{"id":11801,"date":"2025-09-04T09:18:38","date_gmt":"2025-09-04T08:18:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/?p=11801"},"modified":"2025-09-12T09:18:47","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T08:18:47","slug":"patriotism-is-a-poor-second-to-tribalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/?p=11801","title":{"rendered":"Patriotism is a Poor Second to Tribalism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I decided to try to find something appropriate to stimulate discussion as we enter our first enforced break of the season. What emerged is a bit of a ramble about my experience of watching international football and some thoughts about how the interaction between international football and club football has changed over the years. At the end I speculate about how this might have changed our views about the respective loyalties engendered by club v country. I am deliberately taking a slightly controversial view, not to provoke argument but because I thoroughly disapprove of the direction of travel for international football. You may or may not agree!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three games into the new season we face our first Interlull! I have already declared that I don\u2019t mind Interlulls because I find the hopes and dreams we have for Arsenal become so intense that it is nice to have a break from them. But I don\u2019t like Interlulls  because they usher in international football. To be honest, although I regard myself as a reasonably patriotic Englishman, I\u2019m not sure if I will bother watching the England matches in this break. To put this in context, between 1973 and 1978 I never missed an England international at Wembley. A group of us would go from the office, get nicely beered up before the match and we watched some momentous games including that famous match against Poland, Don Revie\u2019s first match as manager, SuperMac\u2019s five goals against Cyprus and the defeat of the new World Champions (West Germany) in 1975 ( I attended my wife\u2019s graduation from London University and then hotfooted it to the match). I did take her out to celebrate later that week! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gradually a combination of family life, work pressures and more particularly the sort of English fans I ran into, made me less and less inclined to go. I attended some of the Euros games in 1996 and took some Irish friends to see the Republic outplay us around 1992. I remember the game because some morons heard their Irish accents and tried to kick them in the face! The last international I remember attending was at Villa Park, a friendly against the Dutch about twenty years ago. It ended 0-0 and was unalloyed tedium. I remember getting to Birmingham early and finding a pub that might have come from the set of \u2018Shameless\u2019. It was all going so well until the English supporters arrived and started \u2018No surrender to the IRA\u2019 and their songs about German bombers and the like. You might sense a theme here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The thing I increasingly noted and that is very noticeable at away games and during tournaments was that the majority of the people who followed England around were either unaffiliated or were supporters of clubs in the lower divisions or non-league teams. England supporters are almost a separate species to regular Premier League watchers. This schism, if I can call it that, is regularly reflected among Holics when England teams are selected. It is very clear that a lot of Holics have much less concern about the England team than they do Arsenal. When Saka or Rice or Lewis-Skelly are picked there is grave concern (often fully justified, especially in Saka\u2019s case) about overplaying key players and subjecting them to injury. I\u2019m a bit ambivalent about this because I\u2019m certain that Rice and Saka have, as one of their ambitions for this season, to play for England in the World Cup next summer. But I also don\u2019t want them put at unnecessary risk\u2026.and you can add to that list others like Eze and Madueke and MLS and, who knows, by next summer 16 year old Max Dowman may be off to the USA with England! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is  primarily an article about England but the reality of Premier League football is that it supplies players to countries all over the world, some of whom fly prodigious distances to represent their country during international breaks. Arsenal have had players from 65 different countries representing them and the majority of them played international football at some point during their time with us. So, the football calendar is now highly prescribed and, certainly during the autumn, the league season can feel very fragmented as international football gets played.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If I were to sum up the attitude that most UK based Holics have, it is that they reluctantly accept international qualifying games, certainly for the World Cup and Euros, but they resent international friendlies. Unfortunately those friendly games are the only time that managers get an opportunity to experiment, blood new players and try out formations. They are an inevitable part of the football year but there is nothing as annoying as having star players injured on international duty. Martin \u00d8degaard suffered a serious ankle injury playing for Norway at the start of last season and hasn\u2019t looked the same player since he returned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It didn\u2019t used to be like this. I\u2019m old enough to remember the 1958 World Cup. It was the first football I ever watched seriously. All four home nations qualified but as far as I recall Arsenal only had two representatives and they were in the Welsh team. Jack Kelsey, our keeper, was regarded as one of the finest keepers in the tournament and I remember my Dad watching him perform with enormous pride. Dave Bowen, the club skipper, was also involved. We didn\u2019t have any representatives in the England team then nor in the 1962 World Cup and only George Eastham, who was transfer listed and left the club before the start of the next season, figured in the 1966 World Cup winning English squad and never kicked a ball during a tournament in which there were no substitutes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It used to be a matter of great pride to have players capped for England. I can remember a young winger, Danny Clapton, winning a cap against Wales in 1958. The Home Internationals were played on midweek afternoons during the season and the club got a great lift when Clapton was picked. One fact from that game, which showed how different football was, occurred when Arsenal fixed a prestige friendly against Juventus at Highbury. We had never had European football, and the match attracted a huge crowd. Kelsey played against England and then he was driven from Villa Park to Highbury where he played for Arsenal! Can you imagine that happening now? The date was November 26th 1958 and Kelsey started both games and played 90 minutes in both. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 1966 World Cup hugely increased interest in international football in this country (obviously not in Scotland!) and was one of the key milestones in the development of modern football in this country. As I started going to international matches in the seventies I was not aware of fans who were primarily England fans. I went partly to see how Arsenal players performed but there weren\u2019t many in the England team in the seventies! My first game was against Northern Ireland and it was the last game in England before the 1970 World Cup. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

