RIP Sven Göran Eriksson

My post about the Beckham doc on Netflix talked about a weird time, so it's fitting that I run this post, about the recently passed former England manager, Sven Göran Eriksson, since he was a big part of why that was such a weird time.

I was listening to the Guardian's Football Weekly today, which led off with some tributes to Sven, as he was known during his time here. Some of it was fair, talking about his rise from obscurity in Sweden to managing in Portugal and Italy, and then getting hired for the England job on the strength of his time at Benfica and Lazio. They also talked about his record as England manager (three quarterfinal exits in a row, in 2002, 2004 and 2006), and on the tabloid obsession with Sven's personal life.

I thought some of their comments missed the point, btw. Max Rushden and co were right to point out that the Sun and other tabloids' relentless reporting on Sven's affairs was a bit much, but they also didn't mention that Eriksson was in a relationship with Nancy Dell'Olio while the tabloids were reporting on his various affairs. Indeed, one of the guys on the podcast said Eriksson wasn't hurting anyone with his affairs, but surely he was hurting Dell'Olio?

Sven's time as England manager is also a little confusing in hindsight. It's held up as a period of drift, because the expectations at those three tournaments were high, especially in 2006, when a lot of England fans expected to win. Mars bars were even briefly rebranded "Believe" bars, because presumably that would fire up the fans. 

But the football turned out to be slow and ponderous, and not at all the kind of play you'd expect to win a tournament with. I even remember sitting through the first half of England's opening match against Paraguay, which was settled by a Paraguayan own goal in the fourth minute, and when the half ended and they returned to Gary Lineker and the Match of the Day team in the studio, they all looked embarrassed at having to talk up such a performance. As I recall, England's tournament didn't really improve, and my abiding memory of their exit against Portugal, even more so than Cristiano Ronaldo winding up Wayne Rooney, is both Rooney and Beckham throwing tear-filled tantrums as the game slipped out of their control.

(I also remember having to be careful about the big grin on my face as I took the train home from my friend Ian's house. Not, I should add, because of England's elimination, but because Brazil had been eliminated by France in the earlier match, which made me quite happy back then. But that's by the by)

The 2006 World Cup is remembered more for the Wags (wives and girlfriends) and their antics in Baden-Baden, where the England team was based, than for anything the men did on the pitch. It was held up as a symbol of moral decline, in which the players (chiefly Beckham) were more interested in celebrity and partying, and of Eriksson's dangerous indulgence. Indeed, the 2010 World Cup, where England were coached by Fabio Capello, was promised to be a much more buttoned-up England camp, though they actually went out earlier than they had in 2006.

I was among many who tut-tutted at the Wags' antics in 2006 (although now my writing playlist features a song by Girls Aloud, a member of whom is Cheryl, one of the chief Wags, so I've clearly changed in the intervening 18 years). Though if you consider it, Sven's England achieved an impressive level of consistency, certainly more so than the three tournaments before or after.

England had three different managers at Euro 96 (Terry Venables), World Cup 98 (Glenn Hoddle) and Euro 2000 (Kevin Keegan). The exits were at, respectively, the semi-finals, round of 16, and group stage. If we go back to World Cup 94, England didn't even qualify.

After Sven's departure in 2006, the roll call is even bleaker: failed to qualify for Euro 2008 (Steve McClaren), round of 16 in World Cup 2010 (Capello), and quarterfinals in Euro 2012 (Roy Hodgson). We can also take Hodgson on his own, since he was the first England manager after Sven to hold the post for three tournaments, and he didn't exactly cover himself in glory either, with a group stage exit at the 2014 World Cup and then the humiliating defeat to Iceland in 2016.

You can look at this from several angles. One is that England didn't know how good they had it when Sven was their manager. Certainly he and Capello are among England's most successful managers, in terms of win percentages, even if both served up some pretty dour performances on the pitch.

But that's what's frustrating about Sven's time as England manager: he had an arguably more talented group than Gareth Southgate had for his four tournaments, and got less out of them. The Football Weekly guys said something about good man-management by Sven, which is attested by the players, who all seemed to deliver stirring eulogies this week; but I also remember that the England team was riven by cliques, with the Manchester United and Liverpool, and later Chelsea, contingents not talking to one another. I'd say that Gareth Southgate was better at getting the whole squad to play for each other.

Still, I have some mixed feelings about Sven, because I appreciated that his bookish demeanor riled up the tabloids, who'd probably rather have lost gloriously with Dave Bassett at the helm. And another thing the Football Weekly gang said was, Sven, for all his faults, lived life. Those affairs were a bit distasteful (especially the one with the FA secretary who'd also had an affair with the FA chief executive), but apart from that, he seems to have been a bon vivant.

