Why do some of us support our national teams – and why don’t we all?

This article has been updated as part of our Euro 2024 and Copa America coverage, after originally being published in 2022.

Why do we support national football teams? It seems like a simple enough question.

When I asked my six-year-old, Arsenal-obsessed nephew why he supports England he looked at me, slightly baffled. “Because we live here,” he replied, making me feel like an idiot for even asking the question.

When this feature was first proposed I had a similar reaction, but when I started speaking to people from countries around the world it became clear that supporting your national football team is sometimes far from simple.

Sometimes it’s difficult and divisive. Sometimes club loyalties become a barrier. And sometimes it’s so entwined with politics and posturing that supporting means making a statement some fans aren’t prepared to make.

Yet sometimes supporting a national team means so much more to people than simply allying themselves to the place they call home. Sometimes it’s about being part of something overwhelmingly positive and unifying in a world that can feel like neither of these things.

Not as simple as it first seems, then.

In seeking some answers to this sizeable question, I’ve spoken to a handful of people from a small number of nations. It is by no means an exhaustive or conclusive discussion (my word count doesn’t quite allow for that), but it does provide insight into the complexities surrounding national football.

My first port of call is British author and sociologist David Goldblatt, an expert in the history and politics of world football.

He says: “In a way to answer this question is to answer the question, ‘Why is football the most popular, popular cultural phenomena in the world?’.

“And once you’ve answered that question, it’s almost a no-brainer to say that in a world which is divided into nation states in which national identities remain — despite the globalisation of the world — the primary form of identity for most people in most parts of the world, it’s not really surprising that the national football team, particularly on the global stage, becomes the number one popular space in which conceptions of the nation and national identity are formulated and imagined.”

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That brings its own set of difficulties, says Goldblatt: “Because once football becomes a space in which national identities are reproduced, imagined and invented, they become a place of political theatre and political contestation, because rarely is there a single model or understanding of what the nation is.

“Nothing could illustrate that better than the taking of the knee at the 2020 Euros when 20 per cent of the crowd are booing, and we know what kind of version of the English nation they represent, and then 80 per cent of the crowd start clapping and drowning them out; extraordinary public theatre.”

Despite this element of division, Goldblatt disputes the idea that in England, where the Premier League reigns supreme and Champions League football is placed on a pedestal, international football and supporting the national team is a less tantalising prospect than it has ever been.

“Supporting club football is great,” he says. “You have your local club community in the stadium and online, and that’s great. But in the end, it’s not that many people, compared to 25 million people watching the game.

“Part of the appeal of football in the 21st century is that it’s one of the rare places in which we feel part of a collective. And we all feel like we’re all part of more than one collective. And the biggest collective of all, that most of us feel part of, is the nation.”

At no time does that become clearer than during a major international tournament.

“It’s really interesting how people who are not really engaged with club football become part of the ‘we’,” says Goldblatt. “My kids don’t like football, for all sorts of good reasons, but when it comes to the World Cup, suddenly it’s ‘we’. And that goes for a lot of people. I think people want to be part of it.

“There is a hunger in an individualised world for those kinds of collective experiences.”

In Spain, that collective experience gets more complicated, as one of The Athletic’s La Liga correspondents, Irish-born Dermot Corrigan, explains: “Most Irish people support the Irish national team without thinking about it too much, but in Spain, because of the different cultures and histories with Basque people and Catalan people, it can be quite different.

“For instance, some Basque people wouldn’t bother watching Spain playing on the TV. It wouldn’t be quite the same situation with Catalans, but until the likes of Xavi, (Andres) Iniesta and (Gerard) Pique were in the team around a decade ago, there also wouldn’t have been quite as much fervour around the Spanish national team in Catalonia as in Madrid, Andalusia, or different places like that.”

In March 2022, Spain played their first game in Catalonia for 18 years, when they faced Albania in a friendly on the outskirts of Barcelona. “But they hadn’t played a game in the Basque country in decades,” says Corrigan. “Spain is quite divided politically as well, between Left and Right, going back to the Civil War, and people on the more conservative Right political side will be much more likely to support the national team and to wear the national flag.”

