It’s Coming Where The Heart Is.
On the strange drama of being Anglo-Italian on Sunday.
Fifteen years ago today, I sat in the back of my father’s black cab as we drove the streets of London in a kind of reverie. After the most stressful match to date in what was already then several years of my life spent obsessed with football, Italy had won the World Cup. I was eight, it was unlike anything I’d experienced before. London’s Italians, the most unrecognised and seemingly un-group-like of all of the capital’s many significant European diasporas, emerged from every street in every suburb to celebrate. We weaved through crowds becoming of a domestic win. It was pure emotion, and an expression of Italian identity that London has not seen since. For a child already beginning to grapple with the issue of identity, it seemed to present a clear answer as I watched the pride in my father’s face shine; “I live in London, but I am Italian”. In a search that would yet get far, far more complicated, it was a false dawn.
A decade and a half later, my father’s cab sits in a garage somewhere rusting — a casualty of the Covid-triggered collapse of London’s traditional nightlife and the much longer-term nemesis to the industry that is Uber. As the world grows beyond your childhood and the things you always presumed stable, so too do you grow beyond your ideas of yourself, no matter how instilled they are. There is certainly no part of me now that would rally to my Italian identity at the expense of the identity within which I have both grown up and become the version of myself that I recognise as truly me ; British, and, in some meaningful way, English. But it is harder to let go of your childhood footballing memories than any half-formed notions of identity your eight-year-old self had. Indeed, so wrapped up are they in emotion and time and profound nostalgia that they linger in your soul like a childhood toy buried deep in a draw, refuting by its very existence the logic of it being thrown away.
So, whenever Italy play, my heart still beats faster. Even as the players get less instantly recognisable to me, and the relationship I have with the very ideas that seem to dominate the modern culture of the paternal fatherland get more strained, I still feel that loyalty to the memory of a team that changed my young life. I remember standing on a beach in Salerno, begging my dad for a Materazzi shirt (weird, I know). I remember how it felt to wear it back here in the U.K. — as though I was somehow part of an elite footballing era that, despite my comfort and pride in my home, was somehow incompatible with English football.
It was both sheer luck and the kind of coincidence that defines the stories we tell ourselves about our lives that some particularly personally formative years coincided with the rebirth of England as an international competitor. Indeed, it has extra resonance because of its coincidence with the Brexit years. Through that tumult, and the decision to take part in it as a campaigner, I came to a much more honest Englishness with myself. It is one that takes stock of the fact that I am wrapped up in the reality of having being born and raised here, and that is prouder of the culture and life here than many who are born solely of it. It was in this that I realised identity is what you, personally, experience and have experienced, and that no external voice or set of monolithic forms can define that against your own expression.
I spent those years fighting for exactly the kind of openness to identity that a modern Anglo-Italian ends up living with, not through being some woke internationalist but simply by the hard reality of having family (and as such, stories, myths and histories) scattered across a larger-than-one-nation-sized map. The so-called Citizens of Nowhere are more emotionally invested in the many somewheres we inhabit than the narrative would have us portrayed as. Indeed, as every child of immigrants has recognised at some point in their journey, the emotions of growing up and detaching, re-attaching, and detaching again from one culture in response to its clash with another is a personal psychodrama that, whilst rich and useful for evolving as a person, is filled with exhaustion, pathos and a fair bit of trauma too. It is certainly not fun, woke virtue-signalling, and whilst critics think Anglo-Europeans sneer at Englishness, the reality is that many I’ve known have been jealous of such a stable and cohesive identity.
So, on Sunday, I will cheer for England with all that is in my soul because those boys with Three Lions on their chest grew up at the same time as me, on the same romantically-grey secondary school pitches as me. Indeed many of them had the same conflicting upbringing as me, presumably having to remind not just the right-wing press but themselves that they are English enough because it was here, in this country, with its greatest opportunities and its most heart-breaking flaws, that they came of age, fell in love, and grew into the people they are today. I will stand with the people I love and who make up my community, and I will rejoice or mourn with them in turn. I am being compelled to, and finally have to allow myself to, let go of that eight-year-old me. In the coming fight of the highest sporting stakes between him and the person I am now, I have to be honest with myself about who I really do want to win. I want it to come home, to this home, my home.
Whether as an Anglo-Italian you conceptualise this final as a heart-breaking clash between two sides of a family, or a difficult but necessary moment in which you have to choose where your true colours lie (and bear all of the emotion of a lifetime’s psychodrama related to that), I hope you find that people respect and understand that this is more than just a minor decision. I hope you invoke Arrigo Sacchi’s great maxim if anyone doesn’t — that “football is the most important of the unimportant things in life”.
