It’s Coming Home. Apparently 

It’s coming home. They say.

All it took was one match for England’s fans, and Britain’s media, to start inscribing the country’s name on the World Cup trophy. Sixty years of hurt are definitely coming to an end. They say.

If you detect a slight tone of scepticism here, you would not be wrong (there’s cynicism too, but that’s what you come for). A 4-2 victory over Croatia isn’t nothing but England were the favourites, Croatia are an ageing side and letting two goals in might not have been ideal. The offensive performance was, so I am told, good though (I didn’t actually watch the match – no-one who knew me would expect me to).

England were among the pre-tournament favourites and it would be reasonable, now that a ball has actually been kicked, to update our view of the chances of them going all the way. But how much has their mighty victory actually improved their odds?

2-3% according to the AIs I consulted and the bookies.

Their chances have improved (mainly because there are now fewer ways for them not to get out of the group or to meet a top team in the next round if they do) but not by much. There is still an over eighty percent chance that someone else lifts the cup.

There is a gap here – between the vox pops on the TV and the underlying reality.

Probability is not something that comes naturally to human beings. It is not intuitive in the way that arithmetic is. When we think about it, we filter events through all sorts of cognitive biases. The day after a plane crash is statistically the safest day to fly, but because we have seen a burning fuselage on the TV, we decide that flying is more dangerous than it really is and think about taking the train.

The bias of football fans is different. Already wanting their team to win, they look for evidence to confirm their belief. A victory is always useful to this end, but probably not sufficient, so conversations take on a more qualitative flavour. It is not that England won that guarantees their eventual overall victory, but the way that they won. Across the land fans will latch on to one passage of play and use it to explain why the Three Lions are going all the way this year.

It is not what you don’t know, they say, that hurts you, but what you know that just ain’t so. All the beautifully weighted passes, perfectly struck penalties or inspiring half-time talks do not alter the fact that the team are unlikely to win. And what do we will do then?

We’ll get upset. For every picture of a victorious team lifting the cup, there is one of their opponents’ fans looking distraught. Footage of a young Turkish fan’s tears went viral after his team lost their Gallipoli re-match with Australia. The lows of fandom are every bit as low as the highs are high. They might not be if we didn’t under-estimate their likelihood. But we do, trapped in a cycle of hope and despair. They’re a lot more common too.

Put this way, fandom is an odd phenomenon. We generally avoid things which are likely to hurt us – nobody intentionally picks a pan off a hot stove with their bare hands on the off chance it won’t burn them this time. History and probability are, in such cases, sufficient authorities to guide our actions.

But the pay-off structure to fandom is slightly different to that of a war against the laws of thermodynamics. There may not be a huge chance of England lifting the trophy, but it is much better than that of my hand emerging unscathed from an encounter with a hot pan. And there is the benefit of belonging.

Fandom is a tribal phenomenon. It sorts a small band of “us” from a larger bunch of “them”. It has a uniform to mark out its members – Three Lions on my replica shirt. It has its rituals – “It’s coming home” becomes less a hope or prediction during tournaments, more an incantatory badge of identity (not dissimilar to Greek Orthodox Christians saying “Christos Anestei” (Christ is Risen) to everyone they meet on Easter morning).

And there is the belief that “our” lot are better than “their” lot – over-optimism is, like a pension release, a draw-down against future confirmation.

Tribes, though, love to impose a cost on their members. It separates those who really want to belong from those who are less committed. A fan who cries into his pint is a proper fan in a way in which one who says, “Oh well. Maybe next time” never will be. From a certain standpoint, the suffering isn’t a by-product, the suffering is the point.

To some, that may be worth it. Schopenhauer, never to be confused with a ray of sunshine, argued that pride in country was the fall-back position for those who have no reason to feel pride in self. Fandom can be a way of sharing in feats one’s day-to-day life does not offer. It certainly offers access to heightened emotional states which cannot be easily replicated on the 8:20 to the office in the morning.

But the need to belong is not evenly distributed across the population. For all those who are “England till I die”, there are a few Groucho Marx sorts who never wanted to join a club that would have them as a member. Nor is the need for emotional extremes. Some people are happy to forego the highs to be able to chop off the lows. If there is a tribal aspect to fandom, it is not just Arsenal vs. Tottenham, or even England vs. Germany (“Two world wars and one world cup”), it is also those who get something out of it, and those who feel they don’t. Or at least not at a price they’re willing to pay.

I have no plans to watch England’s matches. To my mind, they are a distraction from our proper business of inventing the future and nicking territory off our neighbours across the Channel.

But I will watch the Tour de France. I’ll be supporting Jonas Vingegaard. He probably won’t win – he is an exceptional human being, but Tadej Pogacar is an alien. Still, there’s always a chance. Isn’t there?

Happiness must always lie slightly beyond our control.

Stewart Slater works in Finance. He is now also on Substack, where you are welcome to follow him.

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(Photograph: Benh LIEU SONG, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

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