Fans cover up racist graffiti on Marcus Rashford’s mural in Manchester with messages of support

In week 164 of The Shift, when Greta Thunberg launched this video at the Austrian World Summit because uncontrollable fires have been reported in Canada, California and also Finland, our focus suddenly shifted to sporting matters.

We have a phrase in our house – “that’s football” – that we use whenever anything mind-crunchingly complex shows up as a simple fail (win-lose). For example, after months of planning a groundbreaking event, we suddenly lose the bandwidth to broadcast the Zoom: that’s football.

But on Sunday night we had the chance to witness why football can hold responsibility for that phrase. Not simply because it is ‘the beautiful game’, burgeoning with strategy, technique, method, practice, selection, team and leadership dynamics. And which, nevertheless, all boils down to a game that only one team can win on the day (“in the end, it’s the team that scores the most goals that win it, Gary” (see Colemanballs for more of this footie wisdom)).

No, we use “that’s football” because the game itself is socially complex. Each match rises to the surface from within a sea of cultural and structural circumstances unique to that set of teams. Every game becomes a crucible of possibility. Or try a different metaphor: it arises from a sea of potentials, then inevitably sinks back there after the game.

This powerful emergence can happen locally in youth teams, when the two sides in that community come to represent a cultural or geographical divide. The stories each team’s fan base tell about the other side can amount to small but intense civil wars that go on to change that community for ever – for good or bad.

England v Italy in the European Cup Final on Sunday is proving to be a classic of the genre. England reaching the final of a major cup, for the first time since 1966 when ‘we’ won the World Cup, brought with it epic emotion. Full transparency: despite being Londoners, AUK’s core team has been rooting for the Dutch, Danish and Scottish teams before eventually moving to England in the final. (And even that was tricky because of Italian connections). Yet we were drawn by the ‘new story of Us’ that Gareth Southgate was bringing as a way to update Englishness, in a moment of cosmolocal angst.

For the England fans this was a chance to ‘bring football home’ again, back to its rightful place. The story evokes memories (real and false) of past glory that go way beyond football, landing clumsily in the story (currently being excavated) of the British Empire. This story is much more likely to reach the headlines via the discourse around ‘decolonisation'. A very small part of this is activists pulling down statues of past heroes who have been revealed as the oppressors of the poor and enslaved.

The idea of Britain (or her symbol, the Queen) as glorious – sung by the English team at the start of each game – will also evoke Brexit. Not just as a mixed message of Britain, freed (or struggling) to occupy a new place in the global sphere. But of England trying to lead the narrative of these islands, as Scotland and Ireland make attempts to distinguish their own, autonomous place in Europe and the world.

But “football” is complexifying all “that”. England manager Gareth Southgate championing his team ‘taking the knee’ against racism has played an important role in offering an alternative English identity in the run up to the final. And to some extent – as we blogged in a previous editorial — it has been responsible for a much wider cross-cultural appeal, creating a whole new constituency among activists who previously saw football as a male and capitalist enterprise.

It still is that, of course. But suddenly it has within it seeds of social transformation, only one of which is its symbolic power. And that’s a lot for a young boy to carry as he walks up to the penalty spot.

At the same time, football is also a portal for conversations, methods and practices about the kind of social dynamics we all participate in, wherever we are part of a family, community, municipality or larger constituency. Or any shared enterprise, for that matter.

When done at a community level, footballing shows us how to generate good teamwork out of a bunch of individually talented – and often differently-abled — participants. Not every young boy/girl is keen on football, but for those who are it’s an invaluable tool for easing the transition from solo to collective action.

Learning how to hold your responsibility as an energetic mid-fielder while also letting the strikers do their thing? That’s a capacity many adults never develop in organisations with multiple forms of agency. Southgate’s success in integrating the historically self-propelling Rahim Sterling into the team was emblematic of the ‘new England style’ he was bringing.

Brought together, the soft power ambition of not only talking about a new English identity in the world, but displaying it as new practice and strategy on the field – diversity in both culture and forms of agency – was a heady mix to bring to boiling point this Sunday.

It is one thing for Gareth Southgate to be able to generate this culture and practice within the bubble of the Premier League. And before a mainstream/broadcast media that, while conflicted, is inclined to let him do his thing as long as we score goals and win games. But it’s another to break it out into the wider world of social media where everything is polarised, or a global space with 31 million people watching.

Seven years ago, we were at the World Cup in Brazil with football pundit Garth Crooks – concurrently the Chair of Capital City Academy, on whose board I was a governor. A young man was making a casual criticism of a team member who had stalled in front of goal, missing a chance to score.

Garth, who represented England four times in the Under 21s, turned on him with passion, saying, “have you any idea what it feels like being on the field with the whole world watching? Until you’ve been there you can’t imagine – your whole body carries the weight of your countries hopes and dreams. At the same time you can feel this immense pressure from the millions of people who want you to fail. It’s like being in a Greek amphitheater, facing a lion.”

All of which begs the question of whether or not Southgate, for all his high idealism and belief in the squad, had thought enough about the vulnerability of the youngest players who volunteered themselves for the most dangerous task in football: the penalty shoot-out. Especially given England’s historical failure at this sharpest of sharp ends on the international stage, and versus an Italian team that had not lost its previous 32 games.

Three of the volunteers that made the list were right at the heart of the “culture wars” spotlight as they stepped up... Rashford having made a name for himself as a political activist, taking on the government over free school meals and earning the full opprobrium of the anti-woke brigade… now pulled off the bench to deliver one last brilliant move. Plus Jason Sansho and Bukayo Saka, relatively innocent of any media controversy, but often subjected to racism on their journey to prominence, catapulted onto the world stage at the tender ages of 21 and 19 years old.

All three of them failed to hit their penalty marks: they have since become the focus of way too much frustrated, angry English disappointment that may follow them around for years.

It is at this point that Southgate’s vision of a new English team at the heart of a progressive English culture will be heat-tested. Yes, he did well to claim the narrative immediately, insisting that no single footballer will ever be separated from the whole-team responsibility - these boys are part of that unity. It’s a message that, had he been successful, could have played a strong part in shaping the future of English national culture. But now that it is associated with failure, his vision have to be actively supported by many others, so that it consistently lands.

Here at The Alternative UK, we can only admire Southgate’s vision and even, to some extent, his failure. We have to be capable of both, as we face the ongoing multiple crises within which the mainstream media’s culture wars is playing its part, pushing us faster towards the cliff. There will be multiple and regular assaults on our attempts to bring an alternative and we will often fail to hit the mark.

One failure doth not extinction make — any more than that time you were dumped by your first love could stop you going on to meet the love of your life. It just feels like it at the time.

Take heart, lads! The future is calling on you to hold your nerve and stay true.

Gareth Southgate comforts Bukayo Saka after missing the crucial penalty in the finals of the European Cup.

Alternative Editorial: That's Football