Why football isn't coming home

West of Scotland Cricket Club in 1910. Is this the real home of football?
(Photo: The Glasgow Story)

We've been hearing a lot in the last few weeks about how football is "coming home".

Fans are talking about it. Commentators are telling us about it. Newspaper reporters are getting excited about it. Conservative MPs are tweeting about it, even the Home Secretary whose usual level of interest in football is on a par with her knowledge of the finer points of the Refugee Convention. Forget the implications of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill - all that really seems to matter at the moment is that football is, apparently, coming home.

Why it left and where it went to are questions no-one seems to be able to answer, but few seem to care about that. "Football's coming home" everyone is singing, rather loudly and slighly out of tune; everyone that is apart from Gareth Southgate and his players who have to their great credit refused to allow themselves to be carried away with all the euphoria.

The thing is, football isn't coming home. And it never will.

That's not to say England won't win the European Championship final on Sunday, a match for which I wouldn't want to make a prediction. You may think as a Scotland supporter I am of the "anyone but England" persuasion and therefore will naturally be backing Italy, but nothing could be further from the truth. I have no affinity with Italy and simply hope for a good game which, this time around, won't be decided by softest of soft penalties. 

What I do want to do is separate England's success from the "football's coming home" rhetoric. And here's why.

Football already has a home. It has a home in the hearts of those who love the sport, on every school playing field, in the ground of every club that plays this fantastic game in every country of the world. It is an international sport that, through tournaments such as the World Cup and the European Championships, has an ability to unite people in strange but powerful ways. It doesn't belong to any one person, any club, any self-serving elite group (think the ill-fated European Super League) or, indeed, any one country.

You see, what's so objectional about all this "coming home" talk is that it somehow assumes the game belongs to one nation. It actively undermines what international football competition is actually about. 

"But history..." some will plead. Ah yes, history. About that...

It's often claimed that football was created in England in the 1860s and, like most myths, that contains a grain of truth. As with most sports, football evolved over time before rules eventually became standardised in an era when standardisation and codification were all the rage. It's certainly true that the FA played a lead role in that, but the 1863 regulations were regularly revisited as this evolution continued. By the time the English Football League was formed in 1888, the laws of the game had changed several times and Queen's Park's modified version of the FA's rules, in which more emphasis was placed on passing and dribbling, arguably created the game that is recognisable to most of us today.

What about international football, then? Where did that originate? No, not England. The first international match (Scotland v England) was played at Hamilton Crescent, a cricket ground in Partick, Glasgow, in 1872. Fittingly, the match itself took place on St Andrew's Day of that year. It came about because Scottish newspapers wanted to see some real representative matches rather than the unofficial games that had been organised by the English FA and which had tended to exclude Scots actually living in Scotland. So, if we're being pedantic we have The Scotsman to thank for the creation of international football... and if it has a "home" to speak of at all then surely it's Partick?

As for England's claim to be the "home of football", it is certainly true that for many years the FA acted as if it owned the game. In the first few decades (as far as England's national team was concerned) football essentially stayed at "home" - they didn't play any non-British nation until 1908 (Scotland had played Canada as early as 1888). When FIFA was formed England didn't immediately join, waiting until 1906 mainly because they didn't feel the need for it with its silly ideas about international co-operation. Along with the other "home nations", England resigned from FIFA in 1928 in a dispute over broken-time payments. England were thus not members of the international footballing community, felt uneasy about playing First World War rivals and only rejoined FIFA in 1946. As far as the FA was concerned, it was their game and they didn't consider all these newcomers their equals. Who needed a World Cup when there was a vastly superior British Home Championship?

England didn't even participate in a World Cup until 1950 when the so-called "Kings of Football" turned up expecting to win easily but were instead famously beaten by the USA and Spain (Scotland qualified for the same competition but refused to accept their place as runners-up to England). The FA's insular and arrogant attitude had failed to keep pace with the reality that football was rapidly becoming a genuinely international game and England were shocked - and humbled - by their World Cup experience. 

If we're going to focus on international tournament football, then the "home" of football is probably France. Jules Rimet, mentioned in Three Lions but only as the name of the trophy, was essentially the brains behind the World Cup, while Henri Delaunay's work lay the ground for what became the European Championship. They were working towards achieving their respective visions at a time when the Home Nations considered such competitions with barely-concealed contempt. 

And so the "coming home" narrative (to my mind) just serves to reinforce a sense of entitlement and a desire to return to a mythologised past. If England win on Sunday night, they won't have brought football "home", they'll have merely added themselves to the list of nations that have won the European Championships. They'll have gone from winning it as many times as Scotland to winning it as many times as Greece. 

It may well be a good thing to see a new name on the trophy - Italy should be formidable opponents but they're not unbeatable - but let's be forward looking. Football is a truly international sport and should be celebrated as such. The idea that football is quintessentially English and somehow belongs to the English nation is an idea that was already outdated in 1950. In 2021 it's not only wrong but embarrassingly arrogant: an expression of the type of absurd and ignorant arrogance that leads to sections of England's support booing the anthems of opponents, be they Germany or Denmark.

It's little wonder that Denmark's goalkeeper, Kaspar Schmeichel, responded with the question: “Has it ever been home? Have you ever won it?” During the last World Cup, Croatia's Vedran Corluka gleefully told a press conference “it’s not coming home”. But the idea that football belongs to the victors is also an odd one: the sport belongs as much to the fans and players of San Marino and Iceland as it does those of England, Italy or Brazil. Cliftonhill or Cappielow are every inch as much a "home" of football as Wembley Stadium or Old Trafford. 

As writer and author Jennie Kermode pointed out on twitter, football is a game that has historically belonged to the working class rather than elites, big businesses, sponsors, club chairmen, FAs or national teams: "More than anything, I see it as a game that belongs to poor people, because all that's needed to play it is something to make out goal spaces and a ball, or even a tin can or bit of wood." Commenting directly on the current media circus surrounding the Euros, Jennie added: "It doesn't belong to people who create that kind of propaganda hype." Surely that's a vital point that needs to be made. Such people are hijacking the game for their own particular interests and, well, that's just not...erm, football.

Sure, the adoption of Three Lions as England's unofficial anthem was always bound to lead to the team being taunted by the likes of Corluka whenever they fail. Such is life. It's not so much the song that's the issue but the narrative it has helped spawn, no doubt unintentionally. Three Lions reflects on historical disappointments, but it's been reduced to three words: other lyrics have effectively been discarded or at least have vanished from public consciousness. When it was released in 1996, it was in many ways a refreshing non-political alternative to God Save the Queen or Land of Hope and Glory but when it's hijacked by the likes of Priti Patel and Boris Johnson that's no longer true. 

The fact is, football already is home. It never went away, and it doesn't need the English national team winning a major tournament to bring it back. Let's enjoy the game for what it is, not what we imagine it used to be.