The beautiful game in ugly times — a Euro 2024 journey

As France went to the polls on Sunday, I went to the football. Trudging towards the England-Slovakia game in Gelsenkirchen in Germany with my son Nat, I put Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump to the back of my mind and concentrated on Harry Kane and Jude Bellingham.

Returning to Germany for a football tournament has brought back fond memories of going to the World Cup of 2006. That was a glorious summer and, in retrospect, a pretty glorious time in European and German history. The continent was largely peaceful and prosperous. War and political extremism seemed confined to history. The global financial crisis and the invasion of Ukraine lay in the future. 

Euro 2024 is taking place at a very different time and in a very different atmosphere. The largest war in Europe since 1945 is raging in Ukraine and the far right is resurgent across the continent. The ghosts of the past are returning to haunt Europe.

European football championships always have the potential to be infused with the politics of the moment. They can also attract nationalist thugs — who like the ritualised struggle between countries, the excitement, the booze and the chance of a punch-up. The first game I went to in the tournament, England vs Serbia, was designated “high risk”.

Long experience has taught me that it is best to avoid the bars where England fans gather before a game, so we took an Uber straight from Düsseldorf to the Veltins arena in Gelsenkirchen. Scanning my phone on the way to the ground, I noticed reports of marauding bands of black-clad Serbian “ultras” in the centre of town. 

Since we were in posh seats, I assumed we would be well clear of the ultras, who tend to congregate behind the goals. But some Serbs, dressed all in black, were just a few rows in front of us. They refused to sit down when the game started, which meant that the people behind them had to stand — which meant, in turn, that everybody else behind had to stand for the full 90 minutes.

Throughout the game, the guys in black would chant “Serbia” — to be met with a return shout of “Kosovo” from their fellow-ultras in the stand behind the goal. At that point some of them would reply with a stiff-armed salute — which looked uncomfortably close to the Nazi salute that is now illegal in Germany. 

As the Serbs would be quick to point out, their fans were not unique in giving vent to the grievances that still fester after the Balkan wars of the 1990s. When Croatia played Albania later in the tournament, the two sets of fans were alleged to have chanted about killing Serbs. The Serbian football authorities threatened to withdraw unless punishments were handed out. In the event, all three countries were eliminated after the first round of games. 

Against England, Serbia were defeated by a goal from Bellingham — who was born four years after the end of the Kosovo war. The Serbs sitting directly in front of me were a jolly family group who took the defeat in good part. Not so the black-shirted ultras who stormed out of the ground just ahead of me, ripping down England flags as they went. 

Our route out of the stadium took us down an unlit path in the middle of a forest, so I thought it prudent to give the ultras a few minutes’ head start and to take my England scarf off. We made it to the main road safely, only to find — like many fans that night — that we were stranded without transport in the midnight drizzle.

My son Adam (Nat’s brother) and I were standing disconsolately by a tram stop when an England fan approached and said he had found a taxi. Did we want to share the ride back to Düsseldorf? Our companions on the trip seemed far more typical of the fans who follow England around international football tournaments than the characters who feature in books with lurid titles like Among the Thugs. These were middle-class football nerds — a landscape gardener from Bromley and a Spotify engineer from Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire. We filled the time with the usual conversation about what team changes England needed to make for the next game. 

I had tickets for the second England game against Denmark in Frankfurt. But an overdeveloped sense of duty meant I’d given them away, so that I could concentrate on my day job and attend a conference in Brussels on transatlantic relations.

As England and Denmark kicked off, I was at a dinner at the residence of the US ambassador to Nato. Normally, I would have been slightly miffed to be seated at a table on the edge of the room. But being hidden away in a corner was in fact ideal for watching the England game on my phone. The announcement that there would be speeches was further good news, freeing me from any obligation to speak to my neighbours. I was instead able to concentrate on what turned out to be an absolutely dire England performance. When one of our players put the ball into touch, under no pressure, for the umpteenth time, I forgot myself and shouted “For God’s sake”, drawing a startled glance from the speaker, who may have thought I was objecting to something he had said about Nato.

