A video showing England fans singing “Ten German Bombers” in front of a young boy has been posted to a Facebook group run by the Football Association.
The 22-second clip was uploaded to the official page of the England Supporters Travel Club (ESTC) a little under two hours before Thomas Tuchel’s first away game as national team manager.
The footage shows a number of fans singing the illicit chant in a bar,
So it’s not actually the FA posting it, etc. Bit “illicit”? Impolitic perhaps but actually claiming that it’s illegal?
That’s about where we tell the people doing the defining to fuck off isn’t it? And if they have declared it to be illegal then we definitely tell ’em to fuck off.
“Governing body calls video ‘inappropriate and disrespectful’ and says its security team is working on ‘appropriate next steps’”
This is what I call Not Understanding Your Business. Same as Bud Light hiring a tranny to market it.
What made football supporting fun was all the tribal stuff. You got on the terrace and sang chants for your teams. You called the opponents centre forward a homosexual, or questioned his parentage. You referred to some historic event around their city or club. You collectively celebrated a victory. You were part of a crowd doing something blokeish.
Some people took it too far, into actual violence. Although a lot of that was all willing participants. One firm arranged a fight with another firm.
If you take that away, it’s just 11 random mercenaries kicking a ball around to another 11 random mercenaries. Why pick one over the other? Where’s the fun in it? It’s why football supporters now tend to be dweebs who pore over stats and talk about transfer windows.
Do they charge you a fee to join the Society of Professionaly Offended?
What made football supporting fun was all the tribal stuff. You got on the terrace and sang chants for your teams. You called the opponents centre forward a homosexual, or questioned his parentage. You referred to some historic event around their city or club. You collectively celebrated a victory. You were part of a crowd doing something blokeish.
You’re making me wonder about my credentials as a bloke. This is supposed to be fun?
BiS – The Shed at Chelsea was a rite of passage for us South London boys. It was an hilariously funny place, the football was secondary. I took a Yank there once. He came out ashen faced, he complained that he’d never encountered so much pent up aggression or heard the word ‘c*nt’ said by so many people in such a small space – they were even calling their own players it !
Around 1990ish I went with some pals ( including some Germans ) to a Eng V Ger friendly at Wembley.
Halfway through the first half one of my mates tapped me on the shoulder. I looked around and saw the entire stand behind me on their feet, arms outstretched singing the Dambusters theme.
Modern English stadia are soulless, sterile, silent places these days. QPR was the first place I encountered proscription of rudeness and gesticulating and that was the late 1980s. I thought at the time, that this was the future and I was right.
I once took a Bath-supporting ex (she wasn’t an ex at the time, and not for some time afterwards!) to see Gloucester vs Bath at Kingsholm. We stood in the Shed, me wearing a Gloucester shirt and she wearing a Bath one. The piss-taking was merciless, but totally good humoured – even she enjoyed it!
I used to (before the knee-taking) wear my England shirt in Welsh pubs for 5 or 6 nations matches. Lots of banter, taken and given, as well as lots of beer.
I don’t think I’d ever try any of that at a soccer match or pub.
@WB
What made football supporting fun was all the tribal stuff.
Some very rich twats are presently misunderstanding this in rugby, where the rich twats – fronted by Mike Tindall and the utterly hopeless former Bath Director of Rugby Stuart Hooper – are about to try to poach the best 350-odd players in the world and create 8x ‘franchises’ which will tour the world playing each other in places like the Nou Camp and the Maracanã.
(There will also be 4x women’s teams, natch. Literally no fucker will watch that, but still.))
Their rationale is that domestic rugby (outside France) isn’t a big deal. They’re right about that – rugby is a minority sport which punches far above its weight because a lot of wealthy blokes like it and because it has (in the northern hemisphere) one of the world’s most watched annual sports tournaments, the Six Nations.
They appear to think that because you can sell tickets to Twickenham for England v anyone at £150 a pop, and hundreds of millions watch the tournament on telly, there is an untapped wellspring of secret rugby fans who don’t watch Prem rugby (Leicester is the only club with attendances over 20,000, some clubs get 3,000-4,000) who can be converted to watch the Panasonic Titans take on the Coke Zero Warriors in Tokyo.
The fucking idiots don’t realise that the reason England sells out is not because there are secret rugby fans but because there are unsecret England fans.
Same as I do not give two tits about football but sometimes watch England if they’re playing in a decent tournament.
They are making this mistake for the same reason as the FA are making theirs: they are ‘anywheres’ who care more about media bollocks than the country that they grew up in (if they did grow up in it).
@Bloke in Wales
I once took a Bath-supporting ex (she wasn’t an ex at the time, and not for some time afterwards!) to see Gloucester vs Bath at Kingsholm. We stood in the Shed, me wearing a Gloucester shirt and she wearing a Bath one. The piss-taking was merciless, but totally good humoured – even she enjoyed it!