What's sad is that, overall, Sven's career didn't really hit the heights again after 2006. He managed Manchester City before Abu Dhabi bought it, then a variety of middling to low-level national teams, the lowest of which were China and the Philippines. He also managed Leicester City a couple of seasons before they were promoted back to the Premier League, so, much like his time at Man City, he missed out on the Foxes' big success in 2016.

I've done a bit of criticizing in this post, but overall, I'd say that Sven deserves to be regarded as more than a footnote in the history of England's men's national team. His time in charge coincided with my first stint living in the UK, so the England matches were a big part of my life in those years. Indeed, my favorite Sven game is the 5-1 defeat of Germany in World Cup qualifying in 2001. His tournament teams may not have hit those heights, but he deserves the credit for that result, and for giving England a confidence they hadn't had before.

Netflix's Beckham Documentary is a Weird Snapshot of a Weird Time

I try not to do this, but sometimes I'm just taken with a show and I feel the need to talk about it here, even though I'm not through watching it yet. Add the fact that I had no idea what else to blog about this week, and voila: I want to talk about the David Beckham documentary on Netflix.

I heard about it when it first came out, and gave it a hard pass, because Beckham's a footballer that I made my mind up about years ago, and I've been content not to revisit that opinion. Whenever he comes up in conversation these days, it's usually negative, like the flack he took for shilling for Qatar ahead of the 2022 World Cup. After years (decades) of playing to the LGBTQ community and presenting himself as an ally, many in that community felt betrayed by that move.

I've also been a little bemused by his whole thing at Inter Miami, not that I knew about the details. Having checked out the ownership section on Inter Miami's Wikipedia page, it looks like he received an option to buy an expansion team when he joined MLS in 2007, which I guess is the same deal the league gave to Lionel Messi when he joined Miami. Nothing too odd, at least without doing full due diligence.

So I was a little surprised when I learned, or was reminded, that the documentary had been directed by Fisher Stevens, who played Hugo on Succession and has made a career for himself as a director of well-regarded documentaries. It came up because I heard Stevens talk about the Beckham doc on Marc Maron's podcast, WTF, in an episode from last year. They talked about the various people Stevens spoke to for the doc, and that's what persuaded me to have a look.

It's authorized by Beckham, which is both good and bad. Good, because Stevens gets access to a lot of people, from Beckham's wife Victoria to former teammates, his parents, and various others. I think what made me want to check it out was the fact that they spoke to Sir Alex Ferguson, which felt like a good get. The bad thing about being authorized is that sometimes it feels a little sanitized - Beckham gets to present himself as he wants, which is his right but is also at the heart of why I'm a little disdainful of him.

On the other hand, the documentary does give Sir Alex a voice throughout, including when it discusses his rift with Beckham. The only person that's clearly thrown under the bus (so far, because I'm partway through the third episode, of four) is Glenn Hoddle, who was the England manager at the 1998 World Cup. That means he was in the hot seat to talk about the red card in the match against Argentina, which Beckham received for kicking out at Diego Simeone. In fact, it's kind of cool that they talked to Simeone about it, and he's quite forthcoming about it.

More than anything, the episodes I've seen have been a nice time capsule back to the 90s and early 2000s, and the football culture that prevailed. There's a lot of archival footage of Beckham from the time, both on the pitch and off it, which takes me back nicely. The music is pretty on-point too, capturing some of the Cool Britannia stuff that was happening around then (see also my love for the Britpop documentary, Live Forever).

There are some things I didn't know, or had forgotten about. For example, that red card against Argentina may have galvanized the whole of England against Beckham, but it was good to be reminded that his sending off didn't actually make them lose the match - they held on for penalties, which is when England came a cropper. Though it wouldn't be the last time the English collectively blamed a single individual for an early exit from a tournament...

It was also interesting to hear directly, from Beckham and Ferguson, about the incident that led to (or at least presaged) Beckham being sold to Real Madrid. I remember hearing about the boot to the face incident in the dressing room, but hadn't read up on how it was Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's boot, or how it was effectively a freak accident when Ferguson kicked a pile of laundry and the boot hit Beckham in the face. I also hadn't known that they'd originally sold him to Barcelona, only for him to ask to go to Real Madrid.

The other thing that was helpful to be reminded of is just how good Beckham actually was on the pitch. My enduring memories of him are missing a penalty against Portugal at Euro 2004 and of his tear-filled tantrum when the same opponents knocked England out of the World Cup two years later. But the documentary, without spending too much time on the intricacies of football, does a good job of showing the ways Beckham could be influential. The prime example is the qualifier against Greece, which Beckham essentially won single-handed (though my abiding memory of that qualifying campaign was the October 2001 demolition of Germany).