English clubs were banned from Europe in the eighties because of a number of incidents culminating in the awful scenes at Heysel before Liverpool played Juventus and there were  a series of hugely embarrassing incidents involving English \u2018fans\u2019 on foreign grounds. This tended to alienate a lot of fans and  the mediocre performance of the England team exacerbated the indifference to international football. That began to change as we entered the nineties post Hillsborough as English  football tried to clean up its act. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think the next big milestone was Italia 90. It was the first time I can remember people watching en masse<\/em> on screens, something that is very much the norm now, and the reaction to Gazza\u2019s tears touched a nerve in many people. I watched that semi-final in Turin where Gazza touched the nation\u2019s heart, in a mountaintop restaurant outside Zurich at an international conference with my company. The England supporters with us  were drawn from USA, Australia, South Africa and a few of us from Blighty. The rest of the group, including all the Europeans, favoured the Germans. As we entered extra- time the CEO asked everyone to depart for the tram back into Zurich. All the England supporters refused and stayed with one German! After the  game we had to walk down the mountain very late to catch a different tram. Cue one very nervous German as we joked about throwing him off the mountainside! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Premier League was formed just after this and we also had the Euros in 1996 in England. The first proper foreigner I can remember signing for us was Anders Limpar and then of course we had the momentous acquisition of Dennis Bergkamp. The integration of increasing numbers of foreign players into English football increased the quality of the product but also led to English fans embracing foreign players as idols and favourites. Foreign coaches began to proliferate. It is remarkable to think that Arsene Wenger was the first foreign coach to be really successful in England. Gradually, the Premier League became more and more international and at the same time the England team started to improve, other than a brief nosedive under Graham \u2018do I not like Orange\u2019 Taylor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where once Arsenal fans rejoiced at the England debut of Danny Clapton, they now started to hold their breath as most of their squad flew around the world playing in international qualifiers and major tournaments like AFCON and the Copa America. The Premier League has become indisputably the financial powerhouse of world football and seeing the best players in the world every week the sense of awe when a global superstar pitches up to play against us is seriously diminished. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

England search in vain for success although under Southgate they came tantalisingly close to it and one senses that there would still be serious rejoicing in the kingdom if they did finally achieve international glory. One only has to look at the joy that the Lionesses have generated to glimpse the national appetite for celebration! But the majority of keen fans of football teams are much more interested in their club than their country. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few years ago, the late Franz Beckenbauer postulated an idea that the focus of international competition would switch from national teams to club teams. The recent World Club Cup which preposterously installed a very erratic Chelsea side as \u2018World Champions\u2019 (really?) may point to that. I have to confess a second national World Cup in what is not a major football playing country is an affront to countries who will stage it with much more tradition and atmosphere. I intend no offence to American readers who love the game and adore Arsenal but there are more deserving venues for the competition in my personal view.  But Infantino is so far up Donald Trump\u2019s backside (there\u2019s an image for you!) that he is happy to let the Orange one garner huge personal publicity at a global event that is bound to be disrupted by frequent lightning strikes and the indifference of a large part of the local population.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As an Englishman, I would love to see England win the World Cup but I want to see Arsenal lift the Cup with Big Ears infinitely more than that. I bet if you polled the attendance at our next home game 95% of the English fans would agree with me. I contend that football tribalism trumps (oo-er!) patriotism when it comes to supporting the game. I\u2019m not anti international football but I don\u2019t consider it is anywhere near as important to me as a win for my beloved Arsenal. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

How do readers feel? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let me know in the Drinks!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I decided to try to find something appropriate to stimulate discussion as we enter our first enforced break of the season. What emerged is a bit of a ramble about my experience of watching international football and some thoughts about how the interaction between international football and club football has changed over the years. At […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[23,3,28,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11801"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11801"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11893,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11801\/revisions\/11893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goonerholicsforever.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}