Watching England will be another grievous ordeal, but sit back and soak up the vibes | Euro 2024

“Stop the boats, Nigel Farage,” sing a group of England fans as they step out of Dortmund station. No, that’s not it. Too mean-spirited, too fringe. Maybe it’s The Killers, screening the last few minutes of the semi-final at their London concert, and then launching straight into Mr Brightside after the final whistle. No, too contrived. Maybe it’s Alfie Moon and Martin Fowler discussing Ollie Watkins’ winning goal against the Netherlands in a frankly discomforting level of detail on Thursday’s hastily-rewritten episode of EastEnders. No, too try-hard. Maybe it’s a £7 pint spinning through the air at a branded leisure park, showering rows of clammy young people with droplets of tepid Madri. Too cliched?

But then perhaps this is the defining quality of English football mania: there isn’t one. No one motif can ever hope to express this chaotic, snowballing tale of bemused delight, uncaged euphoria, wry smirks and cocaine-flecked gums. No one image can capture the unique blend of ferment and foreboding, exclamation mark and question mark, tub-thumping and navel-gazing, that accompanies England on their passage to any major tournament final. Is this brilliant? This is brilliant! Is this fun? This is fun! Nobody really knows how we got here. Nobody knows what happens next. Nobody – and I mean nobody – has the faintest idea what any of this means. Welcome to Spain v England, the final of Euro 2024.

This is England’s fourth final in as many summers. Berlin 2024 (men) comes hot on the heels of Sydney 2023 (women, defeat), Wembley 2022 (women, victory) and Wembley 2021 (men, defeat, racism). By any objective measure, this is one of the golden streaks of British sport, a triumph not just for the individuals involved but for the systems and processes that generated them. So why does it still feel so skittishly contested? What are we hoping to happen on Sunday night, and why are we hoping for it?

A large part of the confusion, of course, springs from the football itself. Which – quite frankly – has been bad. Over 600 tournament minutes, England have spent only 122 of them in the lead. They needed extra time to get past Slovakia, penalties to get past Switzerland and a last-minute winner to get past the Netherlands. There is a metric called “expected goal difference” which calculates how many goals a team should have scored or conceded based on the shots they have taken or faced. England’s expected goal difference is -0.5. By rights, Gareth Southgate’s team should be home by now; or perhaps on holiday, dancing to Bad Bunny in one of the more exclusive Gulf autocracies.

And so the hope invested in England remains largely a blind hope, a desperate hope, almost a kind of gallows hope. Hope, in the face of all available evidence, that something will turn up. So far, with an unerring sense of timing, something has turned up. Jude Bellingham’s overhead kick in the last 16. Bukayo Saka’s spectacular late equaliser in the quarter-finals. Watkins, a largely overlooked substitute, banging in one of the most cathartic goals in the history of England football. But there is no sense of culmination here, no process, no narrative. We are simply flotsam, washed along on a wave we can neither understand nor see coming. It feels great. But it feels weird at the same time.

Perhaps this is why we as a nation have become so hooked on the dopamine of reaction videos: television pundits jumping around in the studio, pub gardens going ballistic, celebrities live-streaming their celebrations on social media, lending some kind of context to a series of events that feels essentially context-free. It also explains the curiously sour debate that has long been waged over Southgate himself. The fractured meanings of Englishness in an increasingly multipolar, mutually hostile post-Brexit world: complicated. The maddening intricacies of tournament football with their vanishingly small sample sizes and largely irreplicable environments: complicated. Southgate in or Southgate out: this is a dialectic even a child can understand, one that can serve any agenda you want.

And so, in a way, England’s mild-mannered coach has become a kind of avatar for the swirling confusion his team have conjured: not simply as an outlet for reactionary rage but – more recently – as a vehicle of righteous centrist vengeance. We are told, with a kind of patrician condescension, that Southgate is a decent man with an unenviable tournament record and a history of pursuing progressive causes, and that if you disapprove of his methods you must by extension be against progressive causes, decent men and winning. That to crave a more appealing, cohesive style of play is akin to philistinism, an infantile belief in playing six attackers and no midfielders.

The truth, of course, is a little more prosaic. Even among England’s hardcore travelling support, Southgate is not as despised as many of his advocates like to imagine. Most simply believe his time in charge has reached a natural conclusion, and that a limited tactical palette is here being redeemed by some outrageous moments of individual skill. Nor is he the “woke king” depicted by so many of his rightwing critics. Indeed, what is notable about Southgate’s leadership in recent years has been the extent to which he has resiled from the social causes and advocacy he pursued in the run-up to Euro 2020.

He had precious little to say on the human rights situation ahead of the Qatar World Cup. When Jordan Henderson, one of his most senior players, moved to the Saudi Arabian Pro League, he visibly squirmed at questions over whether his continued selection was an affront to LGBT fans. Earlier this year he opened the door to a recall for Mason Greenwood, the Manchester United winger who had charges of domestic violence and sexual assault against him dropped but remains deeply unpopular with many supporters.

And so, a question that seemed easy enough to answer in 2021 but less so now: what does Southgate’s England actually stand for these days? Is it purely a vessel for victory, a basic retreat from the idea that a football team can materially change a country? You can’t argue with the numbers. The record of success is unimpeachable. The structural and cultural change has been real and tectonic. But the vibes are more mixed. And if this sounds like a familiar tale, then perhaps this has something to do with the man in the country’s other top job.

Like Southgate, Sir Keir Starmer has set himself against the forces of juddering, populist extremism, an antidote to the decadent years of failure and excess that preceded him. Whatever radical idealism he once embodied has long since been smoothed off and folded away with the purpose of providing the smallest possible target. Another future is not possible. What he offers instead is a kind of extreme competence: the grown-up in the room, the man warning us about tough choices ahead, the promise that things might, one day, feel marginally better.

And so, as Southgate carries his own Ming vase across a highly polished floor, a nation prepares once more to direct unintelligible hand gestures and impotent curses at the nearest big screen. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind, and have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and hurled pints. Deep down, we probably know that winning or losing isn’t going to change anything. But after a panoply of dismal days, one magical night can feel like the world.