Sport can help us come to terms with the EU referendum because, like life, it is riddled with defeat

COMMENT
A dejected Rangers fan lholds his head in despair after a Champions League match with AS Monaco, back in 2000
Mark Thompson/ALLSPORT
John Dillon24 June 2016

The usual custom is to say that life’s biggest events put sport into perspective. Kicking a ball around a patch of grass is meant to become a trivial matter in comparison with tragedies, disasters or momentous, sweeping, ground-shifting moments like the stunning Brexit vote.

Nobody ever says that opera, the theatre or music or anything else among the great arts has to accept a diminished status like this.

Indeed, they are said to reflect humanity and all its turbulence all the more sharply and comprehensively at such moments.

But sport? It’s just millions of people watching hundreds of thousands of others straining, striving, plotting and planning to create achievement, physical excellence, wonder, unity, drama, common ground, physical excellence, competition and success and failure on a global scale and in the local park, day after day after day.

What could it possibly have to say and tell us about the human condition with so many people taking part or watching and debating it all on such a grand scale?

The answer to that is everything; or at least as much, if not more than the arts.

So its justifiable to try to comprehend the shock of Britain’s decision to leave the European Union through the prism of football, and to use it to explain just how much more emotionally affecting the result has been than I ever got close to expecting that it would be particularly with its timing in the midst of a major international tournament.

For one immediate example, just now, as a result of the emptiness and worry about the future the decision to break away has induced, I feel suddenly disconnected from Euro 2016. And it’s not because the competition doesn’t matter anymore. Of course it does.

It is not an over-dramatic reaction to suggest this. I’m sure, too, that this sense will recede rather quickly and probably by the time the action starts again on Saturday.

But it is the job of the football writer to try to place things in greater context as well as to record the endless, gloriously silly but hugely important litany of groin strains, penalty rows and offside arguments that make it all such a compellingly unfinish-able business. And right now it feels like this nation has turned its back on something of the idea of what the Euros are about.

In purely practical terms, this will have an effect in English football.

Already, it has been pointed out that fabulous players like West Ham’s Dimitri Payet would never have met the work permit criteria which may be imposed on EU players in future. Anyone who dismisses that one point about all this as mere football triviality misses a big point. The football industry is a massive contributor to the economy here and a jobs growth sector, particularly among the young

If English football were to become less glamorous, less attractive to the rest of the globe, there will be an economic effect here.

"Remember our football history. England felt itself too grand to even enter the first three World Cups. Look where that has left us, 1966 apart. Still struggling to catch up now."

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There is a lot of confusion swirling around just now. But perhaps a lot of us didn’t realise that we were so in tune with the general idea of progression that the EU, in theory, has been about – even if it has some torturous and dangerous ways of going about it.

Now the Brexit decision has arrived with such an almighty wallop to the senses, that have become clearer, too. And in essence, football’s Euros are based on the same idea of coming together rather than going our own ways, even if these recent weeks have been scarred by violence. Still, the football prevails, doesn’t it?

Remember our football history. England felt itself too grand to even enter the first three World Cups. Look where that has left us, 1966 apart. Still struggling to catch up now.

That’s what sporting isolationism can do. And even though we won’t isolate ourselves from our sporting ties with Europe, we’ve stuck up two fingers to some of the feelings and beliefs behind it all. It’s awkward and troubling.

Football has always been important enough for me to see life in this way.

Of course, there are countries involved in the competition in France – and beyond it in the whole carnival of European club football and the next round of the international game – who are not EU members.

Somehow, though, it feels more emotionally wrenching to be now preparing to pull away from those amongst whom we have been part of international football than it would do if we had never been EU members in the first place.

It feels like we are turning our backs on them and that will be felt viscerally in terms of football because that is how football is; up-front, immediate and powerful.

Has Wales versus Northern Ireland now taken on a different edge because one country voted leave and one voted remain? Most likely, it hasn’t. But project it forward a few years and, given the renewed stirrings about independence already raised in parts of the UK which voted to stay, this might not even be a meeting of any ‘Home nations’ any longer.

There is a side issue here, too. The drunken English yobs who invaded Marseille at the start of this competition can in no way be said to reflect the views of the millions who have, quite legitimately and with many good reasons, voted for Brexit. Nor do they even represent the vast majority of England followers. But there they stood, arms aloft, bare-chested and leering – until the tougher Russians arrived - chanting bovinely about getting out of Europe, their motivation clearly that peculiar feeling of inebriated superiority to foreigners English hooligans always assume abroad.

It happened and I don’t wish my country to be seen like this in any way.

I don’t like what my country has decided to do, either. But it’s a result, fair and square. My own football allegiances, domestically and internationally, have made me rather used to defeat. It’s life. It’s football. The two are utterly entangled. Don’t let anyone tell you there is any other kind of perspective.

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