The Home of Football: How Globalisation has Impacted the English Football Team.

Abstract

By winning the World Cup at Wembley in 1966, the England team created arguably the most prideful postwar moment for fans, who saw the team as a symbol of national success (Armstrong and Giulianotti 1999). Since then, the England national team has experienced many highs and lows, and in recent years there has been a growing disinterest with the national team because of poor performances at international competitions. As England is culturally far different from the country it was in 1966, this paper aims to discover the impact that globalisation has had on national identity through Tajfel and Turner’s Social Identity Approach (1979). This theoretical framework aims to explain how individuals behave and group themselves in regards to the social world. Drawing upon the ideas of the Social Identity Approach helped gain a better understanding of attitudes towards the English national team and what had caused these to change over time.