Corrigan believes the strength of feeling around the national team has intensified over the 14 years he’s lived in Spain, with towns and people decked out in national colours when the team plays a match there. “It’s a little bit like when English teams go away, but even more so. And my impression is that that has happened partly because the team started to do very well. But also because of people in Catalonia looking to break away (from Spain).

Real Madrid’s Spanish defender Dani Carvajal looks at Barcelona supporters waving Catalan pro-independence flags during El Clasico in 2019 (Jose Jordan/AFP via Getty Images)

“So there is more of a focus on Spanish nationalism as almost like the mirror image of Catalan nationalism. People are more openly proud of being Spanish, identifying more with the flag and with the national team.”

A more united sense of nationalism can be found in Wales, where the Football Association of Wales announced in 2022 that it was considering changing the name of the national team to Cymru (the Welsh word for Wales), and where there has been a change in the way fans support the team.

Author and commentator Bryn Law says supporting the national team was, until recent years, the preserve of a small, hardcore group of fans. “It was very easy not to support Wales, because Wales as a football nation was not a great success,” he says. “People might have followed the fortunes of Wales but they wouldn’t really declare themselves a fan. It wasn’t something that people were particularly invested in, but there was a real hardcore.

“And for a lot of them, it was maybe about a bit more than just the football. It was about declaring their support for this nation from which they came.”

One fan, Tim Williams, created a slogan — “independent football nation” — which became popular among fans. Law says: “That idea of this being an independent football nation is important because so much of what is in Wales is not really independent. So the people who were supporting the Wales team maybe had a concept of Wales as a nation in all aspects, not just in a footballing sense. It was something to attach yourself to, if that was how you felt.”

Some of the recent impetus for using the football team to communicate national pride came during the qualification campaign for Euro 2016, when Gareth Bale, Aaron Ramsey and Joe Allen gave fans the sense that something different was building. Law was in France for the tournament, where Wales got to the semi-finals, and felt that support was more unified than before.

Gareth Bale celebrates after the Euro 2016 qualifier against Andorra in 2015 (Catherine Ivill/ AMA via Getty Images)

“It was Welsh support from all parts of Wales,” he says, “Which hadn’t always been the case. We’d had big divisions previously, even in a tiny fanbase, where you’d have the Welsh-speaking northwest Walians in a group, the English-speaking northeast Walians in a group, and the Cardiff City fans in a group. While Swansea City fans barely travelled.

“So even within this small group of people travelling you had cliques and divisions. One of the things that we’ve seen in recent times is that all of that has pretty much gone now,” says Law.

While Law was at the Euros in 2016 he also met two Taiwanese fans who were wearing Wales shirts. He discovered that they were fans of Bale and had come to see him play for Wales. “I took a picture with them,” he says, “And that’s still my screensaver picture, because that was the moment when I realised that other people were now buying into this concept of this team. Bale is the entry for so much of that.

“When he won the Champions League with Real Madrid, he would always end up with a Wales flag at the end of the game while they were celebrating. And those things are significant because people then ask, ‘What’s that? What’s he holding there?’. Then they make the association between Bale and Wales and want to maybe find out more.”

Some of the themes Law speaks about can be seen in other countries where independence is a huge factor in their identity and history. Amine El Amri is a Moroccan football journalist who says the way some people support the national team is linked to when the country was occupied by France. “Football was, at that time, a special way to express themselves and to say, ‘We don’t like it this way. We’re wanting to be independent’,” he says.

The Moroccan national team was founded in 1928, when the country was still under occupation. They played their first game against the B team of France, losing 2-1. In 1954 a team comprising Moroccans, Algerians and Tunisians played against France in Paris to raise money for the victims of an earthquake in Algeria. This time, they won.

“I think it started from there,” says El Amri. “And then with the whole context of the ‘New World’, after the Second World War, I think everybody identified to this team, which represented the whole nation.”

