The crosses of St George are flying all around me. Fair to say the opening line of Three Lions ’98 hits a little differently in 2025. The crosses of St George are being daubed on an Islamic centre in Basildon. The crosses of St George are being used to deface a Chinese takeaway in York. The crosses of St George are draped over men shouting at a three-star hotel from a mini-roundabout. The crosses of St George are retailing for about £2.36 on Temu, depending on whether you want them car-window sized, or big enough to write the words “GET OFF MY LAND” in the white spaces.
Keir Starmer has declared that he is “a supporter of flags”. Alas, at the time of writing the prime minister’s position on other items of tactile fabric remains unclear. What does he think about blankets? Does he endorse or condemn the dishcloth? Not to be outdone, the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, disclosed that she has St George’s bunting on display at home. “I would put them up anywhere,” she confirmed, which – anatomically speaking – is not an image any of us needed right now.
Naturally it barely requires saying at this point that the recent wave of flag onanism is a thinly disguised trap laid by the resurgent far-right, a way of sneaking its toxic politics into our shared public spaces under the guise of broad-church patriotism. It’s just a flag. How can you get triggered by a flag? How can any right-thinking citizen possibly object to this most simple expression of collective pride? Albeit an expression largely being expressed by a few lone individuals in the dead of night, which is when all great expressions of collective pride traditionally occur.
Into this stinking cheese dream of contested symbolisms, amateur semiotics and flag enemas step Thomas Tuchel’s England: refreshed and rebooted after their summer slump, facing games against Andorra this Saturday and Serbia next Tuesday.
There are, of course, more banal sporting issues under scrutiny here. Can Elliot Anderson stake a claim in midfield? Can Tuchel find a less soporific way of breaking down a low block? And yet, at the same time, this is simply a very interesting moment for an England team to be taking the field under the England flag, with all its attached mythologies and meanings.
Football has always been a reluctant participant in these conversations, and in particular English football, with its proud anti‑intellectual streak and reverence of the bottom line. After all, there are vibes to be maintained, disposable barbecues to be sold, pub gardens to be filled, Club Wembley corporate packages to be shifted. Far better to retreat into the usual bromides: no greater honour, play for the shirt, honestly thought it was a wind-up when I saw the number on my phone, and so on.
Tuchel, for his part, has made no secret of the extent to which questions of identity and symbolism and nationalism concern him, which is to say not in the slightest. On his unveiling he affirmed that he was a “head coach, not a manager”, signalled his distaste for “sport-politics”, even admitting that he could use his foreignness as a kind of impregnability cloak on such matters.
And, you know, fair enough. Seen through Tuchel’s eyes, football – even international football – probably does feel like an entirely neutral space, a hermetically sealed world where the borders are fluid and the dressing rooms are polyglot, where everyone is rich and talented, where all the football pitches are the same and all the football pitches are good.
But at the same time it is important to be clear what Tuchel is really saying here. What he is saying is that his England team will stand for nothing outside itself. It will play football, and you will watch, and it will try to win, and you will be happy or sad, and these alone are the ceiling and four walls of its ambition. Whatever you think of that as an ambition it is also a desperately tricky line to maintain, and not simply because, in football, politics has a habit of finding a path through even the most impermeable cracks.
For if Barthes – Roland, not Fabien – teaches us anything, it is that the very act of trying to mean nothing is in itself a form of meaning. Perhaps this is doubly true in a pursuit as mass-cultural as football, a sport utterly in thrall to its mythologies, its symbols, a phenomenon being constantly shattered and re‑shattered in the sheer heat of its collective gaze. However thoroughly you try to strip it of meaning – the pointless friendly, the infinite content scroll, games slopped upon games – meaning finds a way. I did promise you amateur semiotics.
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Images rely on captions for their meaning. Who gets to caption an England flag? The fan painting it on her cheek? The players walking out underneath it? The neo-Nazi plastering it on a zebra crossing at 3am? Certainly not the tortured and grimacing Starmer, a man who has outsourced his dinner to a focus group and is now being forced to eat the results, mumbling “I get it, I really do” as he chews unhappily on his meal of roast chicken, custard and Haribo bhuna.
However reticent they may be to admit it, the England team that take the field on Saturday are not simply athletes with a goal but bearers of an idea. The flag under which they play is freighted with connotations and mythologies they did not author and in which they probably have no interest. Perhaps this has always been England’s original sin: the absence of that idea, empty and unfocused fervour as a substitute for thought.
But the more we recoil from defining these symbols, the more vulnerable we are to having them defined for us. As the Lionesses demonstrated so stirringly over the summer, Englishness as a trait need not be expressed in photographic negative. Like the Palestinian or Ukrainian or Pride flag, the England flag can be a reclamation of agency, a reassertion of our unity, diversity and shared values, a champion of the vulnerable, a rejection rather than an embrace of intolerance.
And yes: it is tiring to have to keep having these arguments. It should feel depressing to have to restate the basic principles of our humanity, to debate those with no intention of listening, to be reminded over and over that international football is political by its very nature.
To an extent this is simply a measure of the moment in which we find ourselves: a society stripped to a husk, hollowed and directionless, reduced to howling at symbols. But when the symbols are all that remain, they matter a great deal.
