Make “It’s Coming Home” Great Again
How “It’s Coming Home” got hijacked and why we need to take it back again
Whoever you’re supporting in the Euro 2020 final, remember the background behind “It’s Coming Home”. In the song, it was a direct reference to the slogan of Euro 96- Football comes home.
Yes, that displays an imperialist attitude to a global game (I’ve written about that before), but the double meaning has been lost in the memes and hashtags.
The early 90s saw English football recover from it’s darkest time. It was under real threat of being crushed in a wave of hooliganism, racism and far right thuggery.
The 80s Tories under Thatcher responded by treating fans, like the miners, as a working class enemy within. The response to Hillsborough from the Sun and some politicians tells you what you need to know.
But Taylor Report set the tanker back in the right direction and football move remarkably quickly towards being a safe and (with a few notable examples) family friendly place.
It’s unthinkable now that Euro 96 being hosted in England was a brave decision that 5 years before that would have been totally impossible.
That’s the original context of Football Coming Home. It’s a outpouring of joy and hope. English football had a proud history, but it was emerging from dark shadows and people were daring to dream that past on-the-pitch success may be repeated too.
This has been lost by Boris Johnson and Priti Patel, whose forebears and idols wanted Football to be institutionalised and never to come home.
One that’s been lost by Jacob Rees-Mogg, who last week read the words “We are no Hooligans” in John Barnes’ 1990 rap without a hint of thought that the line was a dig at people like him.
The song and phrase echoed through the two decades that followed, but only in 2018 did “It’s coming home” explode as a statement of national superiority.
It’s really important to comment on it’s closeness as a phrase to “Take back control” and “make xxx great again”. And on the extreme, ideas of “going back to how things were” are always a big hit with fascists.
So it’s no wonder that the right have been loving the meme. They’ve been allowed to steal it and rewrite it as a statement of pure English Imperial nationalism. It’s time we took it back. Let’s make coming home great again!