That strength of feeling is still there now, says El Amri, describing a “crazy love” for the national team that can sometimes lead to unrealistic expectations. “In Morocco, we say that we love everything that is aesthetic and cute and beautiful, instead of sometimes more efficient things. So when we love our national team, we love it to produce the best ever football.

“Of course, it’s not possible because we’re not a football nation in terms of how big football has become in the past two or three decades. So we’re still on this romantic relationship with our national team.”

Morocco fans during 2022 World Cup semi-final loss to France (Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images)

El Amri believes younger people have developed a stronger connection to the national team than felt by his generation, who are now in their forties and fifties. “Because my generation grew up watching Morocco playing not very well — for example, we missed the World Cup for 20 years between 1998 and 2018. Now, because of social media, players, information and the news of players everywhere they play is more accessible, and so young people identify more to them, hence follow them more than my generation.”

It’s also easier to identify with a team that wins.

In 1986, Morocco reached the last 16 of the World Cup in Mexico.

Eighteen years later, the men’s team reached the Africa Cup of Nations final, finishing as runners-up to tournament hosts Tunisia. They then finished fourth at the 2022 World Cup, becoming the first African and Arab nation to do so. Morocco’s women then reached the last 16 in their debut World Cup appearance last year.

These tournaments captivated the country. “But from 2004 until 2018, we haven’t gotten much to watch because the team was losing pretty much all the time,” says El Amri. “Even when we qualified to the AFCON we were getting out in the first round. So there was this gap between the national team and its supporters. They were disappointed and disappointment grew to be some kind of un-love between supporters and the national team.

“But since 2016, 2017 a new generation has risen and a new generation also of supporters has risen, so it goes both ways. Obviously when you lose nobody really follows what you’re doing but when you’re winning everybody does.”

The sense of national pride that Law and El Amri describe isn’t always comfortable for football fans.

Germany are hosting Euro 2024 this summer and The Athletic’s Raphael Honigstein, who was born in Munich, describes how his connection with the national team was initially a difficult one.

“I used to have a weird relationship with them,” he says. “Just like many of my generation, patriotism was a little bit frowned upon because of the world wars. People tried to not go too close to flags and things like that. And the German national team in the 1980s and early 1990s attracted the worst kind of people who loved all that stuff.

“Obviously, you want them to win because they’re your team. But at the same time, it was always a bit strange.”

It was around 2006, the year that Germany hosted the World Cup, that Honigstein felt a change. Players such as Lukas Podolski, Bastian Schweinsteiger and Philipp Lahm were easy to like and not the “alpha male” types that populated the team in previous decades. A managerial team of Jurgen Klinsmann and Oliver Bierhoff brought a “sense of modernity”, according to Honigstein, moving it away from a history that prompted complex emotions.

Fans at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin after Germany finished third in the World Cup in 2006 (Sean Gallup via Getty Images)

“They almost treated it as a startup,” he says. “And it was easier to get on board with that revolution and sense of something being done differently, against the way of the establishment, against Bild, against all the old talking heads who are saying, ‘No, no, this is all wrong because we used to always do it this way’.

“Suddenly, there was a new relaxed, carnivalesque and kind of peaceful way of engaging with the national team. And the flag became just colours.”

So popular was this new Germany team says Honigstein, that “even Turkish guys in places like Berlin and Cologne were suddenly flying the Germany flag. Even they could get behind it, and that was a big thing”.

He adds: “People don’t feel it’s something taboo or forbidden to associate with Germany as an idea.”

Which brings us to England.

Paul Hayward has chronicled the team in his book England Football The Biography, 1872-2022. He’s included a chapter on England fans which has the heading: “Unruly fans and the burden of shame.”

“Not many countries would say, necessarily, that they have a burden of shame from their own following,” he tells The Athletic. “But that’s certainly true with England.”