I used to (before the knee-taking) wear my England shirt in Welsh pubs for 5 or 6 nations matches. Lots of banter, taken and given, as well as lots of beer.
I don’t think I’d ever try any of that at a soccer match or pub.
I go to Kingsholm regularly in my Tigers shirt, with my local Glaws-supporting mates. Usually get bought more pints than I can drink in Teague’s pub opposite.
My favourite Bath related football/rugby contrast is about the time that Stan Collymore found himself in a chip shop in Bath late at night, not long after he’d publicly kicked the out of Ulrika Jonsson.
‘I’m a big lad,’ quoth Stan, ‘and I can look after myself, but there’s nothing I can do against five or six blokes. One of the girls I was with got a clump in the face. They’re just f***ing tossers. Racist, cowardly tossers.’
The idea that he complained about one of the girls he was with getting ‘a clump in the face’, which didn’t happen, is hilarious.
Big Stan’s version of events is rather different from the actualité, according to someone I know who was there. Danny Grewcock took exception to his treatment of Ulrika, verbally, and Stan came back at him, and Grewcock put him straight, and that was the end of it.
https://www.standard.co.uk/showbiz/rugby-stars-beat-colly-to-a-pulp-7235020.html
BiS,
“You’re making me wonder about my credentials as a bloke. This is supposed to be fun?”
I absolutely loved it and if you met me, that might surprise you.
And as Otto correctly observes, “Modern English stadia are soulless, sterile, silent places these days.”. I went a few times after terraces came down, but there was no atmosphere. You might as well sit in front of the TV watching it, where it’s warm and you can have a drink.
Collymore has now made an official complaint to police in Ireland.
However, aspects of his account have been called into question by sources at the nightclub, who claimed he punched three players inside the club before following them to Burger King.
“…and now you know the rest of the story”.
The fucking idiots don’t realise that the reason England sells out is not because there are secret rugby fans but because there are unsecret England fans.
Have to disagree. I stopped going to Twickenham precisely because it wasn’t full of rugby fans secret or unsecret, it is full of piss heads who aren’t interested in the rugby. If they were they wouldn’t get so drunk and spend most of the time either going to the bar or going for a piss. I’ll bet most of them can’t remember the game the next morning.
Rugby fans have a few pints before and during the game and then get pissed afterwards.
As for getting ribbed at rugby games, imagine the fun I had when I accompanied my Sale supporting mate to see them play Bath at Bath wearing my Wasps scarf and shirt. I got it from both sides 🙂
Well, Wasps, obvs….
Fans of teams playing against England ought to chant about Hillsborough and Heysel.
Ted S,
If they did, England fans other than Scousers would probably join in.
“(There will also be 4x women’s teams, natch. Literally no fucker will watch that, but still.))”
There is a market for watching big lezzers rolling around in the mud.
If they switched to Angel Delight, it will really take off…
I’d watch it if they still swapped jerseys at the end of the match
I like watching rugby, not so much football.
I always feel sorry for the ref. The players on both sideshave people wearing their shirts.
You don’t see anyone in the crowd wearing a referee outfit, cheering them on.
Maybe one day I’ll buy a referee shirt and go to a match, cheer on the ref.
Would only do this at rugby though, fans there more likely to see the funny side. I don’t particularly want to get stabbed at a footy match.
Have to disagree. I stopped going to Twickenham precisely because it wasn’t full of rugby fans secret or unsecret, it is full of piss heads who aren’t interested in the rugby. If they were they wouldn’t get so drunk and spend most of the time either going to the bar or going for a piss. I’ll bet most of them can’t remember the game the next morning.
There is some of that – been guilty of it myself occasionally (most unforgivably at the 2003 RWC final, the second half of which I could barely remember – though we had been drinking since very early that day) and there are corporate types too.
But the majority of people at Twickenham are rugby fans, obviously.
That said, that was a bad example by me – switch people at Twickenham for people watching the 6N on TV at home or in the pub. That is where the serious money is and these are the supposedly missing rugby fans who don’t watch the premiership on TV but who are supposedly going to watch this new weirdness.
It’s clearly bollocks: the reason the 6N is so popular is because of the national rivalries.
There is a market for watching big lezzers rolling around in the mud.
Confession time. I do rather enjoy watching the leggy Ellie Kildunne out-sprinting the opposition before doing her rather likeable lasso dance.
So sue me.
Ditto about Kildunne. And as n England supporter it’s great to have a team that’s gonna dominate rather than eg England soccer ‘winning’ one-nil vs Andorra FFS.
The Old Firm have the most intense football rival intensity. Glasgow Celtic v Glasgow Rangers is intense. Also Scotland has a big intense historical rival in England.