I suppose my memories of those years are erased by the unceasing juggernaut of the Messi-Ronaldo rivalry that dominated the 2010s, and by the importance of Wayne Rooney to the English game. Though it's worth noting that Beckham's stardom and ubiquity essentially paved the way for the circus that surrounded Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, as evidenced by the religious ecstasy Beckham provoked in fans when he got to Real Madrid. Rooney, on the other hand, was a creature that the English fans understood better - a chaos agent with a rampaging style similar to that of Paul Gascoigne, who however didn't squander his gift like Gascoigne did.

My memories of Beckham end when he left England, though I had a good laugh at his first couple of seasons as one of Madrid's galacticos, since they didn't win many trophies, being too top-heavy to play well. I do remember when he came to MLS, and how they allowed him to break the salary cap, which has become known as the Beckham rule. I even (vaguely) remember when he went to AC Milan, though I think I didn't know he'd ended his career at Paris St-Germain. I'm looking forward to seeing what the documentary has to say about those years.

Overall, the show isn't perfect, but it's been nice to revisit those years through the lens of Beckham's career. I made a point at the time of ignoring the celebrity stuff he was involved in, thanks to his wife (who I should add was also my favorite Spice Girl), so the hoopla around his wedding and children was new to me. But it all brings me back to those years when I'd first moved to the UK, so it's fun to watch.

Also, the sections where Stevens talks directly to Beckham about his life now are unexpectedly interesting, like the joke about playing football against his son Romeo and threatening to invite his former teammates, like Zidane and Figo and Roberto Carlos, to destroy Romeo and his friends. It's nice to see that will to win is still there, even when it seemed like he was more interested in being a fashion icon.

Chris Claremont's X-Men and What Came After

As part of my ongoing reread of the X-Men, I've finally arrived at the moment when Chris Claremont, the book's most influential scribe, left. This was in 1991, when the X-Men were at the height of their popularity, spawning a new flagship title and inspiring toys and the X-Men animated series. It's also the inflection point for the X-books, where they went from the bestselling titles of the 80s to the sprawling mess that made podcasts like Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men necessary.

This post isn't so much an explanation of what happened (which I've pieced together via Wikipedia pages and comments on podcasts), but more how I saw it play out then, and how I see it now.

The first thing to say is that Claremont's departure after X-Men #3 was the first time that I realized how important writers were. I bought that issue soon after it came out, and continued on with the book for a couple of years, but I must have noticed something was off, because I kept coming back to X-Men #3 and its farewell to Claremont, and I put two and two together that Scott Lobdell and Fabian Nicieza weren't quite as good.

Thinking back, that must also be the point at which I became a fan of writers rather than artists, to the point that for years I barely noticed the actual art. It's only in the last few years, with my overall reread of my old collection, that I've forced myself to study the panels in many books. As a result, some artists don't hold up like they did for me back then, while others, like Jim Lee, do look as good as I remember.

Claremont's departure is likely also involved in my switch to DC. The JLA books that hooked me at that time were well-drawn, with one of Adam Hughes's earliest ongoing commitments, but overall the writers, Keith Giffen and JM DeMatteis, were the standouts powering the book. I had a similar whiplash when Giffen left both JLA and Legion of Superheroes, which drove home how important the writer's voice was to my enjoyment of a book (even if, in those specific cases, Giffen was doing the plot rather than the script).

What I didn't realize until I reread my physical copies of Claremont's old issues is how full of tics and idiosyncrasies his writing was. Much has been made of how every character always repeated their powers in the course of an issue (likely a result of the old adage that every issue is someone's first), or of how they repeated certain phrases (doing something "fit to burst"; yelling "Glory!"; and so on). 

I was also struck by how wordy his pages were, from 1975 to 1991, as he described everything and had the characters deliver long monologues. Those are probably also the result of a certain way of doing comics, in which he was plotting the book with the artist and then writing the script after the pages were drawn. It meant Claremont had to adapt his wording to whatever the artist had drawn; most notably, John Byrne drew the Dark Phoenix destroying an inhabited world, which meant Claremont had to adapt the rest of the story to that, leading to the death of Jean Grey, something he hadn't intended on at first.

