The arrogance and inaccuracy of ‘football’s coming home’

Three decades after Frank Skinner, David Baddiel and the Lightning Seeds first sang that football was “coming home”, the lyrics are being belted out again during the World Cup in the US, Canada and Mexico.

In the Radio Times, Baddiel, one of the song’s co-writers, said that English people “feel, with this game, that essentially: it’s our ball” and that “football is ours. We codified it. We gave it to the world.” But critics say it is “mistaken” to claim that England is the home of football, said Sky News.

Scottish professors

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That chimes with the fact that the “English football public has a certain reputation globally”, said The Athletic. “There is an assumption of arrogance, of high expectations, of going into every major tournament presuming their team will win it.”

It’s also wrong to claim that England is the home of football, Hamish Husband, from the Scottish football magazine Tartan Army, told Sky News, because a group of footballers in the 19th century, known as the “Scotch professors”, were pioneers of the modern passing game.

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Their new tactics were adopted by Scotland before spreading across Europe and other continents. “It was the travellers that worked the factories of the UK that took football to the world – not England”, he said.

A letter written by Reverend Samuel Rutherford in the 1600s, “holds the key to Scotland’s claim”, wrote Tom Burrows on BBC Newsround. He complained about people who gathered to play football on Sunday afternoons near Anwoth Kirk, his church. The site can “reasonably claim to be the earliest” game of football, said William Wyeth, a curator of history at English Heritage.

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To bolster Scotland’s claim, archaeologists doing building works at Stirling Castle found a football behind a wood panel built in the 1540s. It was “made of pieces of leather sewn together, more like football that we know today”. Also, the first modern football club that’s “widely recognised as such” was founded in Edinburgh in 1824.

But the roots of the beautiful game may stretch back much further. More than 2,500 years ago, the Chinese played “tsu chu”, or “kickball”. The earliest reference to organised ball games in England comes in around 1174, said Simon Inglis on English Heritage.

But “we can’t be sure” whether these games in England involved “kicking, as well as handling, the ball”. A woodcut from 1612, which refers to “country swaines at footeball”, shows the players “using hands” as in volleyball. So was it called “footeball” because the “players played on foot, rather than because they played it exclusively with their feet”?

However, football’s “global spread” couldn’t have happened without the “evangelical efforts of British entrepreneurs, teachers, engineers, soldiers and sailors, who took the sport to Europe, South America and all corners of the Empire”.

On the charge of arrogance, yes, it’s true that people hear the song as a statement that England “view winning as the rightful outcome, and that anyone else winning is somehow wrong”, said The Athletic. But England fans themselves “simply do not see the song that way”. “The whole point of it is looking back on past glories and melancholy,” one fan told the outlet. “It’s not a triumphant song at all.” But “if English is your second language, I get why people would misunderstand it.”

Another long-standing England fan told the outlet she found the controversy entertaining. “I find it quite funny that people get upset about it,” she said. “I actually enjoy using the phrase just to wind up international colleagues!”