News from Nowhere: Coming Home

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Last week, England won its first major football tournament in more than half a century. Last week, England's women's team won its first major football tournament ever.

This was, all the papers agreed the following morning, a truly historic event. Their front pages were dominated by the news of Chloe Kelly’s winning goal against Germany in the final match of the European Championship at Wembley. For reasons of footballing history as well as military history, a win against Germany was considered especially sweet.

This ‘inspirational’ team were, according to the Daily Mirror, ‘history makers’. The Daily Mail hailed England’s ‘historic victory’, declaring it ‘the greatest sporting triumph in the lives of most of those lucky enough to witness it’. The women’s win would, it said, have been ‘inconceivable’ when England’s men’s team last earned a major trophy, the World Cup, also at Wembley, back in 1966.

The Guardian called the team ‘game changers’ and suggested that, as their captain ‘hoisted the trophy aloft in her rainbow armband’, it felt ‘like the end of one journey and the beginning of another’. The Times described it as a ‘watershed moment’ not only for women’s football but for women’s sport more generally. The BBC’s chief football writer proposed that ‘women’s football will never be the same again’ – but we might be forgiven for hoping that the impacts of this event may reach well beyond the world of sport.

In fact, Her Majesty the Queen went rather further than most of these pundits, when she sent the team a message of congratulations saying that they had provided ‘an inspiration for girls and women today, and for future generations’. That was surely really the point.

With an audience of more than seventeen million watching on TV and a further six million viewing online in the UK alone, this unprecedented level of public appreciation saw this once undervalued and still cash-starved sport suddenly come of age. But this moment of sporting glory was rather more important than just that. It was bigger than women’s football and women’s sport. It demonstrated an extraordinary degree of English success – of English women’s success – in a sport that had once been dominated by men, a sport at the heart of the nation’s mass culture and public consciousness. 

Although it had been popular for forty years since its inception in the 1880s, the women’s game had been excluded from the Football Association’s members’ grounds between 1921 and 1970. The governing body had argued that the sport was ‘unsuitable for females’. 

Its decision may have had something to with the increasing popularity of women’s football at the time, particularly during (and in the immediate wake of) the First World War – and because it was financially independent of the FA. With one match reportedly attracting more than 50,000 spectators (around sixty per cent of the number at last week’s UEFA final), it had rapidly been outstripping the men’s game in both profile and incomes.

The decades that followed, years in which men again came to dominate the pitches and the terraces, saw the sport develop a culture of machismo and chauvinism which not only reflected but also reinforced and exacerbated the gender divides prevalent across a wider society. Football really is that important to England.

In June 1996, when England had hosted the men’s Euros, the pop music charts were topped by a song which had announced that football was ‘coming home’. It has since become the ubiquitous anthem of English football. 

The beautiful game is ingrained in the nation’s psyche, and twenty-six years ago it was believed one of its flagship contests might have been returning to these shores to bring glory to the country which claimed it was its birthplace. 

(That claim is obviously contestable, although modern football may have its roots in the so-called folk football of medieval England, a game in which two teams – each involving unlimited numbers of players – would attempt to shift an inflated pig’s bladder towards their opponents’ end of town. The goal posts were the gates of churches, and the rules prohibited killing fellow players but not much else. The regulations of contemporary football may have evolved out of the playing fields of Victorian private schools, but its origins in truth go back thousands of years to ancient China, Greece, and Rome.)

In this context, the triumph of the women’s game in a traditionally male-dominated sport may have broader social impacts. In recent years, England’s premier league has repeatedly been rocked by allegations of serious sexual misconduct on the part of male players. In terms of gender, and race, it sometimes seems to have made little progress since the 1970s. Sometimes it feels like it’s gone backwards.

The radical changes in the public recognition of women’s football in recent years – and, most stunningly, at the end of last month – look set to change all that. Indeed, even England’s decisive goal-scorer’s gesture of celebration has been interpreted by many as a symbol of emancipation. 

Writing in the Daily Mail on Tuesday, Julie Burchill argued that ‘in an age in which women’s very existence is being denied, this show of bold femininity can change the world’. The Guardian that morning presented the result as ‘a win for every overlooked and patronised woman’.

There is however one significant caveat to all this energising hyperbole, a concern which several commentators have identified. England’s winning squad was this year comprised entirely of white players. This would be unthinkable in the men’s game and is certainly also unusual in women’s football. Football may now at last have come home, but the home it’s reached is not quite the multicultural nation we might know.

This is nevertheless a moment for England to celebrate, a brief respite from the political and economic turmoil in which the country is currently languishing. But it is also perhaps a turning point – a potentially revolutionary moment – in public perspectives on gender in this massively influential aspect of national culture.