I like to jokingly wonder whether Chris Claremont is the best bad writer or the worst good writer, but both are unfair. He managed to create a richer world for the X-Men than either Stan Lee or Roy Thomas had before, and having unchallenged control of that world for 16 years meant that he could introduce characters and concepts that are still playing out now, whether in the comics, in the movies or in TV shows. Wolverine is essentially his character, even if he didn't originally love Logan as much as Byrne or other collaborators did; same with the more complicated understanding of Magneto's motivations. 

In terms of Claremont's legacy, I'm still figuring that part out. I have bad memories of the issues in the 90s after he left, but now that I'm embarking on reading that era, I'll have a better sense of how it all played out. I still haven't quite forgiven Lobdell and Nicieza for (as I saw it) ruining books that I loved, but I'll be interested to see how I see their run going forward.

One problem with them and some of the other writers who followed Claremont is, as Jay and Miles put it in an episode that I listened to recently, Claremont had been writing the X-Men so long that Lobdell, Nicieza and whoever else thought that was just how you had to write them. Anybody would have trouble replicating such an imposing voice, even if they were a good writer themselves, so it's fair to say that the deck was stacked against them. And even more so when you consider that, as the flagship Marvel title, X-Men was subject to a lot more editorial interference than it had been in 1975, when Claremont, Len Wein and Dave Cockrum rescued it from the obscurity of being a bimonthly book of reprints.

Since I'm reading one issue of Uncanny X-Men per day (and now also X-Men, the series launched by Claremont and Jim Lee), I've calculated that this first year will take me through to the very eve of Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men. As I recall, there were a few reboots and new directions in that time, including Claremont coming back, and Warren Ellis being given control of the non-core X-books. But Morrison's run - divisive as it is - still strikes me as the short, sharp shock the X-line needed to move on from Claremont's influence.

I've heard some stuff about Morrison's pitch when they were plotting out what they wanted to do with the book, and it sounds bad when they talk about disregarding the existing fans. But I also think of the context, when creators, including Ellis, were just getting to grips with the internet and how easy it was to hear about how pissed off certain fans were that someone was doing new stuff with a book. I don't know how much of a link there is to the toxic fandom of today, but it certainly seems to prefigure stuff like Comicsgate, which has also served to radicalize a bunch of nerds to be culture warriors. If that link really is there, then I kind of wish Morrison's run really had driven all the old fans off. But I'll have to study it myself in more detail when I get to those issues...

The other thing to consider is that, influential as Morrison's run was, they also became something of an albatross on the characters after they left. At the very least, Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men is meant to be a good continuation of New X-Men, but in the 20 years since Morrison left, there haven't been that many notable characters introduced - certainly not many that stuck. As far as I can tell, the exceptions are Hope Summers and Pixie, but I'll have a better sense of it when I get to those issues.

As for Claremont himself, I'm kind of looking forward to X-Treme X-Men, but also not. My sense is that he's never really recaptured the lightning in a bottle of his first X-Men run, so that series may end up just complicating the continuity further. But we'll see.

Let's Fucking Go: Spoiler-Filled Thoughts on Deadpool & Wolverine

I just got home from watching Deadpool & Wolverine, and yeah... it was pretty fucking good.

Maybe it's not quite as good as the first one. The first Deadpool benefited from that tight focus on Wade and his desire to get back to Vanessa, with only a minor nod to the wider X-universe, so we got more of the unfiltered Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool. This could be good or bad, depending on how much you like Reynolds, but it feels like it was the breakthrough role for him, in that his public persona then became Deadpool.

But if this one is a bit more sprawling and laden with references, and the jokes about Deadpool fucking Wolverine get old after a while, it's also a fun movie in its own right. The first thing to note is that the references, in the form of Marvel Multiverses, are part of the movie's grand joke. The wasteland that Wade and Logan find themselves in features not only the 20th Century Fox logo, following Disney's acquisition a few years ago, but also various characters from the X-Men and Fantastic Four movies. I guffawed pretty loudly when Chris Evans's character in this sequence was revealed to be not Captain America, but the Human Torch.

(Incidentally, per the expletive-laden post-credits scene, I couldn't shake the feeling that Chris Evans was really enjoying playing against the Boy Scout type that he's played since 2011 as Cap)

All the Multiverse stuff was used well here, to poke fun at the way the concept's been used. The main joke delivery mechanism was Channing Tatum as Gambit, whose lines all talk about forgotten characters or those "who didn't get a chance", which is surely a reference to the Gambit movie that was in development but never came to pass. At any rate it was good to see Gambit doing his thing on the big screen.

