Did the Southgate-loving soccerati watch the same Euros as us?

It might seem as if England played and lost in two different European Championship finals last night.

On one hand, there was the official Euros. This was where Princes William and George and Labour prime minister Keir Starmer cheered the ‘brave’, beaten Lions from the safety of the Berlin VIP box, Labour culture secretary Lisa Nandy declared that the new government would unite the nation by being ‘more Gareth Southgate, less Michael Gove’, and the establishment clamoured for Southgate to be knighted.

On the other hand, there was the people’s Euros, where millions of England fans hurled metaphorical pints at Southgate for squandering another chance to make history, and fervently hoped we had seen the back of him and his soul-destroying brand of football.

Did the defeat to Spain even count as a real disappointment, given it was only what many of us firmly expected (however fervently we hoped we were wrong)? In my packed local pub, the final whistle was greeted with less of a tearful howl than a shrug of resignation to the inevitable.

Earlier in the tournament, during the General Election campaign, I compared England and Labour in a less positive way than Ms Nandy, suggesting that ‘Gareth Southgate is the Keir Starmer of football’ because he pursues the same dull, safety-first, risk-averse approach to a contest.

As I concluded more than three weeks ago, ‘Whatever his obvious shortcomings, cautious Sir Keir Starmer is set to end the election campaign in 10 Downing Street. Cautious Gareth Southgate, on the other hand, currently looks likely to end the Euros with nothing – except that this darling of the establishment will probably still get a knighthood.’

Sometimes it is not good to be proved right all along. Countless England fans will take no pleasure today from having our worst fears confirmed last night.

We always feared that Southgate’s dull, precautionary style of football would ultimately fall short, just as it wasted our chance to win the last Euros and to reach a World Cup final. By shackling the talents of England’s top-class players, Southgate allowed Spain to dominate the game.

Yes, the Spanish team of attacking stars might have won anyway. But if England had gone for it from the start, the way they finally did after falling behind and making belated substitutions, we would at least know our defeat was down to being beaten by the better team rather than the worse tactics.

Of course, Southgate loyalists will still insist that his overall record is better than any England manager since Sir Alf Ramsey, who won the World Cup in 1966. But as even Gareth fanboy Gary Lineker has pointed out, if you are going to make the national team play in such a dispiriting way, you better at least win.

Ramsey, who was also criticised for his ‘wingless’ style of play, won; Southgate, despite being gifted a great generation of players, didn’t. The margins are narrow – an England goal that was given when nobody was sure if it had crossed the line in ’66, a late header off the Spanish goal line last night – but history-making.

So, Sir Gareth, ride off into the sunset now (hopefully not to become the manager of my club, Manchester United), trailing the plaudits of the football and political establishment, and leave us to trudge on under the perma-cloud of sporting depression that comes with being an England football fan.

The two Euros confirmed that the divide between the soccerati – the woke middle-class elites who have colonised the national game – and the mass of everyday football fans remains as wide as the gap in England’s defence through which Spain scored their goals.

Despite England’s dismal form throughout the tournament, much of the criticism in the media and social media was aimed not at Southgate or the players, but at the fans for daring to criticise them. Horror of horrors, after one terrible non-performance some fans threw a few empty plastic beer cups in St Gareth’s general direction, rather than throwing palm leaves at his feet.

The media even branded fans who criticised Southgate’s team online as toxic ‘trolls’, who were guilty of ‘hate’ for venting their frustration at England’s unlovable football.

Behind all the talk of national unity, the soccerati could not disguise the deep-seated snobbery that is always directed towards football fans. These bourgeois pseudo-supporters love the ‘beautiful game’, you understand; it’s just that they fear and loathe the ugly people who unfortunately follow it.

The ‘northern correspondent’ for the Guardian (who else?) expressed this attitude in unusually honest terms, when she tweeted about, ‘The whiplash when you’re celebrating the lovely talented nice footballers and then it cuts to the stands and you remember what people in England actually look like. Brings you back down to earth with a bump.’

Scottish nationalist newspaper the National also gave the game away with a front page on Saturday that went beyond the familiar Anyone But England attitude. It pleaded with the Spanish to take ‘revenge’ on the English who ‘fill up your beaches… drink all your beer… make a mess of your plazas… eat fried breakfasts all day instead of your wonderful food’, etc. A snobbish caricature that has rather more to do with class than nationality, and could just as easily be aimed at Scottish rank-and-file fans on holiday.

There was plenty more of this stuff. Even UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin demanded last week that Southgate’s vulgar critics apologise for ‘insulting and ridiculing’ the best manager England have ever had.

Now, far be it from me to suggest that these people know nothing about football. As pundits, ex-players and football panjandrums who make a profession out of watching it, I am happy to concede that they must know far more about the technicalities of the modern game than the likes of me.

I am equally certain, however, that most of them know next to nothing about being a football fan. It is our team, and that means it is our right to criticise, ‘insult and ridicule’ them as we see fit. Nobody else is allowed to do so, of course. The loyal supporters who keep the game alive are the only ones permitted to sing ‘We’re shit, and we know we are’. And nobody is going to take that freedom away from us.

This is anathema to the soccerati, who think fans should be seen waving the flag but not heard complaining – and preferably neither, which is why they loved the cardboard cut-out crowds and the censored crowd noises piped through speakers when the stadiums were empty during lockdown.

Indeed, one reason the soccerati love Southgate is that he has done his bit to advance the sanitisation of football off and on the pitch. It was he, we might recall, who insisted during lockdown that the England team would take the knee before international matches, in order to help ‘educate’ fans around the world in the woke ways of the modern West.

All of which might have been forgiven, though never forgotten, had England won the Euros – even if, like Starmer’s Labour, they won by default. But we felt in our English hearts that Southgate’s dream wouldn’t come true – any more than Starmer’s fantasy of uniting the nation by posing as the Sir Gareth of politics.

Mick Hume is a spiked columnist. The concise and abridged edition of his book, Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?, is published by William Collins.