England’s thugs and losers

The Portuguese police are donning their riot gear, the café owners are boarding up their premises and the locals are telling each other, ‘Don’t go down to the square, the English are coming….’ It’s Euro 2004, and the English have already arrived. They are sitting in clumps around the fountain, groups of pink, misshapen men, wearing St George T-shirts and shellsuit bottoms or shorts. Some are glum, nursing a can of beer as consolation for a lost wallet or a night spent in the park. Others are jovial, the kind of men who think it a lark to try to dance with passing women or moon the Italian supporters drinking coffee underneath the awnings across the square. And there’s a group who are staring angrily, red-faced, up for it, whachewfuckinlookinat?

The football hooligan is one of those indelible images of England which the world carries in its mind. Even Donald Rumsfeld, maintaining that reports of lawlessness in Iraq had been exaggerated, said, ‘We know what happens at a soccer game in England.’ Over the years, snowfalls of words have been expended on this tribe of ugly Englishmen, but all that is left is a slush of puzzlement. Why do they do it? What do they tell us about ourselves, if anything? England is not the only country that produces football thugs, but ours remain far and away the brand leaders. They were the first, they have been the most persistent and they have caused the most destructive, sometimes tragic confrontations.

Hooligans are the most visible puzzle of English football, but not the only one. Why are the English at once so passionate about football and, relatively, so unsuccessful at it (to quote Baddiel and Skinner’s iconic song — ‘Thirty years of hurt never stopped me dreaming’)? England’s lack of success at football is the stuff of legend: England has won one significant international competition; since 1966, we have failed to reach the final of a single World Cup or European Championship.