Along the way we get to see a bunch of versions of Logan, from the one that's close to his height in the comics, to the Age of Apocalypse version, to a version played by Henry Cavill (who I think would make a good Cyclops - if we discount Matt Bomer). We also get a bunch of different versions of Wade, and they all get massacred in hilarious and satisfying ways, even if they get better because of Wade's healing factor. I also appreciated Wade's fourth-wall breaking plea to stop using the Multiverse as a gimmick, though I suspect Marvel's not going to listen to that plea.

Another thing that made me happy about this movie was the presence of X-23, as previously seen in Logan. I know we saw her in the final trailer, but I was still worried that she appeared as a flashback or a character in Logan's head, so it made me happy to see that she wasn't only in that scene, and that she played a key role in Logan's character development for this movie. Since I started reading newer X-Men comics, she's become one of my favorites of the new characters (i.e. the ones introduced since 1993), so it was good to see her, and the actress who played her, Dafne Keen, have those good moments with Logan.

For me, the best thing about this movie, beyond seeing Hugh Jackman back as Wolverine in a role that doesn't diminish his last appearance in Logan, was the hard R. Marvel's gotten a lot more violent and sweary since the 1990s, when they couldn't even say hell or damn, but even now, you don't really get to see the effects of Wolverine's claws or Deadpool's swords or Gambit's explosions. This movie didn't pull its punches, either in terms of violence or language, and given the consistent PG-13 tone of the rest of the MCU, I'm not complaining. Though it'd be boring if they all turned into this.

I don't know if there's going to be another Deadpool movie, and I kind of hope not. This does, however, make me feel a little more confident about the MCU accommodating the X-Men, whenever that's going to happen. It's also a nice companion piece to X-Men '97, which kind of kicked off this annus mirabilis for the X-Men - but whereas that was full of loving homages to the old show and to the Chris Claremont comics, this was an irreverent (but still loving) take on the same corner of the Marvel universe. If we can keep an energy somewhere between those two extremes for the MCU X-movies, the future should be bright indeed.

Or as Wade, Logan and Laura say at various points: Let's Fucking Go.

Interesting Times

Another week, another big piece of news on the 2024 campaign trail. Last week it was Donald Trump almost getting shot at a rally in Pennsylvania, and this week the big news is Joe Biden deciding not to seek reelection after all. After the Republican National Convention this week, a friend was having anxiety about the GOP's new confidence, and I told him that the news cycle would move on.

Listen, though, I didn't expect this.

Like pretty much everyone, I tuned in to the debate last month and was horrified to see how bad Biden sounded. This isn't to imply that he made Trump sound like JFK, but it kind of pointed up all the things that the GOP has been saying since the campaign started, somewhere around 28,000 BC. It didn't suddenly make me want to switch my vote to Trump (sorry, spoilers), but it certainly wasn't what we needed to show that Biden was the person who could beat Trump.

I kept faith, though. As I said, one debate performance isn't as important as keeping out a man who packed the Supreme Court with anti-abortion rights judges who've essentially dismantled the administrative state; who banned Muslims from seven countries from entering the US (though notably not from the country that provided most of the 9/11 attackers); who handed out positions to cronies and crooks; who oversaw the worst response of any country to the Covid-19 pandemic; and who, when he was turned out of office in the 2020 election, declared it a fraud and engineered an insurrection to stay in power. And yeah, I haven't touched on his personal conduct, but he's also a felon. So.

But clearly, the opinion polls and the pressure from various Democratic grandees became too much, and Biden decided it was time. With respect, this wasn't the time, because we've already gone through the primaries and there aren't any real national figures that I think can beat Trump. There was a bit of an attempt to primary Biden earlier in the year, but it came to naught, and now we face the prospect of Democratic infighting as we go into the Democratic National Convention and, worst case, into the election itself.

I am reassured that Biden did endorse his VP, Kamala Harris, but I've read that the Democratic elites don't believe she's the right candidate. I have my misgivings about a candidate who suspended her run for the 2020 nomination before a single vote had been cast, but I also worry that shutting her out makes the Black vote stay home in December. If the Democrats actually believe that Trump is a threat to democracy, which he is, then they shouldn't play around and they should get behind Harris.

Was Biden a flawed candidate? Yes, of course! You can quibble over whose fault the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan was (Biden was in charge, but Trump negotiated it), but the crisis in Gaza is entirely his failure. The only person who'd probably have done a worse job of reining in the Israelis and minimizing Palestinian deaths is Donald Trump; but I feel it when Arabs call for people not to vote for Biden. It's hard to argue that anyone else would be worse for the Palestinians than Biden when literally the worst is coming to pass.

