What football can tell us about the state of Britain

Telegraph

5 days ago

Football makes for a good bellwether in part because of its sheer scale. According to the FA, 14 million Britons play regularly. The country has 243,000 football coaches (as many as it has primary school teachers), 27,000 referees (twice as many as judges and magistrates), and 1.4 million volunteers (30 times the number available to the National Trust).
But this ubiquity also makes writing a social history a formidable challenge. What is there to say about the Qatar World Cup, or the European Super League, or the Russian ownership of clubs that hasn't been said already in countless newspaper columns and magazine articles? Goldblatt's answer consists in his approach – at once statistical and historical – and his emphasis on lower-league teams. These combine into a thoughtful narrative that offers surprising insights into the deeper structures and challenges underpinning the game.
Where in 2014 the story was on the whole a positive one – a decline in racism and hooliganism, an astronomical rise in match attendance and viewing figures, and a better sporting standard – today the state of play is grim. Many of the apparent advances then look in doubt, if not in plain regression, now.
Take racism. In 2019, 93 per cent of fans from minority ethnic groups (polled by Sky) said they had witnessed racist acts at football matches; 71 per cent had been abused themselves. These would have been humbling numbers in the Victorian era.
Goldblatt's stories illustrate the scale of the problem. A Newcastle under-23s coach took his squad on a team-building day to a 'Go Ape' adventure park and told his black players they 'should be used' to climbing trees; the same year, an eight-year-old in Leicester described a game in which 'instead of shaking our hands, the opposition players slapped them and said 'banana' as they went down the line and made monkey noises'. Alan Sugar, in 2018, tweeted a photoshopped picture of the Senegalese World Cup squad standing behind a display of sunglasses and designer bags, saying he 'recognise[d] some of these guys from the beach in Marbella'.
Many of these chapters are disheartening. Mercifully, Goldblatt is blessed with a sardonic sense of humour, and his account is leavened by a sharp eye for the absurdity of much that surrounds the sport. Here he is on clubs' increasingly frantic memorialising on November 11: 'Swansea's Cyril the Swan bowed its elongated head, but only at the cost of its beak bayonetting its stomach, and no amount of low bows and hands behind backs could disguise the demented rictus grin of Southend's Sammy the Shrimp.'