England fans will always support their 'Three Lions' through thick and thin. (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
‘There were ten German bombers in the air….’ is belted out by four alcohol-sodden morons, screaming with misplaced enthusiasm outside Wembley, the ‘Home of Football’. That’s football. Foot. Ball. A sport. A sport where people kick a ball around to each other and … well, if you’re reading this, you probably know how it works by now.
If anyone’s looking for further reason why England cannot sell out their national stadium for a competitive, Euro 2012 qualifier against a home nations side packed with Premier League players - a reason beyond high ticket prices and the ridiculous location of the ground - they could do worse than to look at the threatening, snarling and downright uncomfortable atmosphere that pervades the national stadium: the pathetic, jingoistic stench with an undercurrent of transparent racism and anger at every turn, both inside the venue and out. It was an atmosphere on full display for England-Wales.
Just a short time before the ‘ten German bombers’ incident, (a song referencing the 66-years-ended World War II, an event having hardly anything to do with a match against Wales), another group of other England fans had stopped a train by jumping up and down on it in a lager-fueled rage, all the while screaming No Surrender to the IRA, a song with severely right-of-center connotations adopted from Irish Loyalists by Combat 18, who took to singing it in between ‘Sieg Heil’s.’ Nice. I’m not really sure what that’s got to do with a football match against Wales, either.
The most confusing thing about the tension, drama and nastiness that infiltrates England games: You’d expect these fans to actually be enjoying themselves. They like football, they clearly like England (a little too much, probably), so why are they so angry? What drives someone to hurl themselves down 30 rows of seats to yell profanities at England’s manager Fabio Capello? Asinine language like "F--- off Fabio you c---." a retrain that was then repeated, with the same bile, accompanied by the 'suggestion' he return to his home country of Italy. That fan would leave the match 30 minutes early, despite England carrying a 1-0 lead.
Their motives surely aren't football-related. Capello has not been the shining light and ambassador for progressive football for which everyone hoped, but he hasn't been that bad. He has easily the best win percentage of any England manager ever, nearly double that of Kevin Keegan, a manager who was actually quite popular.
The reason for the vitriol is more primal, more regressive and more unsavory: Capello’s not English. Whether the England manager should always be English is a different conversation, but is it morally right to question someone’s ability to do a job based on where their parents had sex? Certainly not. Again, xenophobia prevails.
Some would argue that the high ticket price makes people angry, like it’s a sort of ready-made excuse to justify behavior of this sort. I dismiss that out of hand. People know the price when they pay. They choose to pay it. The amount of money paid is not inversely proportional to how well people should behave when attending (and traveling to and from) games, and it’s certainly not inversely proportional to how tolerant they should be to people from other countries. It’s a complete non sequitur.
We also know it’s nothing to do with ticket prices when you can pop down to your local pub and see the same imbeciles behaving in exactly the same manner, only in a way that is even more futile: Actually berating a giant TV screen, an activity that is only punctuated by a desire to shove as much lager down their throats as possible. At least at the game there’s a chance the target of your anger actually hearing you.
Upon leaving the game on Tuesday, I was pondering whether I’d like to take my parents along to an England game. Or my girlfriend. It didn’t take me long to decide. I definitely wouldn’t. It’s not that I’d fear for their safety, per se; my parents and my girlfriend are White British and would be supporting England, so I doubt they’d feel the ire of any of England’s more unsavory element directly. I wouldn’t want them subjected to the language, attitude and behavior. As someone that loves football, I'm embarrassed by it, and I’m not even a parent. I'm genuinely uncomfortable for some of the decent, normal people that took their children to Wembley on Tuesday. I was embarrassed by proxy.
That said, it’s not all nationally motivated. Some of it is just pure thuggery. I had to stop myself apologizing on behalf of the England fan who had smashed another England fan in the face, an incident that happened just in front of a man and his son, the two certainly at one of their first England games together. ‘What was your first experience as an England fan, Johnny?’ ‘Oh, when I was 8 years old and that guy’s England shirt was completely soaked through with blood.’
So, if England's Football Association is reading this, they should know: It’s not just the prohibitive price of tickets, food and drink and the location of Wembley that keeps people away from England games. It’s probably the clientele as well. And depressingly, I don’t have the first idea of what to do about it.