Hayward describes how England fans up until the 1960s were a “benign” presence at games, often out-sung, out-shouted and intimidated at opposing grounds. It was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the England Supporters Club in the early 1960s — a decision that was greeted with delight by then England captain Jimmy Armfield.

“There is no doubt that footballers respond to support from the crowd,” Armfield said. “And it’s a thing that is lacking from international crowds in this country. Even when we play in the home internationals it’s the Scots, Irish and Welsh who get the enthusiastic following. When England play, well, they only seem to get a polite hand clap.”

When England won the World Cup in 1966, Hayward describes how fans reacted: “England and West Germany fans were completely intermixed. There was no fighting, no disorder. No hostility, really. So the 1960s was the last decade in which England fans could be seen as just like any other fans; posing no threat to anybody else and sort of benignly patriotic.”

That changed. “By the 1970s and 1980s, the England support base had been infected by this English nationalism,” says Hayward. “Often truculent nationalism. And supporting England was seen as a vehicle for imperialistic and nationalistic mindsets, and those mindsets transported themselves to whichever countries England happened to be playing in.

“So from then on the England team was followed by, certainly still an older element of peaceful, patriotic England diehards, but also this jingoistic nationalistic element, which went not to spectate, but to occupy.”

England fans display banners at the 1986 World Cup in Mexico (Mike King/Allsport via Getty Images)

Even decades later those elements can be heard at England games. “It’s better controlled now,” says Hayward, “but we still see it when people are singing songs about the IRA and 10 German bombers.

“When you hear those songs, and when you see that stance and the body language and the disdain for local customs and local people, you know it’s ingrained in England and English politics and English life, and it distills itself and assembles itself at England games still, although the mayhem it creates is slightly less.”

Hayward has covered the England men’s team since 1996 and says that although there will be huge numbers of England fans who don’t travel to games to occupy town squares, the tone is set by those who do, because “they make the most noise and drink the most”.

He says: “It will be saying to the locals effectively, ‘This is our place now, this belongs to us while we’re here, it doesn’t belong to you anymore’. And they take it over. And then they leave and they move on to the next country and do the same thing there. It’s a curious kind of occupying mindset that they have, almost like a colonising outlook.”

I spoke to one travelling fan, who gives his name as Mark, who has been part of the England Supporters Travel Club for over 20 years and been to every tournament the team has qualified for (bar the 2002 World Cup) since France ‘98. He’s in a group of 15 or 20 fans who go to the games together and says his experience “probably wouldn’t be viewed as typical” of some of the other England fans “who have, in many cases, a well-deserved reputation”.

“You’ll get people whose idea of a great away trip is to get to the main square or waterway, hang up the flags and then drink themselves into oblivion,” he says. “But you only have to go two, three, four streets back and you can find somewhere that’s a lot quieter and get a much better experience where you can interact with the locals, they’ll appreciate your business, and you’re less likely to get caught up in any bother where someone’s had too much to drink and starts to do some sort of antisocial behaviour.”

Hayward describes the well-behaved England fans as “remarkably resilient” in refusing to be “denied their pleasure and driven off the scene by behaviour that they don’t like and would reject”.

“These people are very devoted, and they’ve got a huge memory bank of following England. They follow England the way other people follow their club sides; they’re serious aficionados and they’re very loyal to the team.”

But as Hayward says, the most noise will always be made by (and about) the bad element, the one Mark does his best to avoid and which he worries is undergoing a resurgence. “I would say you’re getting a newer, younger generation of people that are reverting back to the bad old days,” he says.

“I see large numbers of youths representing their various domestic teams in the UK, and I’m not saying they’ve necessarily gone there to start trouble, but certainly they’re not averse to joining in on that and show no respect to the local environment. They really do bring an element of shame to England fans that continues to potentially spoil it for others.”

The situation across the Atlantic is somewhat different. “It is not a stretch to say that Mexico is the most popular national team in the United States,” says The Athletic’s MLS reporter Paul Tenorio.

