at best. Either way, you can’t take online trolling and comments from the internet as a reflection of anything solid. It’s a waste of time.

But in the end, whether three of the youngest and racially “diverse” players were given the final three slots for some great victory of post-national identity if they scored was inconsequential. The media was able to get the racial outrage narrative they wanted anyway - but instead of heroes, these football players are now martyrs. It’s a shame - all three of them are talented and, in the case of Rashford, are doing their hardest to connect and help with communities across England. But, I fear that their careers are now going to be dominated by this ‘Three Lions’ modicum that has now been placed on them.

So now the streets are adorned with shrines to the three of them. People bowing and kneeling in worship at huge efigies of the three minority England players, it having very great similarities to the deification of George Floyd in the United States. There’s massive crowds of people gathering at sites dedicated to these players who - I must affirm, are still very much alive - lighting candles and leaving notes and praying... while I’m sure it comes with very good intentions, it’s all very cultish, isn’t it?

I guess now you can sip your rainbow Starbucks espresso as you appreciate the displays to your new Gods; Greta Thunberg and the Three Lions.

This is the new English identity. Nike pullovers and getting violently drunk at international events - so long as it is multicultural.  

It fits in perfectly with the new, universalist morality that everyone is expected to ascribe to, where loose and ill-defined terms like “anti-racism” or “ally” dictate whether or not you’re seen as a good person, let alone a person worthy of even living in some extreme cases.

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This universalist morality, the same one that we see pop up time and time again, driven almost exclusively by mass corporate media and unaccountable social movement groups (who seem to get funding from intelligence agencies, oddly enough) has resulted in nothing constructive, yet it persists and dominates the social zeitgeist.

You see it in our own media - whether you are watching BBC Newsnight or whether you’ve switched on GB News, you can bear witness to liberalists and “conservatives” alike advocate for stripping away more of your individual freedoms and privacy so they don’t appear to be on “the wrong side of history”. See Piers Morgan have sook on Twitter because people don’t ascribe to his sociopathic need to be seen as the most ethical and tolerant person. It’s tiresome, it distracts us from serious issues and just runs us around and around in circles as both sides play this ridiculous hot-potato game of “I’m not racist, you are!”.

Meanwhile communities break down further and further, the attempts to construct any meaningful identity to unite a multicultural Britain are all hollow, leftover Britpoppery and operate under the same delusional liberal mindset that has crippled Western productivity with meaningless social campaigns.

You can’t just manufacture a national identity based around a football team’s potential success, force people to sing “Strong Britain, Great Nation” and not do anything about the serious problems that exist in post WWII British identity.

As much as people hate playing the identity politics game, there’s no point denying it or pretending that it’s just going to go away. It’s far more effective to draw certain lines in the sand, come to mutual, amicable relations that suit all communities and stop living in this undefined haze of “we’re ALL in this together”. The last few years has shown that, no - that is not the case at all. There are clear and distinct identities that are clashing, and everyone, whether they like it or not, are paying the price.

While we enjoy relative peace in most Western countries there’s still huge problems, and you’d be in denial if you can’t observe they’re getting progressively worse. I’m saying this while we are witnessing South Africa, a modern nation that was built on this universal liberalist morality,  now collapsing into riots, looting of the most crucial resources, massive racial violence between all communities, and political breakdown unlike anything we’ve seen in our time. Thirty years of unaddressed identity issues, media-driven moral campaigns and denial have led what used to be a nuclear-armed nation to ruin. Not that we’ve heard anything about it in mainstream media yet, I’m sure they’re struggling to find a way to spin this as anything other than a complete failure of their political pet-project.

England will play football again. There will be winners, there will be losers. At the end of the day, we watch millionaires kick a ball around a field for our entertainment - fans pay huge chunks of their paycheck at the pub, at the field, and in the stadiums to escape the monotony that modern life facilitates - as an outlet, I’m pretty sure the intense passion that fans have felt at football matches has probably prevented some wars or huge displays of violence by channeling that energy into the game.

To try and punish them, or shame them for doing what they have always been doing is ridiculous. More so, it’s going to have serious unintended consequences that I don’t think most football business executives are weighing up - once you get rid of these outlets, people let off steam in much worse ways.

Rather than focusing on the victimizing of three players who missed some shots, which is understandably part of their job, perhaps it’s more constructive to talk about just how big the football industry is, and the corruption that exists in this multi-billion pound industry - the same industry where FIFA turns a blind eye to Qatari stadium workers dying by the dozens to fit their globalist sports day, or the same industry led by executives that were shamelessly kill smaller club revenue with the proposed European Super League - who knows if that still may happen?

Furthermore, if the media or politicians want to continue to label English football fans as racist, they should stop acting like they haven’t laid the foundations for football to become such a racialized issue. Perhaps it wasn’t the wisest idea to try and paint a nation as evil or bigoted, and then try and reshape a sport that relies heavily on nationalism. You can’t have your cake and eat it - not that they’re wise enough to realize it.

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(Originally Published in Issue #5 of The Mallard)