Ingerland is Europe

To coin a cliche, I am indebted to today's Private Eye for drawing my attention to the wonderful piece on Brexit and the FIFA World Cup by S Bloomfield. I had noticed the strange sudden support for the football team, with S Moore saying she now felt easier about displaying the flag of St George, but this one is a beauty:

If this England team represents anyone, it’s the 48%: the remainers

Some people in Britain seem to have forgotten – these young players are the sort of people they don’t usually like very much

So already a casual link between Brexit and racism on the one hand, and Remain, youth and sporting success on the other.. There is a strangely dated terminology in the view that 'This is the most multiracial England squad to represent its country at a major tournament, with 11 players of colour' --  shades of the same schtik that greeted the victory of the French team in 1998 when the media still used terms like that.

Then:

Every last one of them works with immigrants and appreciates that they have become better at their jobs because of the influx of foreigners into the British game. Most of them live in big cities. If this England team represents anyone, it’s the 48% who voted to remain.

So 'working with immigrants' means supporting immigration as a general policy,and it is only those who do not work with immigrants that voted Brexit? 

Southgate was a figure of fun before this run of success but now:

England’s head coach, Gareth Southgate, has made no secret of his willingness to learn from other European teams...[unlike his predecessor S Allardyce who] bemoaned the number of foreign coaches in English football, and has scoffed at young players who seek to play their football elsewhere in Europe.

Holding these views is not necessarily the result of anti-EU/racism, though.The relative absence of foreign coaches and players and the strong domestic game that can produce is often held to be the main reason for German success internationally. Germany's failure to qualify this time,despite years of success, is no real reason to dismiss the argument just yet.

There’s a hypocrisy to the warm embrace that has been granted to this England team by parts of the media and the population. These are not people they normally like. [That is very true of Guardian writers who typically 'scoff' at working class football players and fans -- S Moore is a johnny-come-lately, for example] It is only a month since the government was illegally deporting people who could have been the grandparents of Raheem Sterling or Jesse Lingard.

Illegal deportations because the Government does not watch or play football? If they did, this would stop discrimination of this kind? It has been some years since racism was a simple matter of initial hostility towards unfamiliar new arrivals, 'dark strangers' as one classic piece put it. Even then, there were differences between personal hostility and general policy.

Then some trite stuff about football as 'a true meritocracy',where 'race' ( that strange term again) 'is also far less of a factor than it is in any other sphere of life (on the pitch, that is – off it, football is still as racist as British society, whether in the stands or the boardroom)'. There is no recognition that seeing ethnic minorities predominantly in sport (or music or crime) is also likely to support racism, albeit of a 'softer' kind -- black people are 'closer to nature', and so black kids should be 'sidetracked' into those careers

  

The parenthesis actually introduces some problems with the metaphor -- so Remainers support a vision of England in Europe with a rather limited kind of soft racist meritocracy confined to 90 minutes on the pitch, while the usual inequalities remain in the rest of life as ever?