Euro 2020 and the search for a new Englishness

A soccer contest is upon us. I know nothing of football as a sport, but even a dunce like me knows that these things are about more than 22 men chasing a ball for 90 minutes. Big sporting events such as Euro 2020 matter, especially for England and Englishness.

Any big England game is a rare chance for people to fly the flag and briefly talk about Englishness. But we need to do more than talk about this when the football team is playing. A proper national debate about English identity is overdue and badly needed. New polling from British Future this week showed that only two thirds of BAME people think ‘Englishness’ is open to them. Worse, 14 per cent of white English people still think only white people can be English. That’s better than it used to be, but still captures the idea of a country that is not aligned with its entire population.

For all Gareth Southgate’s eloquence and the example set by a multi-ethnic national team, football alone cannot build an inclusive national identity.