Culture Society, Identity and Belonging
There are three certainties in life: death, taxes, and politicians pretending to like football. Today marks the start of Euro 2024, and for the first time since 1970 a UK general election is being held during a major football tournament – a crossover that one X-user has called “Barbenheimer for centrist dads”.
Politicians of all stripes, except those west and north of the border, are likely to hitch themselves to the England team and not just because they are well fancied. The squad, parented by police officers, builders, receptionists, plumbers, businessmen, plasterers, and cashiers, is a picture of modern Britain.
Twenty two of the 26 players went to comprehensive schools. Brought up on farms and council estates, in big cities and tiny villages, many came from nothing. If politicians want to speak to a broad church, they could learn a lot from the England squad.
The main party leaders both profess to be football fans. Keir Starmer is an Arsenal season-ticket holder and a bruising five-a-side midfielder. He has said that what you do for a living is “completely secondary” to playing football on a Sunday. Rishi Sunak appears to be a less ardent fan. He supports Southampton and was recently spotted at the Saints’ Championship match against West Brom.
An appeal to the nation is an appeal to people like those who’ll take the field on Sunday, when England plays Serbia. The squad will be together in the German industrial city of Gelsenkirchen, but they started life at an array of childhood clubs, including Dickerage Lane Adventure Playground, Washington Envelopes, Whitehaven Miners, Leominster Minors and the more prosaic Soccer Stars FC.
The clubs are dotted around 26 English constituencies, which, politically speaking, may look very different come 5 July. In 2019, sixteen of them voted Conservative, nine Labour and one Lib Dem. But according to Tortoise analysis of Electoral Calculus projections, there will be a red and yellow wave across the muddy fields and artificial pitches. Nineteen seats are forecast to be won by Labour, five by Lib Dem and just two by Conservatives.
The constituencies in question mainly voted Leave; only eight of the 26 opted to remain in the EU. They cover some of the most and least deprived parts of England, but on average they are almost perfectly reflective of the country as a whole.
The average squad member’s constituency voted Leave with 53.2 per cent of the vote, against a mean of 53.4 across England. In the typical constituency, 56 per cent of people are from the ABC1 social grades (seen as middle class and above), a little below the national average of 56.2 per cent.
Politicians, then, should know better than to repeat the actions of home secretary Priti Patel in Euro 2020. At the height of goodwill towards the England team, she described players taking the knee as ‘gesture politics’ and was called out by the England defender Tyrone Mings.
England’s Euro 2024 squad, by many measures, depicts the country that the winning party will lead in a few short weeks.