Between the Netherlands and Austria, I supported the Netherlands. Between Hungary and Switzerland, Hungary. Scotland over Germany. There isn’t a nation I would like to support, and the tribal dedication to the nation state feels uncomfortable anyway, so whenever anyone asks who I support in the Euros, I say, Liverpool. Then explain: I am a true football fan, which means I am a club fan above all. I have supported Liverpool Football Club since I was five years old and watched my first football games on television from about 4,000 kilometres away from the UK. I am already a global fan of a team to which I didn’t have a self-evident connection. This taught me a lesson about love that I wonder if I can carry to international football, learn how this love can be a form of insistence, a way of finding yourself where you never thought you would belong.
Football is a site where belonging is constantly performed, questioned, proved. I am an immigrant, and I don’t feel a sense of easy connection to the country I live in. I don’t speak in ‘we’ when I talk about politics and policy, nor does that kind of language roll off my tongue when I’m watching the national team play, even when out with my local friends who say ‘we’ and include me, too. I feel like part of it all, and I (sometimes) enjoy the games, but I am not engaged in the way my history with club football has meant. There are three Liverpool players on the Dutch team. The captain of Hungary plays in our midfield, the Scottish captain is the left-back at Liverpool. This is my country. Also Portugal, also France, also England (sometimes, depending on the midfield or defensive configuration).
I am writing this between the end of the group stage and the beginning of the knockout rounds of Euro 2024. Over the course of this tournament, there will be two major elections, in France and in the UK, only making the connection between international football and global politics more evident. Tournaments can cast a bright light over nations and their choices. The Brexit vote took place in the middle of Euro 2016, between England’s last group stage game (a 0-0 against Slovakia) and a 2-1 loss to Iceland in the round of 16. When England were knocked out, it felt somehow related to the nation not wanting to be part of Europe. By the time the 2018 World Cup rolled around, Brexit was still an uncertain reality and when England met Belgium in the group stage, then-Prime Minister Theresa May was in Brussels to meet the European Council and negotiate an economic deal. The game was billed the Brexit Derby by the British tabloids. England lost.
The symbols of nations end up playing an outsized role in international football. The moment before kick-off, in which the players line up as the national anthem is played, always draws attention. Nationalist pundits often count who of the players are singing, who aren’t. International football offers up many symbolic tense moments like that, which prise open something in the societies the teams are meant to represent. It can feel tense, especially at a moment like this one, before a snap election in France, called in the aftermath of the rise of the far-right in the European parliament, before a conservative centrist candidate who presents himself as on the left is probably elected in the country I live in, seeing fans draw national flags on their faces and singing national anthems can seem almost divorced from reality.
But I love football. To love a sport is not a natural state of affairs. It’s passionate, it’s sad. For many fans, it is tradition—something inherited, like a genetic trait. For me, it was something adopted. I don’t love football in an uncomplicated way: I love it like a woman, like an immigrant. The other day, I was with a big group of people watching a game and a woman at the table asked me why I was so knowledgeable about football. When I replied, it was one of those funny moments in public space where the entire room goes a bit silent and something you say is accidentally overheard by everyone. What I said was: ‘I might love football more than most people here.’ Immediately, the guy at the other side of the table challenged me. He wanted to show how his love was stronger. He had a season ticket to a team in a nearby city. His grandfather saw one of the greatest in the history of the game in action. He’s been to a tournament. I don’t want to prove myself, I make some comment about his team, I don’t challenge.
I started watching football because my dad watched football. We watched it on television, two global fans who chose English football almost randomly because what’s the difference between the English Premier League and Spanish La Liga when you’re watching onscreen from another country? The fact that the English league was sold to us as the best in the world. I am the result of the sport expanding beyond its traditional geographies through media and social media, its players and clubs becoming international brands. There are so many stakes that intersect in a game that is popular around the world, that can be monetized globally. And there is definitely a deep, lingering feeling that something profound about football and the game’s relationship to the communities it is meant to belong to has been lost in the process of its expansion. But I never knew that thing. And whenever I try to prove my love, or just tell about my history, whenever I tell about my dad and me in front of the TV, or the first time I visited Liverpool in my thirties to watch a game, I speak to the unloved fan that I am: the one who is not from the city whose club she supports, the one who watched from afar.
I didn’t speak a word of English when I started watching English football; I supported Liverpool even when I had no idea where Liverpool was, what its culture and economy were like, or what role football played in city life there. I must have heard of the Beatles, but I’m not sure I fully made that link between the band, the city, and the club. Watching football with my dad, I developed what felt like a very real connection to a place I knew nothing about; it also introduced the possibility of another life, in other places. The knowledge of an elsewhere that came with the introduction of cable television, sports channels, and the availability of international football had been transformative for me. It taught me so much. I remember trying to imagine the atmosphere in the football stadiums from the background noise on television: what do people do at halftime? I imagined cities in a continent I’d never been to—London, Liverpool, Milan, Madrid—based on the images I had seen of their respective football stadiums, towering in the middle of residential neighbourhoods. I tried to imagine what it would be like to walk to the stadium through rows of brick houses. I didn’t know to call them ‘terrace houses.’ I never imagined one day I’d immigrate to that country.
