Anglocentrism’s coming home: Why England 2030 is from the same cloud cuckoo land as Brexit
After all that, football got collared at border control and decided to settle in France, and life goes on.
As most eyes are on Ronaldo at Juventus and whether Jack Ross can stop the slide at Sunderland this season, the FA have announced they are looking at a bid for the 2030 World Cup. A centenary World Cup at the home of football? Sounds great, yeah?
No.
Let’s start by exploring the whole “coming home” thing. Well, football games have existed around the world for at least 2000 years, and the oldest evidence seems to be in China.
Countries (or their modern-day successors) with a claim to be home ofthe game include Italy, Iran, Scotland, Japan and Greece, and that’s just what two minutes of google research brings up. In the last 100 years there are countless countries who can claim to have revolutionary influence how the game is played- the innovative tactics of the Hungarians of the 1950s, Catenaccio was popularised in Italy and Total Football in the Netherlands, for example. As far as women’s football is concerned, there’s no claim that started in England in any significant way.
What we tend to refer to when we talk about England as the “home of football” was that the English wrote up the rules and (along with the Scots) spread them round the world. The contributions of England and Scotland to world football have been huge. English football has given the world masses of fan culture, three points for a win and Peter Reid.
From the roots of the FA’s rulebook and organisation it’s great that a single global game came about, but as time passes, that’s more and more something that the world, not England specifically, should be proud of, and the whole “home of football” thing has a lot more than a hint of imperialism. For well over half the period that it’s been in existence, English football has actively sought to stunt its growth around the world wherever England hasn’t been in the driving seat.
If football’s home is England, then its masters there have the sort of record that would make Jacob Rees-Mogg proud. There’s that air of superiority drawn from a history that’s been fading in significance as the world outside have been getting on with things.
The English head of FIFA Stanley Rous showed this perfectly with his attitude towards the non- Europeans, being firmly on the wrong side of history over apartheid and in his efforts to keep the World Cup as European as possible (the 1974 world cup had only one representative from Asia and Africa combined).
Look also at how the English FA reacted to the launch of the World Cup- failing to enter until 1950 or of the European Cup- Chelsea were barred from entering the inaugural cup, and the next year Manchester United competed against the FA’s wishes.
At this point, can I recommend to any reader wanting to see how the game developed as a global game should read David Goldblatt’s The Ball Is Round.
How about the World Cup in 2030? It’ll be well over half a century since the last one on these shores, and England (and Scotland, and Wales, and Ireland) has a fantastic football culture, some of the best stadiums and facilities in the world and a good record of organising big events. Fans around the world seem fascinated by our football. I’d love to see a world cup coming back to these islands soon.
But it’s 2030. The centenary of that event we were too stuck up our own island to hop on a boat to Uruguay to play in. Uruguay hosted it and won it, and installed themselves as the clear home of the world cup. England had virtually nothing to do with the 1930 World Cup, so even thinking about hosting it seems to me like a massive fingers-up to the history and heritage of a great event. The whole idea feels like it comes from the same place as calls for no-deal Brexit that forgets there’s a world out there.
Here’s an idea- why not go for the Women’s World Cup in 2027 instead? The growth of the women’s game suggests that by then it’ll be an absolutely massive tournament, and it would provide a boost to the game here even bigger than hosting the Olympics in 2012 or reaching the 2015 World Cup Semi-Final.
It seems totally obvious, but then, I guess, so did staying in the EU.