Each year, Mexico go on an annual tour of the U.S., playing an average of five matches in key Hispanic market areas, with an average attendance of 64,000. They will co-host the 2026 World Cup with the U.S. and Canada, and are taking part in the Copa America this summer, also held in the States, as a guest nation.

“It really doesn’t matter where they play (in the United States),” says Tenorio. “You see when they play in Atlanta even, or in cities that aren’t typically known for enormous Mexican-American or Mexican communities, they still sell those games out. Whereas the U.S. plays games in MLS stadiums that have capacities of 30,000 or 27,000, Mexico are staging games at NFL stadiums because they can put 65,000, 70,000, 80,000 people in the stadium.”

Mexico and USA fans during a match between the teams in Los Angeles (Mike Nelson/AFP via Getty Images)

A lot of that is due to the history of the game in the U.S., where it is dwarfed by the NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball.

“When the U.S. plays a final against Mexico, it’s usually a 65-35 split, Mexico to the US,” says Tenorio. “The U.S. fans will come out, but there’s a different level of passion connected when it runs through your veins in the way that it does for people who have been raised on it for generations.

“I would also note that for a lot of Mexican people who live in the U.S., when you have a chance to get a taste of home when you’re an expat and living away from home and family, to go to a Mexico game is to reconnect to your roots to be a part of something that you only get a taste of living in the United States.”

Nine-time Copa America winners Brazil are one country where most people would assume support for the national team is a given; where everyone is united regardless of politics, club loyalties or historical context. But according to Brazilian football journalist Martin Fernandez, the relationship between the national team and football fans isn’t straightforward.

A lot of fans support their national team with vigour, but why? And why do some fans feel less enthusiastic? “If you ask most football fans in Brazil, ‘What do you prefer, your team to win the Copa Libertadores or Brazil to win the World Cup?’ most of the people will prefer their clubs to win a major title,” Fernandez tells The Athletic. “People are really passionate about their clubs, and it’s kind of like the national team doesn’t need you — doesn’t need your passion or your involvement.”

Part of that is a lack of connection with national team players, he explains, many of whom leave for Europe while young. “There are players that we barely remember playing here. Of course we remember Neymar. But for instance, Vinicius went from Flamengo to Real Madrid when he was 18, and Raphinha barely made the first league here.

“When he was first capped he was playing at Leeds United and most of the people here were like, ‘Who is this guy?’. And we find out that he’s pretty good.”

On top of that disconnect is the fact that when Brazil play at home, ticket prices can be very high, preventing many from attending. But the biggest issue is a calendar one, says Fernandez.

“We don’t respect international windows in the Brazilian football calendar,” he explains. “It’s a historical problem. We disrespect the FIFA international breaks so the league doesn’t stop during them. When a player that plays for Brazil is capped his team will play on without him. And the same goes with foreign players who play here.

“I know it’s crazy, but it’s like this. So people here want their players not to be capped because they don’t want their team to play without good players because of the national team. All that environment causes harm in this relation between the fans and the national team.”

The World Cup does bring some unity. It’s the only time when the league does stop, and fans are fully focused on the national team. “All this noise and conflict is around the qualifiers and Copa America because all of that for Brazil is not exactly hard,” says Fernandez. “But during the World Cup, yes, people are really enthusiastic and optimistic, and Brazilians feel that it’s not quite an obligation to win but something close to that.”

So sometimes we don’t support our national team and sometimes we feel we can’t. Sometimes it’s so ingrained in us that we can’t countenance any other way of being. Right at the beginning, while answering why we support national teams, Goldblatt said that the first question we have to answer is why football is the most popular cultural phenomena in the world. This is his answer:

“Because it’s the easiest to play, because it’s so forgiving of any territory, you can play it with any number, it’s a game of flow, it’s a three-dimensional game rather than a two-dimensional game. It’s absolutely hard-wired for upsets, last-minute turnarounds, in a way that nothing else quite is. And in the late 20th, early 21st century, nothing I think competes as far as I can see.”

(Top photo: Click Thompson/Getty Images)