If fandom isn’t an account of family history, of heritage, a connection to a place, a sense of tradition, then what is it? I want to argue that fandom like mine, the kind that searches to belong and sometimes exposes the impossibility thereof, the kind that aligns not with the place but with a view of it from afar, can also say something to and about that place. Sociologist Grant Farred describes in his book Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football (2008) how, growing up in Apartheid South Africa, he supported Liverpool. It started when he was seven years old and the club’s name in the newspaper sparked his imagination. It sounds random, but Farred suggests that true fandom is very much a critical practice, which he defines as an ‘intense affective relations moulded by politics.[1] What to make of the love I think of as ‘from afar’ and Farred calls ‘long-distance’?
My answer: it’s a form of politics. There isn’t love without politics, but love is also a choice and a possibility: if not to belong then to commit, to learn. Farred writes about being ‘a disenfranchized colored kid supporting an almost uninterruptedly white team for almost two decades in a supposedly democratic metropolitan society, only became resolvable at the moment that John Barnes signed as a Liverpool player in June 1987’. Farred’s book is dedicated to Barnes, the second Black player to play for Liverpool (the other was Howard Gayle, who grew up in Liverpool, played for the youth setup, moved up to the senior team and though he was signed with Liverpool for six years only made four appearances in the senior team and spent much of that time on loan). Barnes, a winger who spent ten years at Liverpool, made over 300 appearances, scored almost 100 goals, and became a club legend.
For Farred, Barnes playing for Liverpool was a form of resolution, the moment where his fandom began to shift and a new space was made for him. My own long-distance love has taught me to insist that I don’t necessarily belong ‘where I am from’ more than in Liverpool, the place I’ve dreamed of for so long. But while I insist on these different ways of arguing for my love, I also resist any notion that this love is ever simple, for anyone, and that these links between fans, players, places, histories, and politics can be somehow smoothed over. For me, football provided a sense of an elsewhere, not only geographically but also across class and gender divides. This is what I picked up over time, as I became practiced in fighting for a sense of belonging that may have been tense and uneasy, something I had to prove over and over again. When I say I love football and a man tests me about my knowledge of it, when I hand my passport at immigration and the person at the counter asks me why I don’t just go back to where I’m from, I insist in the same way. It’s a skill that I honed as a migrant, as a woman, as a football fan.
A part of me wants to do the same with international football. To tell about how I lived in one place when the national team made it to the World Cup final, how I loved the road to the final, watching games in public squares, flags stretching across avenues, fans singing both the national anthem and chants for players, jumping into fountains. I want to say that last night, the pub played ‘Hey Jude’ for England player Jude Bellingham, who scored a last-gasp, could-you-believe-it, where-were-you-when-it-happened overhead kick to equalize for England against Slovakia, with England eventually winning the game. The exhilaration of it all! When we were all holding onto our pint glasses so they don’t spill while we drum the table and sing ‘na, na, na, nanana, hey Jude’ it felt like falling in love.
But I know, love is more complicated than that. Watching international football, I worry that an over-identification with a place, a sense of birth right, are the root of multiple injustices, from colonialism to the treatment of migrants and refugees, and what’s there to celebrate in that. And if I feel this way, should I boycott the Euros? I feel uneasy about supporting any nation, but then, I never understood national representation. The Venice Biennale, the Olympics, the World Cup: why are achievements framed through citizenship? Club football is also organized around communities, from Liverpool to the suburbs of Paris to the great teams in São Paulo and a neighbourhood called La Boca in Buenos Aires. I say citizenship and community as if they are related, but that’s not true: one of these is chosen. And as I describe long-distance love, I remember, watching sports means paying a whole lot of attention to other people, and that has always been the thing I’m most interested in. What I look for in football is connection: between my dad and me, between my friends and I at the pub, even between the guy at the table who tried to prove to me that he loves it more because his grandfather watched Alf Ramsey play. And mostly it’s a form of connection between temporary communities of people who find themselves at the same place at the same time watching the same thing, raising scarves above their heads and singing at the stadium, slamming their hands against tables in utter joy and disbelief.
This is good. It feels good, and sometimes you just want to feel good and not challenge it too much, but the questions come up on their own. Something that is valued and treasured by so many people matters. Football can’t just be one thing—spoiled by money, marketing, globalization, and financial interests. It’s that, too. But it has to be allowed to be so many other things. It is specific, it happens in places and communities who care about it. And it happens in time. This time: two elections, two wars, a tournament hosted by a country going through a conservative turn, partly in response to those elections and one war. Nothing about this summer feels simple and straightforward, which is perhaps the only way I can think of international football. It’s uncomfortable, and complex, and worth thinking about, so I still watch. And hum, ‘Then you can start to make it better’.
***
I write about my love, and I write personally, with an I. This is a position that is far from neutral. I never understood neutrals anyway. Every time I watch a game, I find myself taking a side, feeling a swelling sense of empathy, embedding in the narrative. Perhaps it’s what led me to feel like I belong in a northern city in England. If I follow that logic, and the lesson that love is an insistence, perhaps I should—or could—make an argument to belong here in the place I immigrated to. Make an argument for a fandom that comes with a foreign accent and difference. But I’m not there. I watch international football with this sense of discomfort in front of the nation state, and I love it still and I want to talk about it—personally and joyfully and without closing my eyes to the elections and the wars and the nationalism and the racism and all of the Bad Things sports can represent. This duality, this conflicted sense, is also what football is. It’s hard to love. I’ll still be at the pub to watch the games tonight. I’ll be supporting France. And Portugal.
[1] Grant Farred, Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 12.