Football is political, but even in an international tournament—when national communities are represented and set against one another in just about the simplest way imaginable—the politics of football are far from straightforward. So too with Brexit and Euro 2016.
The question on the ballot in Thursday’s vote, which takes place a day after the Euro group stages end, will be “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?” But the nature of the choice has been heavily freighted with all kinds of political and cultural baggage in the course of a lengthy and toxic debate. Irish writer Fintan O’Toole argues that Brexit is above all about a particular version of English nationalism which has taken hold at a popular level. There are likely to be majorities for “Remain” in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, while England may vote “Leave.” Brexit’s most prominent advocates are virtually all white Englishmen. And if Brexit wins, it’s difficult to envision the UK holding together.
The rowdiest supporters of the English team have celebrated this, singing “Fuck off Europe! We’re all voting out!” while scrapping with French police in town centers.
But whether fans like it or not, the current England team doesn’t simply map with pro-Brexit English nationalism; it also stands for a more fluid, confidently multicultural version of Englishness.
On the one hand, you have the striker Jamie Vardy, embraced across England like few players have been since Paul “Gazza” Gascoigne. Vardy is loved primarily for the simplicity of his play, in particular the sheer relish with which he thrashes the ball repeatedly into the net. But there’s a lot more going on than that.
Vardy seems in some ways to represent the spirit of Brexit, as a working class hero. He has just completed an astounding season at club level, scoring the goals which fired 5000-1 shots Leicester City to the Premier League title.
One of Vardy’s personal catchphrases is “Jamie Vardy’s having a party,” and you now hear this everywhere. Vardy is a late-blooming talent who climbed his way up through tough English lower league clubs (Stocksbridge Park Steels, Halifax Town, and Fleetwood Town). Brexit is nothing if not carnivalesque, and in Vardy’s rise and his massive popularity it’s possible to detect something of the same spirit—subverting the game’s hierarchies and certainties while eschewing its stuffy new professional practices and sports science. He is revered as a classic English star as opposed to many of his teammates who have come through elite clubs and European-style academy systems.
There’s more to this working class image. The far right Daily Mail newspaper this week trumpeted a report that Vardy “downs cans of Red Bull, chews tobacco gum, and never goes to the gym.”
The strength of the popular desire to canonize Vardy as an English folk hero for the 21st century means plenty about the real-life Vardy gets glossed over, which coincides with some of the hypocrisies apparent in the Brexit vote. For example, Vardy is wonderfully adept at winning penalty kicks by tricking opponents and referees. A superb diver (flopping in U.S. parlance), Vardy has mastered the very thing which the English love to imagine as quintessentially “foreign” in football. When English players dive, the pundits lament that they must have learned it from the influx of “foreign” players. But how could Vardy have learned to dive playing for Stocksbridge Park Steels? Better just ignore that one.
The official #VoteLeave slogan is “Take back control,” an extraordinarily effective and simple message.
As an auxiliary slogan, they might as well have gone with Jamie Vardy’s signature boast: “Chat shit, get banged.”
For its part, the “Leave” campaign also likes to compare its supposed plain speech to the complex facts of naysaying experts.
Even very simple economic arguments against Brexit are derided as hopelessly complicated.
The Leavers, in fact, see the prospect of ridiculing all this terribly serious and important advice as an opportunity not to be missed.
So what if the Institute for Fiscal Studies warns that a vote for Brexit would likely lead to two additional years of punishing austerity measures which have already hit the poorest hardest? “Chat shit,” comes the reply, “get banged.”
Vardy was also filmed racially abusing an Asian man in a casino last year (no “political correctness,” hurray!). He later made a full apology, though, which is a decidedly un-Brexity thing to do. UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage has been instrumental in creating a political culture where it’s increasingly unnecessary for politicians to apologize for racism or xenophobia, except in cases of explicit racial slurs.
To cap it all, Vardy has apparently rejected a transfer to Arsenal, who want to buy him for £20 million ($29 million). What could possibly be more Brexity than a hardworking, straight-talking lad from Sheffield turning down Arsene Wenger, the definitive “foreign” coach, renowned for his fancy continental methods? As it is, Vardy looks like staying at good old English Leicester City, where he’ll be managed by an Italian, play up front with a Japanese international, and where the two other big stars in the team are an Algerian winger and a French midfielder of Malian origin.
But Jamie Vardy is just one player on the England team at Euro 2016.
In fact, the England team’s cultural diversity stands as a retort to a key popular dictum underpinning the discourse of Brexit, that “multiculturalism has failed.”
It’s especially significant that having black and brown players on the team from immigrant families isn’t really an issue any more. Players like midfielder Bamidele Alli (whose father is Nigerian), Daniel Sturridge, Danny Rose, and Raheem Sterling (who might all have represented Jamaica but chose England), the injured Danny Welbeck (Ghana) are fixtures in the side whose relative “Englishness” is very rarely questioned in the way that equivalent players for, say, Italy or France, are commonly held as somewhat suspect national representatives. This was by no means always the case—the racist cliché of the 1970s and 80s was that black players lacked “bottle”—and it shows that despite the surge of xenophobia in public life, England in 2016 is a multicultural society and is used to being that way on some level.
On top of all this, David Cameron is the kind of politician who everyone knows pretends to like football in order to look like a normal person (he famously confused the team he says he supports, Aston Villa, and West Ham, who play in the same color shirt). Cameron was accused of being an appeaser of EU tyranny (“a Neville Chamberlain for the 21st Century”) during a big BBC appearance over the weekend. This is about the meanest thing you can say to a politician in England, where consciousness of modern history is heavily conditioned by what Christian Lorentzen once described as “a nationwide death cult” around the two World Wars. Cameron responded by shouting something about Winston Churchill (he likes to do this) and then delivering what he must have regarded as a populist masterstroke: “You can’t win a football match if you’re not on the pitch.”
It sounded lame as a way of arguing that Britain is better off negotiating its relationship with Europe within the EU and its institutions than outside it. This was clearly pandering, and clearly a stretch. Then again, it was exactly the kind of truism about football that we cherish in the UK. It’s the kind of thing Jamie Vardy might say.
Correction, June 21, 2016: Due to a production error, this post was originally misattributed to Raoul Meyer.
