English Fans’ Euro 2008 Alternatives Expose Racism

Another English writer has remarked on how much more enjoyable Euro 2008 – and soccer as a whole – is when you are not cheering on your own nation’s team, when you can be more objective about the tournament and the sport. This time it is no mere journalist but, surprisingly, the novelist A. S. Byatt. “I wondered whether Euro 2008 would be exciting or gripping with no national team to support,” she writes in The Guardian. ”It has, in fact, been infinitely more pleasurable, more varied, and more interesting. This has caused me to think about the emotions that go into ’supporting’ a team. … But when you look closely at ’supporting’ it is a weird emotion and bears only a tangential relation to admiration of skills and courage in players.”

But Byatt, when she notes that “I myself tend instinctively to substitute northern European teams if there is no English interest,” also brings up an issue that she does not get around to addressing. Perhaps it simply slipped her mind, or the editors snipped it. But I’m surprised that no one else has addressed or even simply made note of how, in the many columns and press contests devoted to whom the English fan should support in lieu of England, the choices offered or suggested were usually race-based. Rarely was a southern European or even Slavic country chosen or suggested, as if it were presumed natural that the English fan could see his way clear to ”identifying with” only those countries that are racially closest to his own – Holland, of course, seeming to come closest to the ideal choice.