Anyway, the die is cast. Biden's stepping back from the campaign trail and endorsing Harris. As I've said, we need the Democrats to TAKE THIS FUCKING SERIOUSLY and rally behind her. Because the question isn't only who's going to be in the White House next January, it's who's going to be in control of the Senate and the House. It's also about who will have the power to appoint new Supreme Court justices. People who were calling for Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to step down before the election (to avoid the fate of Merrick Garland's nomination in 2016) drew some glares, but that time has now passed. The Republicans would totally hold that seat empty again in the hope of winning the election and getting to fill the seat themselves.

So yes, we're living, unfortunately, in interesting times. I'd be happy for some boring times come November, and we're only going to get those if the Democrats win the White House, and ideally both houses of Congress.

Euro 2024: And That Makes Four for Spain

So Spain are champions of Europe again, having won their fourth title in this competition. They not only won all seven matches, they did it in a certain amount of style. At least once every match, one of the commentators would say that this is no longer tiki-taka football, but that's a little meaningless, since they last won a tournament with that style of football 12 years ago.

More accurate is that they had the most fluent attack, and the most redoubtable defense. They didn't win ugly, which is considered one of the marks of a quality team - rather, they won beautiful in pretty much all their games, whether it was a 3-0 against a Croatia who matched them for possession and shots; or a 1-0 against an Italy that refused to be broken down until an own goal; or after going down a goal against Georgia, the surprise package of the tournament.

I'm not normally the biggest fan of the Spanish national team, in part because of those tiki-taka tournaments in 2008, 2010 and 2012, and in part because they knocked out Italy in 2008 and 2012, the latter being a particularly brutal 4-0 hammering in the final. I'll admit that part of me was hoping to see a repeat of that today, but since I was watching with an English friend, I think it's better on balance that they kept it to 2-1.

With regard to England, they deserve some props for getting this far. Their record wasn't as spotless as Spain's, and when they won they seemed able only to win ugly. It was surprising to see how disjointed they were in the group stage and the first couple of knockout matches, given that my understanding of Gareth Southgate's tenure is that he's always been good at getting the team all playing for one another.

Still, the players kept faith with his plan, even when they didn't seem to understand it, and they made it to their second Euro final in a row. It helped that two individual moments of brilliance from Jude Bellingham and Harry Kane in the dying minutes of the Slovakia game saved England's tournament. By the end England looked like the team they'd been in previous tournaments, even though it's maybe too much to suggest they were as cohesive a unit as Spain.

Regardless of the result, and of what Gareth Southgate decides to do next, England should be proud of what the team has achieved, and how close they came to matching the women's team's Euro victory in 2022. Getting to two successive finals of a tournament is impressive, and I think it reflects how English and Spanish teams have also dominated the Champions League in the last two decades. It'll be interesting what this team looks like at the World Cup in 2026, and then at the next Euros, which will be held at home in Britain and Ireland.

As for the wider tournament, maybe it's impossible to be wholly objective as to the quality of the football. I'm just always so happy to have a World Cup or a Euro that, even if Portugal were to win with a succession of 1-1 draws and four straight rounds of penalties (which is not too far off from what happened in 2016), I'd still happily watch as much of it as I could. As I noted in previous posts where I calculated goals per game in this tournament compared with the last two, there were more goals and more exciting games, even if there weren't that many surprises or giant-killings.

That last point makes me consider the concept of England "under-achieving" at tournaments since 1966. It's the favorite refrain of England fans and pundits, that somehow the team hasn't achieved the destiny it deserves. But as the authors of Soccernomics say when they tackle this question, winning tournaments is hard. By definition, only one team can win a tournament, and when you have a knockout competition, it comes down to skill and conditioning and heavy helpings of luck.

At least at the Euros, there are about 7-9 teams that you think should get to the quarterfinals every tournament (Germany, Spain, France, Italy, England, the Netherlands, Portugal, and maybe Belgium), which means that by definition, they will all have to face one another. Spain saw off Germany, France and England on their way to the final, after having beaten Italy in the group; England beat the Netherlands and Switzerland (which had knocked out Italy). Both teams can say they faced at least some serious opposition, even if it's true that England made heavier work of facing easier opponents.

The point of all this is, England (or any other big team) can only be said to under-achieve if they don't reach the quarterfinals. After that point, it comes down, as I said, to a whole bunch of variables on the day, which even the most detail-oriented managers can't really account for. So while England should be wistful about what might have been, the fact is they showed themselves to be one of the two best teams in the continent, and should use that as a springboard for future tournaments.

The other thing I've been considering in this tournament has been the number of participants. This is kind of related to the previous point about under-achievement. By its nature, a larger tournament features a larger number of worse teams, but this year in particular, I feel like there were very few teams that were only there to make up the numbers. The evidence for this is that only Poland found itself eliminated after the first two matches, whereas the tournaments that have 16 or 32 participants have many more teams crashing out that early.

