- OPINION!
Has international football lost its magic - or have I just got older? From Mexico ’86 to Southgate’s England, this is a reflection on fading tournament love and one unexpected flicker of hope.
I’m 50. Physically, at least.
That number comes as something of a shock when you realise you’re now officially edging into the category of “old”. My mind still insists I’m 18. My body, meanwhile, has appointed itself head of the opposition and submits regular evidence to the contrary.
Some things definitely change as you get older. A day on the beer now requires a day of recovery. I can no longer inhale a bacon sandwich and three coffees and be battle-ready again by lunchtime. Afternoon naps have gone from being a sign of weakness to a legitimate tactical option. Video games interest me less than they once did, my tendency to flirt with the ladies has noticeably diminished, and the aches and pains from attempting to play sport now oft arrive before the sport itself.
Yet one facet of my life that always seemed immune to the ageing process was my love of football.
Being a Sunderland supporter guarantees a lifetime supply of emotional peaks and troughs - admittedly more troughs than peaks - but the last few years have been so enjoyable that I almost feel privileged to have experienced them. My team qualified for the UEFA Cup (yes, I still use the proper names). I can remember Ipswich winning it in 1981 and thinking, many times afterwards, that I’d never live long enough to see Sunderland play in Europe.
An older friend of mine used to joke that his two ambitions in life were to see Sunderland qualify for Europe and also witness the end of the DFS sale. Sunderland have now done their part. I occasionally find myself checking the Discount Furniture Store website to see whether the second item on his bucket list is ever likely to be achieved.
But here’s the strange thing.
While my passion for club football remains stubbornly intact - surviving relegations, cowboy owners, Jack Rodwell, and away trips to Fleetwood and Crawley (I still couldn’t confidently point to Crawley on a map) - my appetite for international football has steadily evaporated.
As a teenager, international football was something I craved. A World Cup wasn’t merely a tournament; it was an event. A season unto itself.
I have vague memories of Bryan Robson in 1982, but Mexico ‘86 was really where it began for me. I even completed the sticker book, which was arguably a greater achievement than anything England managed. Lineker’s hat-trick against Poland, the Hand of God, and Terry Butcher’s own goal - which absolutely was an own goal, because if you tackle the ball into your own net then you’ve scored an own goal, no matter how famous the Argentinian you’re tackling happens to be - remain etched in my memory.
Then came Italia ‘90.
Viewed objectively, it wasn’t the greatest tournament ever played. Viewed through English eyes, it was magnificent.
It also arrived at a fascinating societal crossroads. English football was beginning its journey away from the hooligan-adjacent excesses of the 1980s - an era when football grounds contained actual electrified fences, a fact that now sounds like something from a dystopian novel - and towards the cultural mainstream.
England started slowly before squeezing past Belgium with a dramatic extra-time winner, overcoming every neutral’s beloved giant-killing underdog Cameroon, then going toe-to-toe with tournament favourites Germany before suffering the inevitable penalty shoot-out heartbreak.
Bobby Robson had a simple philosophy: pick your best players. Sometimes they weren’t playing particularly well, but when they were on song, England were a very good side indeed. Garnish this with Gazza’s childlike crumbling live on the nation’s TVs, and you had something infinitely memorable on more than just a pure sporting level.
After a disappointing interlude under Graham Taylor, Terry Venables reignited the nation with Euro ‘96. England even won a penalty shoot-out along the way before, naturally, losing valiantly again to Germany in the semi-finals. Glenn Hoddle carried that momentum into France ‘98 with another exciting side that ultimately fell victim to Diego Simeone’s world-class shithousery. Watch carefully and you’ll spot the knee in Beckham’s back. Campbell’s disallowed goal still nags away at me, and it’s not unreasonable to think that side might have gone much further.
But somewhere around this point, something began to change.
Following Kevin Keegan’s well-intentioned but predictably ill-fated tenure, Sven-Göran Eriksson inherited what was arguably the greatest collection of English players ever assembled, on the crest of a wave of national public interest. Between 2000 and 2006, England could call upon the likes of Beckham, Gerrard, Lampard, Scholes, Rooney, Owen, Terry, Ashley Cole and Rio Ferdinand.
On paper they looked unstoppable.
In reality, they produced little more than a succession of damp, disappointing quarter-final exits. Tactical confusion, oddly passionless performances and tabloid WAG hysteria combined to waste what should have been a golden generation.
Then came Steve McClaren, about whom the less said the better.
Fabio Capello followed, storming through qualification before somehow producing some of the most lifeless tournament football I’ve ever watched. We bookended his reign with Roy Hodgson - who performed about as successfully as he did at Liverpool - and Sam Allardyce, whose England career lasted roughly as long as an average DFS sale advert, shot down in its extreme infancy by his pint-of-wine-fuelled predilections.
