Off the cuff

We've introduced our range of World Cup products and speculated on how the tournament may disrupt your working week, but we've not actually thought about why we all love the World Cup so much.

This week I caught up with freelance sports journalist James Appell, I asked him to blog about the relationship that the English have with football, here's the result:

'Football's Coming Home' - so went the irritatingly catchy Lightning Seeds/Skinner/Baddiel song to commemorate the 1996 European Championships being held on English soil.

It's not entirely surprising that the English should claim football as their own. The game was born on the playing fields of English public schools, and its rules were set down in the Victorian era by a group of very English moustachioed gentlemen.

But there is more to it than that. English football fans above all others refer to the beautiful game in the possessive sense. They watch it, they discuss it, they fight about it, they obsess about it. To illustrate, the best-attended football league in Europe is the English Premier League, while the fourth-best-attended (ahead of Italy’s Serie A) is the English second tier, the Championship.

Why this is so could be the subject of whole books. But there is one reason why I'd say the English are so in love with the game, and it has its roots in what it means to be “English”.

Allow me to state a few gross generalisations, and to drop in a few clichés at the same time. The English are notorious throughout the world for their manners. 'Mind your p's and q's' is the motto by which the English have lived for generations. Along with this they are well-known for their reluctance to show emotion of any kind, the famous national stiff upper lip.

Note also that England is a hugely multicultural society. Various peoples have immigrated to these shores, from Romans and Vikings in the first millennium AD to Bangladeshis and West Indians in the twentieth century. That also makes the English rather non-partisan, allowing those around them, broadly speaking, to live and let live.

Football, though, is an aspect of society where these rules count for little. It provides a conduit through which people can happily ignore English manners, show strong emotions, and above all behave aggressively and territorially. This manifested itself most clearly (and violently) in the hooliganism of the 1970s and 1980s. But it continues today, albeit in a more muted form.

Go to an English football stadium and you will see the kind of carnivalesque behaviour which the English would ordinarily frown upon as “foreign” – though of course they would only tut-tut quietly to themselves.

Perhaps this is why football is so loved by the English. It allows them - if only for a couple of hours a week - to stop being so English.

James Appell is a freelance sportswriter with a penchant for Russian football, he's author of The Cynical Challenge blog and will be working with ITV during this summer's World Cup on their online coverage and social media output.

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