There is no reason for the English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish FAs to treat the idea of a GB men’s football team at the Olympics with such suspicion.
The players at the Olympics don’t seem any less thrilled to be at the tournament than at the recent Euros. They don’t seem to think it’s inferior or valueless. There have been some thrilling games, but of course England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland’s men are not in the competition because the FAs of each nation are paranoid that it’s all a dastardly plot by foreigners to rob them of their autonomy. If they fear player burnout, players from top leagues have nevertheless been released by other countries to feature without complaint.
For those not familiar with the reasons, they are worried that if we send a GB and NI team – which is the geo-political banner the country competes under in the Olympics – this will undermine their individual independence as football associations, even though FIFA insist it won’t and even though the women play (but failed to qualify) and send England as representatives of the country.
It’s actually a principle that was broken in 2012 in London when we did send a team led by Stuart Pearce and the sky didn’t fall in. The games are played between U23 teams with three over-age exceptions. That apart, they haven’t sent a team since 1964, having won it three times at the turn of the 20th century.
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Various home football associations have raised objections at different times, but Gareth Southgate was in favour of participation for young players to get international experience and England finished in a qualification spot at the 2023 UEFA European Under-21 Championship and so the British Olympic Association hoped a team would enter. But even then, there was resistance.
They did in the early years. All players in the 1908, 1912, 1920 and 1956 squads were English. The 2012 squad contained 13 English and five Welsh players but no Scottish or Northern Irish players and was captained by Ryan Giggs. We were knocked out in the quarter-finals by South Korea in a penalty shootout; Daniel Sturridge missed. Who would be in the side now?
Martin Glenn from the FA revealed that FIFA said the status of individual FAs is not a problem and that “the issue is the individual interests of each home nation”. It isn’t a trick beastly foreigners have devised to abolish our football associations. The Brexit spirit lives on in the dusty cobwebbed corners of the FAs, it seems.
Being autonomous is not a problem but there are those who still use it as an excuse not to compete. That seems suspicious. There must be something else behind it. Something nefarious and unpalatable.
📣TO THE COMMENTS! Should Team GB send a men’s football team to the Olympics? Join the debate here
A belief remains and is justified, that football is snobby and because UEFA or FIFA didn’t invent the Olympics, it hasn’t got any status with them. Football is rarely open-minded and is shot-through with elitism, backed up by its financial success. There is a strong, greedy aspect to football which sees the game purely as a cash cow. If you want evidence, look at how many clubs take gambling sponsors just for a couple million pounds, seemingly always looking to pull in money, even small money and not caring in the slightest where from. It has plenty of leeches who would never ever think of doing anything for sporting reasons alone. God forbid. I doubt they even know what that means.
But when you see the players in the tournament throwing everything at it, it seems like a pointless big mistake to exclude yourself. Life doesn’t begin and end with World Cups, Euros, the Champions League and the precious Premier League. We should find space for the Olympics for younger players, it would only be a positive.
Obviously, unlike some other sports, football already has a global competition but you can preserve the World Cup’s status by making the Olympics exclusively U23 and thus played under a different structure.
GB is a unique, not to say peculiar, construct. There is nowhere like it. I once met a Californian in L.A. who thought it comprised England, Norway and Iceland and was located “off of Africa”. Mind you, he thought Massachusetts was in Canada.
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But it is an unholy union of nations. We tend to feel Scottish or English or Welsh or Irish before we feel British, let alone Great British (whatever that means), if indeed at all. If all countries were independent we could compete as nations. Plenty of small countries exist and aren’t co-dependent on a bigger, bullying sibling, the way we are with the rotten, right-wing instincts of some parts of Albion.
We’re not better together, at least if you’re not living in England and are allowed to plunder the wealth of other nations. We’d be much stronger apart. So perhaps we haven’t a head for a competition which requires us to pretend to be a country called GB and Northern Ireland. It isn’t a construct we feel comfortable with, even though every other sport competes under this banner. Perhaps football isn’t about to cast aside its tribes to compete as a GB team.
But it’s a global competition and it doesn’t seem right that we have pointlessly excluded ourselves. I’m sure younger players would like the opportunity that might not present itself otherwise.
We’re a faux country, playing at national unity despite a substantial number of the four nations having had enough of the union. We pretend to be Britain the rest of the time, can’t we pretend at the Olympics?