By now, my enthusiasm for England had become something of a mystery to me. It wasn’t gone. But it certainly wasn’t what it had been.
Surely Gareth Southgate’s era should have changed that?
A World Cup semi-final and two European Championship finals ought to have rekindled the fire.
Instead, it did almost the opposite.
Football supporters often say it’s not just the results that matter but the manner in which they’re achieved. Under Southgate, England became astonishingly, eye-gougingly monotonous. They beat Germany at Euro 2020 in a game that should have lived in the national memory for decades. Yet if you asked me to describe it now, I’d struggle.
Time and again, England would take an early lead, glimpse an opportunity to kill a game off, and then retreat into a passive shape seemingly designed to protect a Fabergé egg rather than win a football match.
Whatever enthusiasm remained after Capello and Hodgson slowly drifted away, like helium escaping from a birthday balloon.
But perhaps it isn’t just the football.
When I was young, England effectively represented an all-star XI drawn from the English league. The best players in the country all played here. Aside from the occasional Home Countries wizard we weren’t allowed to steal, our national team was the cream of the league’s crop, brought together and supplemented by the odd gifted Englishman mercurial enough to be picked up by a team on the continent. One that would represent us on the biggest of stages.
Today, England wouldn’t beat Arsenal or Manchester City. They certainly wouldn’t trouble the titans of Real Madrid or PSG. International football once felt like the highest level available. Now it often feels like a supporting act for the juggernaut of the club game.
Football itself was different, too.
In the 1980s and early 1990s there wasn’t football coverage everywhere. You got The Big Match at 4pm on a Sunday afternoon to watch and precious little else, besides the cup finals. Then suddenly a World Cup or European Championship arrived, delivering wall-to-wall football for weeks. It was a feast, a glut, teenage boys leaping into it like hyenas onto the carcass of a hippo.
Today you can find live football on virtually any day of the week, on countless channels and streaming services. The World Cup no longer feels like an oasis in the desert. It’s just another hydration break along a motorway already lined with service stations.
The players felt more mysterious as well.
World Cups introduced us to footballers we’d never heard of. Roger Milla at Italia 90 was approximately a hundred years old yet had never registered on anyone’s radar and still scored goals for fun. And then there were the legends we’d never seen play live before, spoken of in hushed tones by those playground denizens who had actually read something about the leagues beyond our shores. Players like Hristo Stoichkov and Lothar Matthäus, who were figures of myth as much as reality.
Now YouTube, TikTok, Football Manager and social media ensure every promising teenager on Earth has already been analysed, highlight-reeled, FIFA-ranked and aggressively debated on X before a ball is even kicked.
Even qualifying has become sub-par.
England used to have to negotiate pre-tournament groups featuring serious opponents such as Holland or Poland. Nowadays we seem to spend much of our time comfortably dispatching a procession of countries ending in “a” by three goals or more.
And with every World Cup expansion, the opening rounds feel increasingly like a warm-up act for the actual tournament. More dead rubbers than a fresher’s week clean-up operation.
So is that the answer?
Is it not just England, but the world instead? Has the hyper-connectivity drained away some of the mystery? Has football become too commercialised, too saturated, too familiar? Have geopolitics, financial rapacity and relentless overexposure dulled the magic?
Or am I simply an old man shouting at clouds?
The truth is, like many things in life, probably somewhere in the middle.
All of these factors matter. Together they’ve created the perfect conditions for international-football apathy to thrive. But I suspect one thing amplifies all the others.
When your team - club or country - plays exciting football, the flaws become easier to forgive. The commercialism matters less. The overexposure matters less. The modern football ecosystem matters less.
And maybe that’s why, watching England against Croatia on Wednesday night, I felt something I hadn’t felt for a while.
England looked like they wanted to attack. They pressed. They took risks. They gave away daft goals. Most importantly, they looked as though they wanted to entertain.
And isn’t that all most of us really want?
Entertainment can be found in glorious failure just as readily as glorious success.
If the next few games bring an England side willing to attack, willing to take chances, willing to go toe-to-toe with the best teams in the world rather than merely try to contain them, then perhaps there’s still hope.
Perhaps I can stop comparing every tournament to the World Cups of my youth and simply enjoy what’s in front of me.
Or perhaps, like generations of England supporters before me, I’m reading far too much into one encouraging performance.
One swallow, after all, doesn’t make a summer.
But for the first time in quite a while, it feels like there might be a little bit of sunshine on the horizon.
Seamus Röntgen is a part-time author and full-time Sunderland supporter. You can get his debut novel (sadly with only one chapter on football) at https://mybook.to/YdBVyD
- OPINION!
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