England should boycott the World Cup. The risk of winning it is too high
England are probably not going to win the upcoming men’s World Cup. But we might. There is no clear favourite, and England’s core squad has built up a useful supply of tournament nous.
It is imperative therefore that we withdraw. Hear me out.
First, this is a World Cup that should not even exist. Qatar is an unworthy host of the beautiful game’s premier showcase, and winning a blood-stained tournament played in absurd conditions would be, frankly, shameful. FIFA needs rebuilding from scratch, and it is clear that reform is never going to come from within.
Second, it would eclipse the triumph of England’s women at Euro 2022, a genuinely heroic, against-almost-all-odds performance. The growing strength and quality of women’s football in England is testament to a remarkable cohort of players and coaches, but also an innate sporting integrity which is alien to men’s football at present. Winning the men’s World Cup has become more meaningless than ever.
Third, I do not want to give Greg Fucking Dyke the satisfaction: Dyke set a target of winning the 2022 World Cup when he served as Football Association chair. Let’s be clear that everything good about football in this country (in both the men’s and women’s games) exists despite the FA.
Normcore
There is a fourth, crucial factor here: I truly believe that Gareth Southgate does not want to win the World Cup.
The most obvious bit of supporting evidence is that Southgate has made no attempt to seriously appraise whether the core team from Euro 2020 (played in 2021) would be performing at the same level a year and a half later.
1) Raheem Sterling had obviously already peaked — which explains his marginalisation at and departure from Manchester City. England needed to settle on a new offensive strategy well ahead of Qatar.
2) Harry Maguire was also clearly in decline, carried by John Stones and Kyle Walker at Euro 2020 to some extent. Injuries and personal problems will have taken a toll, and it is obvious that the turmoil at Manchester United last season has been detrimental (affecting Luke Shaw, Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho too).
3) Jordan Pickford remains a just-about-adequate shotstopper, but there are better goalkeeper options now, and a decision should have been made on a new #1 much sooner.
There have also been missed opportunities to embed younger players like Phil Foden and Jude Bellingham into the side. They are now undroppable, but they have been bolted on to a strategy that does not necessarily suit their natural games. Southgate continues to fret over Jack Grealish too, failing to notice him become an effective systems player, indeed one with more tournament-ready flair than, say, Mason Mount.
I have more sympathy for Southgate regarding Trent Alexander-Arnold. His defensive game has deteriorated, and there are excellent alternatives at right-back for England. Yet he remains one of the most talented footballers in the world. I would actually argue that Alexander-Arnold’s club form has been negatively affected by Southgate’s neglect. Working with Alexander-Arnold to mould his game for international football — even if only used as an impact sub — should have been the manager’s top priority after Euro 2020.
It has become commonplace to say that Southgate has found his limits as an elite coach. This is true, for the most part. However, it is also true that tournament football is a weird beast. The recent friendly and Nations League defeats are irrelevant, and Southgate’s England team are perfectly capable of winning the World Cup without reaching new heights of performance or tactical ingenuity.
The lesson, from this perspective, would be to trust the method. Southgate’s limitations are therefore strengths insofar as they are nicely aligned to what is actually required.
We should not get carried away with this argument. What worked once or twice is not necessarily what will work forevermore, especially when so many of Southgate’s core team have clearly passed their peak. But even peak-era Southgate would be struggling now: it is very easy to go from ‘highly effective’ to ‘distinctly average’ when your rivals have figured out how to negate your best weapons.
Woke to broke
However, I think there is something a little more profound going on. Remember ‘Dear England’, Southgate’s woke-adjacent tribute to his players, and to patriotic centrism, published in the context of hard-right vitriol against his team’s rather mild ‘taking the knee’ protests against racial inequalities?
The ‘Dear England’ essay — and ultimately the performance of Southgate’s team — came to symbolise a one-nation backlash against the depravity of Boris Johnson and his media allies. There was a sense that a collective rock bottom had been reached, but by coming together around football, we could at least forge a path back to respectability.
Oh how wrong we were. Well, at least some of us. At the time, I argued that ‘Southgate’s centrism is not going to cut it… we cannot expect genuine change to be led by a small group of multi-millionaires, no matter how admirable their intentions’. In a longer piece, I wrote:
One of the most striking aspects of Southgate’s essay… is how apolitical it is. It does not actually refer to the knee at any point. He only mentions race once, indirectly, when he opines it is ‘ridiculous’ to insult someone for ‘the colour of their skin’… The key passage is this:
“Unfortunately for those people that engage in that kind of behaviour, I have some bad news. You’re on the losing side. It’s clear to me that we are heading for a much more tolerant and understanding society, and I know our lads will be a big part of that.”
In context, this can be read as being resigned to the passage of time, rather than celebrating it. But even giving Southgate the benefit of the doubt, it is a version of history devoid of agency, struggle, setbacks. We are not heading for any particular future, we are forging it, knees and all — and much darker versions of our future remain very real scenarios.
And so it has proved. Boris Johnson has been replaced by someone even worse, and the Conservative Party has handed the country’s soul over to an opaque network of fools, fanatics and pseudo-fascists representing the precise opposite of patriotism. Whatever was left a year ago of the conservatism Gareth Southgate believes in has now disappeared completely.
My theory, then, is that this has broken Southgate, leaving him unable to rouse himself to do everything that coaching the men’s national team entails, at least not as effectively as he once did. What his current strategy really represents therefore is a comfort zone, rather than a tried-and-tested method. Poor Gareth. We have our differences but he seems a genuinely lovely person (I had a chance to observe him interacting with the public when he visited Sheffield this summer as part of a Euro 2022 roadshow).
So if you want a fifth reason to boycott the World Cup, it would be to avoid any possibility that Liz Truss and co. would be able to extract any political capital from an accidental England victory, not least because it would compel Southgate, laden down with a sense of duty, to play along.
*****
Given that England are not going to boycott the World Cup, and at the risk of sounding like every other halfwit arguing that England should just ‘go for it’ and ‘play our best players’, the time probably has come to just go for it, and play our best players. Play like we don’t care whether we win or not, because we shouldn’t care. We should treat the World Cup campaign with exactly the same amount of respect that our government treats our democracy, our economy, our public services, our lives. Sweet FA.
I am sure in the weeks ahead I will get sucked into the tactical ins and outs of every Southgate selection, so I will refrain from naming my preferred line-up for now. But it would probably be quite similar to the ‘fuck it’ approach anyway. I generally prefer defensive football, but England really don’t have the players to make this work anymore. Let’s not even bother to try. Tell Phil and Jack and Harry and Trent and Jude to just go and have some fun. It might be just the thing this wretched country needs.
