UK
“Have you noticed how we only win the World Cup under a Labour government?”
JUNE 5, 2026
Politicians seldom get it right when they talk about football, argues Mark Perryman.
In March 1966 Harold Wilson’s Labour Party won a landslide victory and just four months later Harold was there to celebrate when England for the first, and to date last, time lifted the World Cup at Wembley.
Never mind the (disgraced) Peter Mandelson, England’s victory spurred Harold to the greatest piece of Labour spin-doctoring ever. Of course, Harold had been at the Final; infamously Harold sent one of his advisers to the BBC matchday studio to suggest he join commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme for some half-time punditry – an invitation that was promptly turned down. Perhaps they lacked the silky charm of (disgraced) Peter Mandelson?!
Four years later, most unwisely Labour risked their 1970 General Election chances by choosing a date slap-bang in the middle of England’s defence of their World Cup at Mexico 1970. The quarter-final defeat to West Germany was widely blamed for Labour’s defeat just four days later.
Yes, really. Wilson’s Minister of Sport, and former League referee, Denis Howell, was better-placed than most to justify the impact: “The moment goalkeeper Bonetti made his third and final hash of it on the Sunday, everything simultaneously began to go wrong for Labour for the following Thursday.”
Labour and football, eh? Be careful what you wish for. Still at least 1970 General Election victor Ted Heath and his sundry Tory Prime Minister successors have proved incapable of robbing Harold’s sound-bite of it’s enduring truth.
But any kind of relationship between politics and international football in the particular context of England has a broader purpose than simply, win lose or draw supposedly being dependent on the party in government at the time.
There is one crucial word that Harold gets spectacularly wrong: ‘we’. Great Britain is unique in international football, represented by four – and for the purposes of football at least – independent nations: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. It doesn’t require either pedantry or nationalism to recognise this. It’s a fact perhaps lost on Harold, or Keir, who every time a summer football tournament comes around will promptly, and very publicly, choose an England shirt for his go-to leisure wear. This tells us, or at least it should, everything we need to know about Labour Unionism.
Gordon Brown might have thought he was being helpful travelling out to support England at World Cup 2006 as the British Prime Minister. Precious few England fans were won over while in his native Scotland it went down like a lead proverbial. Of course, not all Scotland fans are nationalists. But when in 1992 Jim Sillars lost his Govan seat that he’d won in an infamous 1988 SNP by-election defeat of Labour and angrily described the Tartan Army as “90-minute nationalists,” it was a very different era to now. The SNP are no longer a minor party, but, via the Scottish Parliament, a governing party with a formidable number of MPs at Westminster. If Harold could have got away with ‘we’ in 1966, in Scotland, Wales and the North of Ireland, he certainly couldn’t today; yet Keir wears his `England shirt regardless.
Such confusion is both muti-faceted and deep-rooted in Englishness. World Cup Quiz question: which is the only team at this summer’s tournament to line up before kick-off without a National Anthem of their own for them and their fans to belt out? England! God Save the King is the National Anthem of the United Kingdom, not England and just try asking the Scotland team to dop Flower of Scotland to join in too!
This isn’t pedantry, it gets to the core of Englishness, a contradictory mix of nationalism and unionism. The most vivid example of this is the spate of hanging flags, Union Jacks and St George Crosses, from lamp posts in a movement to ‘Unite the Kingdom’. Much of this is wrapped up in a version of English patriotism which does little to distinguish itself from bad old-fashioned racism.
Contrast this to what Harold’s ‘we’ has become. The Wembley 1966 final was full of Union Jacks, the St George scarcely present. The tournament mascot ‘World Cup Willy’ wore a Union Jack. Yes, the only time England has not only won, but hosted too a World Cup and the FA got our flag wrong!
Few England fans this summer will make this mistake: the St George Cross is Universal, home and away. And in sheer numbers it will absolutely dwarf those of the lamp post hangers too. And the purpose dwarves them too. A St George Cross celebrating a multicultural team managed by a German on its own doesn’t make for an anti-racist, Europeanised nation, but given the popular-political will is a very welcome first step in both directions.
In July 2024 Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won a landslide victory and just two years later Keir was there to celebrate when England for the second time lifted the World Cup at the New York New Jersey stadium.
Well, that’s one Labour pledge all of England can get behind.
Mark Perryman is the co-founder of the self-styled ‘ sporting outfitters of intellectual distinction’ aka Philosophy Football.
Special Offer The Philosophy Football Harold Wilson T-shirt is available to Labour Hub readers at 25% off and postage free. Quote coupon code LHWC26 at checkout. From here.
Borders, Ballgames and Global Players
Victor Wembenyama at 2025 NBA Cup. Photograph Source: Daiei Onoguchi – CC BY 4.0
The upcoming June 14 vote on limiting Switzerland’s population to 10 million is a daily reminder here in Geneva that nativist populism remains a powerful political force. In France, Marine Le Pen continues to build support on anti-immigration politics. Nigel Farage pushes similar anxieties in Britain. The AfD does the same in Germany. Donald Trump’s version is familiar: build walls, tighten borders, send ICE into cities. Across much of the West, hostility toward foreigners has become ordinary politics.
