LONDON — The paper airplanes were the nadir, floating down from Wembley’s stands and onto the field, confetti for the loveless union between the English national team and the country it represents.
It started during a friendly against Peru in the weeks before the 2014 World Cup. Wanting to give Roy Hodgson’s England team a spectacular send-off on its way to the tournament in Brazil, the Football Association — English soccer’s governing body — had placed pieces of card stock on every seat in the stadium. During the national anthem, the fans were invited to hold them up to form a mosaic of the St. George’s Cross.
That part worked fine. When the game — a soporific 3-0 win for England — failed to capture the fans’ imagination, though, a few creative minds started fiddling with the cards. There were a few test launches, and then, before long, there were squadrons of tiny planes in the sky. One, thrown from the top tier, hit Hansell Riojas, the Peru defender. The stadium erupted. A cellphone video of the throw has more than five million views on YouTube.
For a while, after that, airplanes became something of a Wembley tradition: not by any means universally popular, but a way to pass time, to alleviate boredom — a silent protest against the tedium of watching England at the professed home of football. As recently as last year, the cheers for a paper airplane gliding from the stadium’s top tier into the back of Joe Hart’s net were as loud as those for the goal that sent Gareth Southgate’s team to the 2018 World Cup.
What happened this summer in Russia, of course — those sun-bleached four weeks when it was coming home, everyone was coated in lager, Harry Maguire was a national treasure and waistcoats became de rigueur — has fundamentally altered the dynamic between England’s national team and its public.
Thursday’s meeting with the United States might have the air of a tribute to Wayne Rooney, but the paper airplane fad has passed. England is popular again, for now; international breaks are no longer quite such an unwelcome lacuna in the unfolding drama of the Premier League.
But if reaching a World Cup semifinal for the first time in almost three decades has absolved the team of its perceived sins, the nation’s relationship with Wembley — the backdrop to so many dreary hours, the scene of so many disappointments — remains much more complex.
In April, Shahid Khan, who owns the N.F.L.’s Jacksonville Jaguars and Fulham of the Premier League, made an offer of 800 million pounds (about $1 billion) to buy Wembley from the F.A. His bid had not been solicited; selling the national stadium, rebuilt by the F.A. at a cost of £757 million and only opened in 2007, was not a longstanding plank of policy.
The offer was approved by the F.A. board, but it received a much cooler reception from the organization’s council, a sort of parliament for soccer, in which every level of the game is represented.
“Only a minority of people speak in meetings like that,” said Malcolm Clarke, a member of the council and the chairman of the Football Supporters’ Federation (F.S.F). “But the tone of those that did was not supportive. If anything, it was against.”
The council does not have any legal power — its votes are not binding — but had it voted against the sale, it would have been hard for the board to complete the deal. “They called around the various county associations,” said Barry Taylor, the honorary president of the third-tier club Barnsley and a member of the council. “I think they knew they would not have a majority.”
Reading the reception, Khan withdrew his offer in October.
Many were relieved. “Certainly, in my neck of the woods, most people don’t think we should sell,” Taylor said. “As someone said to me, ‘Soon we’ll only have Buckingham Palace left.’” In a survey of 2,000 fans by the F.S.F., 58 percent said the F.A. should never sell Wembley.
That should not be taken, however, as a sign that the stadium itself is beloved. True, there are many who regard Wembley as the spiritual home of English soccer; there are some who regard it as the spiritual home of all soccer. Gordon Banks, the World Cup-winning goalkeeper, described it as the English game’s “crown jewel” when Khan’s offer was first submitted.
But for many, what Clarke called the “mystique” of the stadium has been eroded in recent years. Romance, certainly, was not the dominant force in the discussions held by the council over its sale. “It was more a case of not selling the family silver unless we were absolutely sure it was the right decision, because it was a one-way door,” he said.
In part, of course, that is because the current Wembley is not the Wembley that many remember, and cherish. “For me, the historic era of Wembley ended when they knocked down the twin towers of the old ground,” said Mark Perryman, a founder of the LondonEnglandFans supporters group.
The new stadium is magnificent, he said, but it is not the same place that hosted “the 1923 F.A. Cup final — the White Horse final — and the 1966 World Cup final, Live Aid and the final of Euro ’96.” It does not possess the emotional resonance that comes with history; nobody ever threw paper airplanes out of boredom at the old Wembley.
It is not simply a case of diminishing reverence, however; there are deeper resentments. In its survey, the F.S.F. also asked fans where England’s national team should play its games. Some 71 percent answered that they should be held around the country, rather than exclusively at Wembley.
“In the years when they were redeveloping it, the games were held in lots of different places, places that would never have expected to hold an England game,” Perryman said. “It was the biggest experiment in devolution of any national institution this country has seen, and it was a huge success.”
There are many, even within the council, who believe England should — like Italy and Spain and the United States, among many others — travel around the nation it represents. One of the strongest arguments in favor of selling Wembley, Clarke said, was that it would eliminate the F.A.’s overpowering financial incentive to play every game there. Sending the team out on the road, some believe, would help the rest of the country feel more of a connection with it.
That, to many, is what lies at the root of the discontent with England and with the stadium that had come to be seen as its avatar. Results were, for a long time, poor; major tournaments ended in disappointment. T he sight of so many empty seats, particularly in the corporate sections, went from being a source of embarrassment to a running joke.
But more than anything, the problem was that Wembley’s location smacked of centralization, of London’s domination of the rest of the country, of its absorption of investment and resources and opportunity.
That imbalance exists in culture and the arts, too, where government spending is heavily skewed toward London and the South East; the fracture between London — as represented by Westminster, England’s political center — and the rest of the country has only deepened in the two years since the Brexit referendum. The decision to rebuild Wembley on its original site — rather than build a new stadium somewhere more central, more accessible — brought the issue into soccer, too.
“We are a divided country, and there is a disconnect between London, this global megacity, and the rest of the country, which feels economically deprived,” said Simon Chadwick, a professor of sports enterprise at the University of Salford. “Football, like so many industries, tends toward industrial concentration: the conglomeration of power in the hands of a few. London, and Wembley, is emblematic of that corporatization of football.”
For now, wherever England plays, the nation is behind Southgate’s team; success in Russia ensured that. The afterglow will not last forever, though. The F.A. may have recognized that — England played in Leicester and Leeds this year — and Southgate, for one, has voiced his support for taking some home games on the road, strengthening the bond between the players and their people, keeping those paper airplanes at bay.
Follow Rory Smith on Twitter: @RorySmith.
Source: Read Full Article