Notes from a football summer

A summer roundup with thoughts on England, the way fans show support, the unacknowledged success of the Champions League final, and between the lines with the FA.

The Dortmund fan zone in Hyde Park, before the 2024 Champions League final

I’ve just watched joyful Georgia turn Portugal over to bring the group stages of Euro 2024 to a close. It was a great match with positive football on display – a welcome reminder that football is in fact entertainment.

Like many fans, I’ve got a special affection for international tournaments. They retain a certain sporting purity because international football is about coaching the best out of what you have rather than buying the best and stockpiling the opposition out of existence. I’m sure somewhere some ambitious characters are working at changing that, though.

The European Championships were probably my favourite competition. More compact than the increasingly sprawling World Cup, they were easy to get hold of and settle into as a fan. And there was invariably a compelling narrative to secure the attention. But there are few pleasures safe from the relentless drive of football’s authorities to fix what doesn’t need fixing as they pursue more opportunities to make money, and what was once a pleasingly compact competition has become steadily more bloated.

So Georgia were needed to remind us why the game can be beautiful, and may yet provide the narrative thread that makes some tournaments live long in the memory.

In 1984, it was all about the silky French hosts winning their first major title. In 1988, the Netherlands famously and gloriously tweaked the noses of the West German hosts by winning the tournament in Munich after knocking the Nationalmannschaft out in the semi-finals – an achievement replete with symbolism, for the Dutch at least, and one which remains their only major tournament win. (I recommend David Winner’s excellent book Brilliant Orange if you want to read up further on the background).

In 1992, of course, the narrative was all about Denmark, while in 1996, the focus was all on hosts England. And in 2000 I was lucky enough to get a job on the official UEFA tournament website. I mainlined football for six weeks and got paid for it.

England have, so far in this tournament, looked more like the gormless version under Kevin Keegan in 2000 than the Terry Venables side of 1996 which was one of the best England teams I’ve seen. It’s a shame, because I like Gareth Southgate and what he has done to rescue the Three Lions from themselves – and from the rest of us. After the game against Slovenia, he spoke about being careful not to throw away the fact that playing for and watching England had become fun again. And it’s worth remembering how much it wasn’t fun when he took over in 2016.

He's pierced some of the pomposity , confronted some truths and helped forge a more positive version of Englishness – a process superbly set out in Jamie Graham’s play Dear England. That shouldn’t be forgotten, but the bottom line is that managing a national team can’t just be a cultural exercise. Southgate’s football record shouldn’t be dismissed as easily as it has been – he’s taken us to semi-finals and a final – but there is a caution that means he has failed to take advantage of the opportunities he has created. Which means patience is running out – especially when such an obviously talented and potentially entertaining squad of players is turning out such dire stuff.

England are playing the wrong players in the wrong positions in the wrong system. But things can change – remember Italia 90? The knockouts are a different ball game, and the truth is none of the big beasts have really caught fire – with the exception of Spain, who seem to have more to give too. Which may not be good news for Georgia. But that could be a cracking game.

I was struck by one England fan interviewed after the game against Denmark, who spoke of how organised and visible the Danish fans were. It made me think about whether English supporter culture, for so long the template for others, is falling behind.

Bear with me on this, because I’m not arguing for a minute that the English invented fan culture (read another excellent book, James Montague’s 1312, if you want a thorough and insightful view on that) or trying to deny the negative side of the England team’s support that blighted the country for years. But it was the case that the fan culture around English clubs was seen as something to aspire to elsewhere. England fans, and fans of English clubs, can still be counted on to travel in huge numbers – and expressions of support have improved since the bad old days, despite the fact that there are still too many who choose to sing stupid songs about a war they clearly don’t understand.

Now, though, it is the fans of other nations that catch the eye – with walls of colour and noise and what seems to be never-ending good humour. Although perhaps they are moaning into the vox pop mics of their nation’s TV channels too. The truth is that expressions of support that catch the eye are far more organised than they appear to be, and there is a reticence among many fans in England about being too organised when it comes to supporting. Often, if you try to co-ordinate, you’ll be met with the response “Don’t tell me what to do”. And that would pretty much be the response anyone who lifted a megaphone and tried to emulate the European capos elicited.

I’m not advocating a strictly organised approach to support – this is supposed to be fun, remember. But I do wonder if an increasing dissatisfaction with the direction the game is taking, certainly in the top divisions, is hindering organic expressions of support among fans in England.

I saw the great support Borussia Dortmund’s fans showed their team up close when I met up with Dortmund-supporting friends in the Hyde Park fanzone before the Champions League final. It was a really enjoyable day, especially for me as the tension that goes with supporting ‘your’ team wasn’t there. I like the club and the football it plays, and I wanted them to win, especially because it would have topped off a wonderful story. But it wasn’t to be.

The event itself went off well – I know a few people who were working it so that’s not just an observer’s view – and I was surprised that success didn’t get more media profile. Let’s remember Champions League finals recently have not gone off well – there’s been chaos in Istanbul (twice), shambles in Madrid and downright negligence and threat to life and limb in Paris. There were nerves in advance about Wembley, especially after the events at the Euros final in 2021. And a lot of good people at the FA and Wembley National Stadium Limited, working alongside fan organisations, put in a lot of effort to make sure the day went off without any significant issues and I was proud of London despite the grey skies.

What was noticeable in the run-up to the game was that UEFA adopted a much lower profile as the organiser. The cynic in me wonders whether that was a deliberate ploy to leave the English authorities in the firing line if things went wrong again. The fact that the match went off without the disgraceful scenes witnessed at recent finals was worthy of more comment than it got. Instead, some sections of the media amplified a relatively minor outbreak of trouble sparked by a small number of fans attempting to storm the perimeter fence into something more than it was. 

That, along with three pitch invaders earning a bounty from a particularly unpleasant internet grifter, was nowhere near what those in Paris experienced in 2022. That and the huge amount of pyro on display in the Dortmund end will have given cause for reflection to officials at the FA and Wembley, but I believe both organisations should have received more praise for a successful event than they did.

Finally, it’s worth reading the minutes of the latest structured dialogue meeting between the FA and fan reps. There’s an interesting section on the changes to the FA Cup that provoked the row I covered in a previous edition.

I argued in that post that the FA weren’t the villains this time, and that too many people were either facing both ways at once or being less than honest about their position. The minutes of the discussion at the structured dialogue meeting are not hard to read between the lines of. One line stands out. “The FA felt they had been clear and transparent in their discussions but could not vouch for how effective and thorough the information flow had been from those other stakeholders to their member clubs.”

Also: “The FSA asked about reintroducing replays for the First and Second Rounds proper, but were told that there had been no appetite from the EFL Board to retain those given a clash of dates with the EFL Trophy and Internationals.”

It’s pretty clear the narrative spun about the nasty big six clubs bulldozing the change through is wide of the mark.