Some pundits have suggested that certain games at Euro 2024 were proof that the tournament should go back to only eight teams, never mind 16, but that obscures the runs that Georgia and Turkey went on this year. Not only did they play out a supremely entertaining game among themselves, but both got to the knockouts, and Turkey were clearly good enough to beat an Austrian team that held its own against the Dutch and the French in the group.

If the World Cup and the Euros are festivals of football, it makes sense to invite more teams to enjoy the party. A good run, like Georgia this year or Iceland in 2016, is like a once-in-a-lifetime pleasure for those countries' fans (and it doesn't matter if there aren't many of them), and also nets them money that they wouldn't have access to if they didn't qualify.

Given that the Champions League (as I bang on about ad nauseam) is increasingly the province of a few clubs from just four countries, and in practice really only Spain and England, it's good to see that the Euros are going in the other direction and sharing the wealth a bit, even if the winners still usually come from the same pool of Spain, Germany, France or Italy. Though even here, Portugal, Greece, Denmark and others show how a less accomplished team can put together a decent run.

All this is to say, I'm filled with my customary wistfulness at the end of a tournament. At some level, the quality of the play, or how far Italy gets, is kind of beside the point (though I'd have been in a hell of a better mood if Italy had won today!). The main thing is getting up early to catch ridiculous matches that I wouldn't normally cross the street for; figuring out whose house to watch the big games at, or whether to go to the pub; and the constant roasting between me and my friends who support other teams.

Euro 2024 is now consigned to the ages. It might have featured the most embarrassing Italy performance since 2008, but it was great while it lasted. And now I can look forward to World Cup 2026, which will be here on home soil, and which will hopefully feature Italy for the first time in a generation.

UK Election 2024: Labour's Coming Home

Amid all the Euro 2024 fueled jubilation, I haven't had a chance to comment on last week's election in the UK (or on yesterday's election in France). But ever since the results came in, I've been thinking about the return of the Labour Party to 10 Downing Street, and the parallels with New Labour in 1997. What crystallized it for me was rewatching the Britpop documentary, Live Forever, which is overall a pretty good encapsulation of what was going on back then.

Comparing the results of 1997 with those of 2024, they look pretty similar. Labour had 418 seats then and has 411 now. In both elections the Conservatives are in second and the Liberal Democrats are third, though now the Tories have way fewer seats than in 1997 (121 vs 165) and the Lib Dems have more (72 vs 46). One of the big changes is that there are more parties represented in Westminster now, with the notable ones being Reform and the Greens, neither of which picked up seats in 1997 (Reform didn't exist, but UKIP, its predecessor, was one of a couple of Eurosceptic parties that put candidates forward). The Scottish National Party has a similar number of MPs as it did then, in part because it suffered an electoral wipeout, while Sinn Fein has grown to be the largest Northern Irish party, which would have been unheard of then.

Keir Starmer is from the same wing of Labour as Blair was, specifically the more centrist wing. Like Blair, he came in after a stinging defeat for Labour under a more leftwing leader; though apparently Jeremy Corbyn is a bit further left than Neil Kinnock was. Starmer's also relatively young, though he doesn't give off the same cool-guy vibes Blair did. Not that I've had an opportunity to see lots of Starmer interviews, but it's hard to see him noodling on a guitar or playing head tennis with Kevin Keegan. On the other hand, he did chat to Max Rushden and Barry Glendenning of the Guardian Football Weekly, so there may be a cool bone in his body somewhere.

The cultural moment is very different from 1997, though there are some interesting similarities. The big difference is the sense of exhaustion that's permeated Britain in the last couple of years. The country was hit hard by the pandemic and by Brexit, and by the mess the Tories left. Britain under Margaret Thatcher and John Major was a two-speed economy, with all the growth concentrated in the Southeast and the more industrial regions left behind. Britain under this vintage of Tories has that dynamic, though the hollowing out of anywhere outside London and the Home Counties has just accelerated in the past 30 years, plus it's suffered from austerity since 2010.

To put it another way, Britain before 1997 was just stultifying, where many young people had no option but to go on the dole. Britain up until 2024 hasn't even let them do that, because of the cuts to benefits implemented by the Tories (and to an extent by New Labour before them). Instead, young people have had to leave university in debt because of higher tuition fees, find worse and more cramped flats to live in (all in London, because that's where the jobs all seem to be), and pay for all this with increasingly precarious zero-hours contract jobs that offer no security or chance for advancement. The celebrations feel more muted now, probably because no one has any energy for a proper knees-up.