The fighting in Ukraine dominated the conversation in Brussels. The day after that dinner, the Ukrainian team played its second game at Euro 2024 and won a dramatic victory against Slovakia — coming from behind to win 2-1. Afterwards, President Zelenskyy took to social media to suggest that the troops on the frontline could take inspiration from the Ukrainian team’s victory. “Believe in each other! Help each other! Fight for each other!” he urged.

But encouraging the idea that the national football team is a symbol of the nation is a risky business for political leaders. In the next round of matches, Ukraine earned a hard-fought draw against the much-fancied Belgians. Despite finishing with four points from their three games — the same as Slovakia and Belgium — Ukraine’s team was eliminated on goal difference.

That meant that my next live match would be Slovakia versus England — and a return to Gelsenkirchen. If I had to pick my ideal vacation in Germany, it probably wouldn’t feature two short trips, both to the same, small depressed city in the Ruhr.

The location of the match also made me anxious about the travelling England fans’ repertoire of songs — many of which hark back to the second world war. Would they hum the theme tune from The Dam Busters, thrusting out their arms to imitate the RAF bombers that carried out that famous raid over the Ruhr valley in 1943? These had destroyed the Möhne and Edersee dams, damaging the region’s industrial production and drowning almost 1,300 people, many of them slave labourers in Nazi factories.

One of the reasons that Gelsenkirchen itself is such a dull-looking place is that three-quarters of the town was destroyed by Allied bombing during the war. The RAF pilots who flew over the target suffered heavy casualties. The losses on the ground were far worse. Joseph Krause, a survivor of the raid on November 6 1944, later wrote that “Schalke was the Necropolis, the field of blood, the blast furnace of human flesh.”

Essen, 30 minutes down the road from the Schalke stadium, was also largely destroyed in the war. It was singled out because of its status as a centre of the German armaments industry and the location of the Krupp steelworks. There is still a statue of Alfred Krupp, known as the “cannon king” in the 19th century, in the middle of the city. His descendant Alfried Krupp was convicted of crimes against humanity after the second world war for employing slave labour in the Krupp factory in Essen. 

One of the things that I most admire about modern Germany is the national determination to confront the crimes committed by the country during the Nazi period — and never to succumb to the temptation to cast the Germans as victims of the war, despite the destruction of cities such as Dresden, Essen and Gelsenkirchen.

Today’s Germany has been built around the slogan “Never Again”. Leaving our hotel in Essen on the morning of the Slovakia match, Nat spotted a banner above a church, featuring a Star of David and the slogan — Nie wieder ist jetzt (“Never again is now”). This was a reassertion of the importance of fighting antisemitism, at a time when a German government commissioner has just reported a “catastrophic” rise in antisemitic hate crimes. 

Fears about where Germany is heading have been heightened by the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party (AfD) — which finished second in the recent German elections to the European parliament. The AfD has excited suspicion and outrage by challenging Germany’s postwar consensus about Nazism. Last week, Björn Höcke, an AfD politician who plans to run for governor of the eastern state of Thuringia, was fined for using a banned Nazi slogan. In the past, Höcke has objected to Germany’s “laughable policy” of atonement for the past, complaining that “There were no German victims any more. Only German perpetrators.” Another AfD leader recently sparked outrage by suggesting that not all members of the SS should be regarded as criminals.

By coincidence, the weekend that Nat and I were in Essen for the England-Slovakia game, the AfD were also in town, holding their annual congress. When I heard police sirens wailing on the Saturday evening, as we sat watching the Germany game on a big screen in a bar, I initially assumed that things must be kicking off between England fans and the police.

But the street battles in Essen that weekend were to do with politics, not football. Tens of thousands of leftwing “anti-fascist” demonstrators had descended on the town to try to confront the AfD. Some ended up in battles with the police instead — and two officers were hospitalised.

