After the European Championship final, England was supposed to be a land of hope and glory.
It was meant to be a place where football came home, Sterling and co went on open-bus tours and received the odd OBE. Instead, rather than focusing on the remarkable (and frankly, unlikely) achievements of such a young team, some England fans did their own remarkable job of screwing it all up.
These are the fans who launched their beer skywards when Raheem Sterling forced an own goal and earned a penalty against Denmark. And when he netted the opener against Germany, you presume they were all lauding him. And you imagine they were quite chuffed when he scored the winners against Croatia and the Czech Republic. The first time, incidentally, since Gary Lineker that an England player had got his team’s first three goals in a major tournament.
But when three of England’s players, who happen to be black, missed their penalties in the final shoot-out against Italy, everything changed. Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka and Jadon Sancho instantly got racist messages of the worst kind on Twitter. If these fans had known what piccaninnies were, they’d have probably got called this too. But for that kind of diction, you need a truly educated figure, like Boris Johnson.
Johnson tried his best to condemn the horrific comments, but that’s a hard sell. Nobody, aside from Johnson, has used the word ‘piccaninnie’ since the likes of Enoch Powell in the early 1960s. Even a journalist who questioned him about this didn’t know quite how to pronounce it properly – because everybody has decided it’s such an offensive term we don’t want to use it any longer. Well, nearly everybody.
The vast majority of the country was just embarrassed by the twits who tweeted. And annoyed that the focus had shifted from the team’s achievements and moved elsewhere. Instead, we get to hear about a Savills’ estate agent who got suspended for his racist comments. And it’s people like him who are the problem. On a normal day, he almost certainly doesn’t go around spouting racist garbage. But put him together with a group of fans wearing the same Three Lions, throw in some alcohol, add some simmering tension, and you have a recipie for racists. Most of the time, these fans wallow in the reflective glory of young men who’ve achieved far more than they will ever accomplish. But when it goes wrong, their pent-up, just-below-the-surface anger is unleashed, and their target too often is black players.
I used to go to matches. A friend of mine followed QPR, who had a particularly unpleasant group of supporters. Outside of football, my friend was a pleasant, gentle soul. But once inside Loftus Road, something tribal happened. He, and everyone around him, would be focused as much on the visiting fans as the game. They would scream abuse, gesture wildly and generally threaten to harm anyone in a different-coloured shirt.
I may well have joined them in questioning some referees’ parentage, but never a player’s heritage. It was just so obviously stupid and ignorant.
Stopping such ignorance hasn’t happened in the 25 years since then, and won’t stop any time soon. You can try to ban such followers from social media, but forcing everyone to register means you’d also force that from those who need anonymity (victims of abuse, etc). And as we’ve seen from the Pegasus Project, even then governments have ways of finding who you are and what you’re saying.
Social media giants could certainly do more, but the real change will only come when all society condemns racists and makes them outcasts. That movements well under way but while there remains an undercurrent of post-colonial arrogance, it needs leaders and laws to really reflect how the vast majority of the country feels.