Culturally, Britain doesn't really feel like it's on the ascendant now, either. Part of that is the nature of the culture industry, and specifically the music industry - there's a reason why the Live Forever documentary is about music rather than sport or art or cinema. 

One side effect of all those young people on the dole was that they had time to make music, so we saw a great flowering of unique artists like Morrissey and the Smiths, Depeche Mode, Erasure, the Cure, New Order and loads more. These artists, who sang in their native accents and didn't try to emulate American mannerisms like some of the more popular singers and bands, so we got the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays, and these gave way to Suede, the Auteurs, and eventually to Blur, Pulp and Oasis. 

Now it seems a lot harder to find the new Morrissey or David Bowie or Robert Smith or Noel Gallagher. I'm sure there are great bands all over Britain, but none of them seems to have broken through to the mainstream or to the US. My suspicion is that Taylor Swift is the most popular artist in Britain right now, even though she's not British herself. 

This isn't to disparage any of the great grime or UK garage bands out there, by the way - Britpop was a lot of things, but it wasn't diverse, and there were precious few non-white faces among all the bands I loved as a teenager. Whereas now you can have someone like Stormzy headlining a stage at Glastonbury. It's just a sign that the culture industry is more fragmented than it was back then.

Of course, the 90s were a strange moment for Britain overall. It wasn't just music, as Live Forever points out, and as John Harris's book The Last Party also stresses (though Harris's book is more focused on music). British cinema was getting exciting, though the only names I can really point to are Danny Boyle and Ewan MacGregor. In art, Damien Hirst was probably the most visible face of an art movement that includes Tracey Emin and was doing all sorts of innovative stuff in the 80s and 90s. Live Forever even goes beyond its musical remit to talk to designer Ozwald Boateng, who was also held to embody the virtues of the UK back then.

Just about the only thing that seems to have the same hold on the British imagination now as it did in 1997 is football. The England team of the 90s benefited from an explosion of funding following the creation of the Premier League, and from a lot of goodwill as the game cleared out the violent hooligans and became something that everyone, notionally, could enjoy. Just as importantly, black players were starting to come through and play regularly for England, better reflecting the cultural and ethnic mix of the country.

The English game of the last few years may not have suffered from violent fans or a European ban like it had in the 80s, but since Gareth Southgate was hired as head coach of the men's national team, results have been a lot better, with England reaching the semifinals of the 2018 World Cup (the first time in any tournament since 1996), then the final of Euro 2020 (the first since 1966), and after a disappointing, but actually on-par quarterfinal exit from the 2022 World Cup, England is currently one of four teams remaining in Euro 2024.

Incidentally, I'm going into this level of detail to record the ongoing savage culture war that's raging over whether Gareth Southgate is a good manager or not. I'll probably go into that in detail in another post, but here it's worth pointing out that Southgate makes for a nice callback to the 90s, because he was in that Euro 96 team that reached the semifinals before losing to Germany (indeed, it was his missed penalty that sank England). You kind of wonder how much that sense of the country being behind the team has permeated how he approaches the job now - certainly London didn't feel as bound by love for the England team during the years that Sven-Göran Eriksson, Fabio Capello or Roy Hodgson managed them.

I suppose, coming back to the Starmer vs Blair theme, that Starmer appealed to football via the Football Weekly podcast because that's the one thing that still ties together a majority of people in Britain, or at least England. Blair could invite Blur and Oasis to policy confabs and No 10 cocktail parties, because they were the biggest bands in Britain and most people knew about them. He could champion British filmmakers and artists because all of them were firing on all cylinders, whereas now Starmer really can only use football to connect with people.

There's also a cynical comment to be made here: with culture so fragmented along lines of ethnicity, race, sexuality, etc, football is the only thing that won't subject Starmer to accusations of favoring one group over another. It sounds a little stupid to say it, until you remember how apoplectic certain subsets of England fans got when the team would take the knee for racial justice in 2021.

In 1996, about a year before Labour won the election, Britain was enthralled by the first tournament on home soil in a generation (remember, the Scots also qualified). The song of the moment was Three Lions, by the Lightning Seeds along with comedians David Baddiel and Frank Skinner, characterized by its chant that "football's coming home". Blair used that slogan on the campaign trail, tying himself into all the cultural strands that the electorate loved.

Three Lions fell out of fashion for a while, but made its comeback in 2018, and has been trotted out at every tournament since then. Just our luck, then, that it's being sung on the terraces in Germany just as, back home in the UK, Labour's coming, at long last, home.