At the AfD conference, the war in Ukraine featured heavily. But the AfD’s take was rather different from the one I had heard in Brussels. For the German far right and much of the left, “never again” does not mean resisting Vladimir Putin and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It means avoiding anything that could lead Germany into another war in Europe. At the conference, party leader Alice Weidel lambasted the current government’s policy of aid to Ukraine and told government ministers to “go to the front themselves, but keep their hands off our sons and fathers”.

The strength of anti-Ukraine war sentiment in parts of Germany — and the latent sympathy for Putin — can come as something of a shock. On June 14, the opening night of Euro 2024, Rod Stewart was playing a concert in Leipzig in eastern Germany. When the 79-year-old British rocker displayed a Ukrainian flag on a video screen behind him, followed by an image of Zelenskyy, the crowd booed.

June 14 was a bad night for Sir Rod in other ways. He is a passionate Scotland fan who recorded a song supporting the national team before the 1978 World Cup in Argentina. (“Ole ola, we’re gonna bring that World Cup back from over there.”) That tournament went badly for Scotland and so did Euro 2024. On the same night that Sir Rod was playing Leipzig, Scotland were playing Germany in Munich — and going down to a hefty 5-1 defeat.

The Scottish team’s perennial lack of success is a source of delight to England supporters. To my relief, the fans gathered around the Schalke stadium before the Slovakia game seemed to have dropped the songs about bombing Germany in favour of a taunt aimed at the Scots — “Scotland get battered, everywhere they go.”

English exuberance, however, gave way to grumbling and dismay once the game started. Despite their star-studded line-up, England once again looked dreadful. After 25 minutes, Slovakia went ahead. The England team’s efforts to get back into the game looked increasingly disjointed and clueless.

Like many long-standing fans — and perhaps like the team itself — I began to feel as if I was stuck in a recurring nightmare. The crushing tournament defeats of the past began to pass before my eyes. Losing to Croatia in Moscow in 2018 (I was there). Losing to Iceland in 2016. Losing to Romania in Toulouse in 1998 (I was there too). Losing to the US in Brazil in 1950 (mercifully, I had not yet been born).

As the last minutes of the Slovakia game played out, I slumped back into my seat in a stupor — barely able to watch the last moments of the horror show unfolding before me. The two England fans in front of me went even further and stalked out of the stadium, cursing the England manager Gareth Southgate as they went. Big mistake. At the very last moment, Bellingham equalised with a brilliant overhead kick — destined to be replayed endlessly for decades to come. A few minutes later, Kane scored the winner.

Within hours of the result, Britain’s prime minister Rishi Sunak made the inevitable effort to spin the England victory to his advantage. With the polls indicating that he and his party are heading for an electoral defeat of historic proportions, Sunak issued a tweet showing him punching the air in celebration under the slogan — “It’s not over until it’s over.” Nice try.

As I left the ground, I checked the results of another election. In France, the far-right Rassemblement National had scored 33 per cent in the first round of parliamentary elections. The result was greeted with open dismay by some members of the French football team. Defender Jules Koundé, who was named as the player of the match after France beat Belgium the day after the election, did not hold back in his postgame interview. “I was disappointed to see the direction our country is taking,” he said, “with huge support for a party that is against our values of living together and respect, a party that seeks to divide French men and women.”

Koundé, like the striker Randal Kolo Muani, who set up the French winner against Belgium, is a dual national. The RN’s electoral platform includes a pledge to ban dual nationals from “strategic” jobs. Is playing football for France “strategic”? 

For Europe’s resurgent far right, football is an increasingly delicate issue. Successful teams become symbols of the nation and are quickly embraced by politicians. But the emerging stars of this Euro 2024 are, almost without exception, young players of mixed race or from an immigrant background — Bellingham of England, Muani and Koundé of France, Nico Williams of Spain, who is the child of asylum-seekers, and Jamal Musiala of Germany, whose father is of Nigerian-British origin. 

These young men are the faces of Euro 2024. But — willingly or not — they are also getting drawn into politics, as Europe struggles to deal with the twin threats of Putin and the far right.

Gideon Rachman is the FT’s chief foreign affairs commentator

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