The politicisation of the England football team is complete

You cannot help but feel a pang of sympathy for Gareth Southgate. It was only on Tuesday that the England manager, at the end of a Sky News interview on the St George’s Park balcony, expressed relief at how the preamble to his latest major tournament seemed focused on football, not politics. “That’s what I started off in this job to do, really,” he smiled.

Rishi Sunak has taken barely 24 hours to disabuse him of that innocent assumption, calling for a general election that falls in the same week as his team’s potential European Championship quarter-final and thus propels him, against his will, into a familiar maelstrom of opportunism and spite.

For the Prime Minister, it feels a happier symmetry. Indeed, the overlap with the Euros might just be the shrewdest calculation in his decision to go to the polls on July 4, given the capacity of a successful England campaign to elevate the national mood. When the team reached the delayed final of Euro 2020, the Archbishop of Canterbury, no less, announced that he would say a prayer for their success, telling them: “You’ve shown courage, resilience and compassion – on and off the pitch – and brought joy to millions.” Spooked by premonitions of the Conservatives’ electoral oblivion, Sunak appears to be banking on a Jude Bellingham bounce.

It spells a hellish ordeal for Southgate. Across the eight years of his England reign, he has seldom been shy of sallies into politics, arguing that Brexit had “racial overtones” and that it split the country between young people who “want to travel the world” and an older generation “pining for something that isn’t there anymore”. But these interventions have tended to be on his own terms. As a figure of conspicuous moral conscience, he has appealed, not always wisely, for his side to champion a cause greater than themselves, with their insistence on taking the knee lasting so long that the gesture began to look performative rather than profound.

He is on shakier ground when asked to volunteer opinions without exhaustive preparation. You could tell last autumn that the row over the Football Association’s choice not to light the Wembley arch for Israel almost physically pained him. In one long, awkward answer, referring to the governing body’s “good intentions” in dealing with “one of the most complex situations in the world”, he managed to say both everything and nothing. The fluid dynamics of an election campaign do not play to his natural strengths. If he starts to be asked for his views on everything from the economy to immigration, he risks wasting unnecessary energy on formulating the most non-committal answer possible.

A general election and a grand summer tournament: it is an unfamiliar combination. In fact, it has only happened once before, when Harold Wilson called the 1970 election in the midst of England’s World Cup defence in Mexico. If Wilson hoped the conjunction would work in his favour, he was sorely mistaken, with Edward Heath defying the pollsters to sweep to victory four days after Alf Ramsey’s players fell to defeat in the last eight against West Germany. Wilson denied the World Cup had ever intruded into his thinking, loftily declaring that “governance of a country has nothing to do with a study of its football fixtures”.

If England fail, Sunak will regret being pictured with them

Really? Certain reflections from the campaign’s key players painted a starkly different picture. Anthony Crosland, then the local government minister and later Foreign Secretary, explicitly blamed Labour’s loss on a “mix of party complacency and the disgruntled Match of the Day millions”. Wilson’s minister of sport, the former league referee Denis Howell, was similarly convinced, arguing that Peter Bonetti’s three crucial goalkeeping errors in Leon proved a tipping point. “The moment Bonetti made his third and final hash of it on the Sunday, everything simultaneously began to go wrong for Labour for the following Thursday,” he wrote in his memoir.

Here lies the essence of the Sunak gamble. Should England fulfil their extravagant promise with a serene cruise to the quarter-finals in Germany, the incumbent leader stands ready to bask in their glow. But if they resort to time-honoured failure, with a result even half as rancid as their humiliation by Iceland in 2016, the Prime Minister will regret being pictured anywhere near them. At the heart of this precarious equation is Southgate, compelled to shoulder the burden of national expectation while also being used as a political football.

Southgate can scarcely be surprised if the waves of a fraught campaign end up lapping at his door. He has had his say on everything from the Black Lives Matter protests to Qatar’s repressive laws around homosexuality. This mild-mannered man has morphed into a cross-cultural personality, as prone to be quoted on the front pages as on the back, with his England tenure inspiring a theatre production doubling as a state-of-the-nation study. Could there be a better time for him to speak up than an election where his own country’s future is at stake?

Alternatively, could there be a worse one? Southgate has been caught in the political crossfire more often than any of his England predecessors. Worn down by the scrutiny, he needs more than ever to inhabit a politics-free zone if his team are to thrive this summer. Sunak’s inconsiderate timing ensures, though, that there will be no shelter from the storm.