Euro 2020: All those oh-so-nears
It’s Monday morning, and the feeling in the air is…flat. I wouldn’t consider myself a football fan necessarily, but I do watch the big multi-national tournaments like the Euros and the World Cup, and last night’s result was a devastating one for England. The fact that they scored in the first two minutes prolonged the stress, accentuated the agony, as the nation felt for just over an hour that it might just truly be coming home.
A near-win can feel worse than a blowout loss. A study by Thomas Gilovich, a professor of psychology from Cornell University, found that winning a Bronze medal tends to lead to more happiness than winning a Silver (https://www.insider.com/why-its-better-to-win-bronze-than-silver-2016-8). If England hadn’t had a chance at winning, then we wouldn’t have started to develop a taste for it. If Italy had scored in the first two minutes instead, then maybe the anticipation wouldn’t have built up to such an excruciating level. If if if.
I can’t imagine what the players must be going through. Other much more intelligent people than me will be writing about the abhorrent racist abuse that Rashford, Sancho and Saka are experiencing, and how measures must be taken to punish anyone participating in such a vile display. Even without the racism, I would find the pressure and the frustration too much to bear. When I was 19 years old I was bagging popcorn at a movie theatre. These lads had the weight of the nation’s expectations on their backs, and with all eyes on them, didn’t get the result they wanted. A couple of inches to the right or left, and they’d be hailed as heroes instead of derided as failures. They may make hundreds of millions of Euros, but I bet all three of them would trade every last penny to have scored last night. It’s interesting to parallel their experiences with that of someone down and out. It’s possible to be completely skint and have your day made by finding a £10 note in the street, and it’s possible to live in a multi-million pound mansion and feel like a total failure.
One thing I have really enjoyed about the whole tournament, is the brief return of the sense of a monoculture. The internet is a double-edged sword in this regard. On the one hand, if you really enjoy a niche subject, it’s wonderful to be able to find a small group of like-minded individuals who share your passion. On the other, it becomes very easy to be cut off from the rest of society, and live in a bubble of interests perfectly catered to your tastes. Back in the pre-internet days, when there were only a couple of channels on TV, it was easier to have these nation-wide or global events that everyone was experiencing and talking about together. Whether you cared about it or not, you were aware of it and it would be a topic of conversation with a stranger. Nowadays it’s very easy to fall down the rabbit hole of niche interests and subcultures to the point that you become unrelatable to the average person. The Euros have been a nice return to a time where everyone was experiencing a single event together as a society, and though I’m no football fan I’ll miss it a bit now that it’s gone.
I’ll close with some perspective. I couldn’t remember what happened in Euro 2016 so I looked it up this morning. Do you remember? England were knocked out by Iceland in the quarter-finals. No disrespect to Iceland, but they are hardly the football powerhouse that Italy is. It’s easy in defeat to forget the improvements that you’ve made. England went from the punchline of the tournament, to being within inches of winning it all. Not only that, they took countless people like me who didn’t really care either way about football at the start of the tournament, and made us feel hope, loss and emotion when it was all said and done. They made us care about whether or not it came home, and that’s a great achievement in and of itself.