An Own Goal: England’s Ignominious Euro Exit

This is the first article by contributor Ivan O’Brien. Ivan will be writing on sports for our site on a weekly basis. His first article is on England’s defeat in Euro 2016.

Towards the end of Iceland’s 2–1 victory over England in the Euro Cup on Monday, Iceland’s radio announcer punctuated a giddy, delirious rant by referencing certain current events: “Live the way you want, England […] You can go home! You can go out of Europe! You can go wherever the hell you want!”

Some might ask: “Is there a way to clumsily tie the result of a soccer match to a potentially Earth-changing event?” I stand guilty as charged.

As many hand-wringing Brexit thinkpieces have pointed out, one of the things that made the United Kingdom so powerful to begin with was the murder and pillaging willingness and ability to bring in foreign goods and ideas. That same thing can be applied to the English Premier League, which is presumably the country’s premier soccer league.

It’s the richest league in the world, they say. It’s the greatest league in the world.

That may well be true, but it’s probably because of the influx of foreign-born oilmen who use their “Fuck You” money to comb the world for its finest soccer players. The most recent edition of the Pro Footballers’ Association’s Team of the Year — the 11 best players in the league, as voted on by the player’s union — features four Englishmen, joined by players from France, Spain, Belgium, Algeria, and Jamaica. This is hardly a blip; you’d have to go back to 2006 to find a majority of English players on the team.

Conversely, there seems to be minimal demand for English players outside of their island. They train at English youth academies as children and they play on English club teams as adults, until they get old and slow, at which point they get put out to pasture in America.

There is even less demand for English managers, though for good reason; “English tactics,” stands as one of the true oxymorons of the sport, best exemplified by the story of longtime Premier League manager Harry Redknapp struggling to communicate strategy with a striker who didn’t speak much English before giving up and saying, “just fucking run about.”

English soccer is in pretty dire shape. Euro 2016 is the fourth major tournament in a row in which England has not only lost early, but lost badly. Iceland, which doesn’t have a player on a club bigger than perhaps the 17th-place finisher in the Italian Serie A, controlled the match from start to finish (much to the consternation of Englishman ESPN announcers Ian Darke and Steve McManaman, who spent the match’s final ten minutes or so spitting on the grave of their national team).

The English national team is provincial, self-satisfied, stagnant, and decades past its prime. English soccer minus Europe is a collection of myopic assholes running around without any real ideas except trying futilely to recapture a glimpse of long-ago greatness.

Let’s hope this remains a soccer-only phenomenon.