Which is why the recent announcement of the National Basketball Association’s All-NBA First Team was so striking. At the very moment politics is warning against outsiders, American sports is celebrating them. Four of the five players selected to the NBA’s top team were born outside the United States. The city game has gone global. (The phrase city game for basketball was popularized in Pete Axthelm’s The City Game, his classic account of New York basketball in the late 1960s.)
Chosen by a panel of 100 sportswriters and broadcasters covering the league, the All-NBA First Team included: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander of the Oklahoma City Thunder, from Canada; Nikola Jokić of the Denver Nuggets, from Serbia; Victor Wembanyama of the San Antonio Spurs, from France; Luka Dončić of the Los Angeles Lakers, from Slovenia. Only Cade Cunningham of the Detroit Pistons was American. Four of the league’s five best players were born abroad, representing four countries and starring in four different American cities.
That is not symbolic. It reflects a broader reality. As of the 2025–26 season, 135 NBA players were born outside the United States, the highest number in league history. They come from 43 countries across six continents. Roughly one in four players in the NBA is now international.
Now, for those who are not basketball fans, allow me to briefly explain the importance of basketball in the United States. It is one of America’s defining sports: invented in Springfield, Massachusetts, and perfected on playground courts like Rucker Park in Harlem. As Vinson Cunningham observed, “Basketball is one of New York’s great public spectacles: you can’t walk far without passing a hoop.” It is American in origin and mythology, embedded in the streets of New York, Detroit, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Yet the league’s brightest stars increasingly arrive with accents, translators, and passports from elsewhere.
My beloved New York Knicks reflect the same global pattern: OG Anunoby was born in London, Pacôme Dadiet in France, Ariel Hukporti in Germany, and Karl-Anthony Towns represents the Dominican Republic in international competition.
Although New York’s Madison Square Garden (MSG) is considered the sport’s Mecca, the sport reaches far beyond cities. Even in Midwestern rural states like Indiana, basketball courts are woven into everyday life in countless driveways. “Mr. Indiana Basketball” is a major statewide honor—closer to a civic title than a routine sports award. (For anyone curious about Indiana basketball culture, Gene Hackman’s Hoosiers remains the reference point.)
Basketball is not a simple sports niche—it is a major entertainment industry. The NBA Finals regularly draw between 10 and 20 million U.S. viewers per game. The NBA generates billions in annual revenue; franchise valuations are among the highest in global sports, with a huge merchandising market (jerseys, sneakers, etc.).
Basketball is not alone in this globalization. The pattern of more and more foreign stars repeats in what has long been considered the American sport, baseball. On Major League Baseball’s opening day in 2026, 249 players—26.3 percent of the league—were born outside the United States. The Dominican Republic led with 93 players, Venezuela had 60, Cuba 20, Canada 19, and Japan 14. Others came from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Panama, Curaçao, Colombia, South Korea, Australia, Aruba, the Bahamas, Honduras, Nicaragua, Taiwan, and South Africa.
The reigning king of American baseball is a non-American. Shohei Ohtani, born in Japan, is now arguably the most extraordinary player the sport has ever seen. Both an elite pitcher and an elite hitter, Ohtani rightly challenges Babe Ruth as the sport’s greatest player. He is already a four-time Most Valuable Player winner. More and more postgame interviews now happen through translators because many of the game’s biggest stars, like Ohtani, are not native English speakers.
Politicians increasingly tell voters to fear foreigners. In Switzerland, we are told non-Swiss workers cause traffic jams and drive up housing costs. But Switzerland’s own national soccer team offers a similar picture of globalization. Several of its most prominent players have dual citizenship or family roots abroad. Yet the same anti-immigration voters will root for the entire team during the upcoming World Cup.
Like Swiss soccer fans, Americans cheer foreign-born athletes not despite where they come from but because of what they bring: talent, discipline, style, and victory. Tens of thousands of fans in Oklahoma City rise for a Canadian. Denver adores a Serbian. San Antonio chants for a Frenchman. Los Angeles embraces a Slovenian. Baseball stadiums roar for a Japanese superstar.
Sports does not erase xenophobia. It does not resolve the asylum debate or settle border politics despite the Olympic ideal. There is an important paradox. The rhetoric of exclusion collides every day with a simpler reality: people admire excellence wherever it comes from when it helps their team win. The crowds see winners before they see nationality, even as many of them vote for politicians running on xenophobia. U.S. sports crowds—many of whom voted for Trump and admire his hard line on immigration—seem perfectly happy cheering non-Americans.
The NBA’s first team may say something larger about the country. Politicians may still campaign on borders and walls. Donald Trump and Stephen Miller may continue to denigrate foreigners, but America’s sports fans keep rooting for the world.
To understand the importance of the Knicks to New York, see The New Yorker editor David Remnick’s recent description of the first time the Knicks won the NBA crown: “May 8, 1970, was the night of all sporting New York nights,” he wrote. “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive! So proclaimed the voices of the Knicks: John F. X. Condon at the Garden, Marv Albert on the air.”
How I remember that night! “Bliss it was to be alive.” After decades of waiting to see the Knicks back in the Finals and more than half a century since we last won the title, I just want my team to win this year, no matter who hits the winning baskets, American or otherwise. Go Knicks!
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