Football does not go "home" | News | sport



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This is the category B horror film that most of the world has never asked for. A lousy pop anthem 1996 comes back to haunt us – to make our way through our brains.

Football Coming Home was metamorphosed into an animal completely different from what it once was.
It's a song-cum-phrase-cum-gospel that has been dogmatically embraced by the rowdy mob of the Three Lions in Russia. Their fervor quickly spread and spread over our timelines and homepages.

England is finally better than trash in a major tournament and their supporters want you to know

. their arrogance to claim an entire sport like theirs. But if England had decided to spit in the face of the scenario and lift the World Cup, would there be any truth in the sentence?

The English are not necessarily alone in the hypothesis. Fifa badigns a meeting to a London tavern in 1863 at the time the rules were written. This is the version we know today. Yet for centuries before that, a myriad of cultures had played ball games that looked like crude versions of football. Chinese and Mesoamerican societies, for example, held competitions more than a millennium before 1863. Does their existence suffice to discredit the claim of history books?

"I read a lot of nonsense about it," says football historian David Goldblatt. "The game that is being played today is clearly the descendant of the 1863 rules created in England … If China had been industrialized and globalized before England in the 18th century then that would have been the case. they had the opportunity, no doubt we would all play a version of cuju.But they did not do it.England is the place [where] football was invented .

Goldblatt, author of The ball is round and current host of the podcast The game of our lives has devoted much of his career to understanding the roots of football. As a researcher, he is happy to recognize the arrogance that often permeates the circles of those who wave the flag of St. George.

The invention of football, however, is a historical fact. Yet even if he is English, he would condemn anyone who would attempt to badert the ownership of the sport or suggest that it belongs to him spiritually.

"Now, what do we mean by" it comes home "?" He asks. "What we own it? What is ours in a way that is not that of anyone else? Football is a cosmopolitan gift to the world. It's great that everyone is playing and we can be leisurely happy that a group of ridiculous schoolchildren had it in the 1850s and 1860s … We are very, very lucky to be here. to have something in this fragmented world that most of humanity can accept "

The irony of the sudden omnipresence of the phrase is that it began as a joke mocking an endless series of failures.The comedians wrote the original lyrics as an appreciation that the 1996 Euro was hosted on local soil, but the punchline was that it was the only one way for football to come back "at home."

There is a decent argument to argue that it is this lack of egotism that has brought Gareth Southgate and his players until now in the World Cup. Yes, after the round of 16, the nation increased its belief that it was his year, but no one gave them a chance on the dinner table of Wayne Rooney

The opportunity had come and disappeared while Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard and David Beckham aged. It was this often chastised golden generation that was supposed to chart a way home, not a Sheffield kid like Harry Maguire. But the pressure, and the lack of pressure, can be a fun thing.

Of course, the joke is now that England is going home. Before defeating Wednesday's semifinal against Croatia, Southgate, in his typical and unobtrusive manner, admitted that he could finally stand to listen to Football's Coming Home. It's almost poetic that, in the year the song was written, Southgate missed a penalty that ended up coming out of its Euros side. He is going to cry now for one last missed opportunity, but he can leave Russia with pride.

Although, secretly, most of the world is surely happy to have been spared by the festivities of a victory in the Three Lions Cup: wants to live in a world with Sir Harry Kane.

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