Why are English football fans still so obsessed with Germany?
There were four German banners in the air. They were carried into the Westfalenstadion by local schoolchildren. Each banner had a huge gold star and a number: 54, 74, 90, 14. Germany were still world champions when England visited Dortmund for a friendly in March 2017 and everything about the occasion underlined the gulf in achievement between the nation who gave football to the world and the nation who took the game and made it their own. The match was relatively encouraging from an England viewpoint  a creditable performance even if it ended in a first defeat under Gareth Southgate  but these were two teams operating at different levels and with wholly different expectations. Those four banners represented Germanys four World Cups to Englands one. If they had wanted to go further, they could have paraded another three to mark their European Championship successes (to Englands none) and, even further, their seven runners-up spots across both tournaments (to Englands none). Little wonder that so many people across England felt a sense of dread last Wednesday when an evening of wild fluctuations and high drama ended with Germany not crashing out of Euro 2020  which was on course to happen until Leon Goretzkas late equaliser against Hungary  but as runners-up in Group F, setting them on course for Wembley on Tuesday evening. Not them! Anyone but them! went the cry and all the old memories and insecurities came flooding back. Gordon Bankss tummy bug, Gazzas tears, Southgates penalty, a grim afternoon in Bloemfontein  In terms of achievement on the international stage, England versus Germany is a mismatch. That was the case in the early days, when England won seven and drew the other of their first eight meetings with West Germany, culminating in their most famous victory of all, but since then the rivalry has been entirely one-sided. Of their 24 meetings since the 1966 World Cup final, Germany (West Germany until reunification in 1990) have won 15, including all the ones that mattered most  and perhaps it says something about those contrasting standards that Euro 96, when they beat England on penalties in the semi-final, is recalled far more affectionately here than there. When England lost to West Germany for the first time, in a friendly in Hanover in 1968, it was seen as a blemish, a mere hiccup while preparing for the European Championship finals, which the world champions expected to win (they didnt). Defeat in the World Cup quarter-final in 1970 was attributed to numerous factors  the loss of goalkeeper Banks to food poisoning, the substitution of Bobby Charlton at 2-1 up, the heat of Guanajuato  but not to the greater skills of Franz Beckenbauer, Wolfgang Overath, Uwe Seeler, Gerd Muller et al. A creeping sense of realisation only began to take hold two years later, when West Germany came to Wembley and, inspired by Gunter Netzer, played England off the park with what the French newspaper LEquipe called football from the year 2000. Even some of the English journalists were impressed, with Ian Wooldridge writing in the Daily Mail that this was a German team to make a nonsense of the pulp-magazine conception of the German character and to make a few million adults realise that their prejudices are as obsolete as Bismarcks spiked helmet. That pulp-magazine outlook sadly persisted  more on that later  but a grudging admiration took hold as the balance of power shifted dramatically. It added to English footballs growing sense of post-1966 neurosis: penalty shoot-outs, Germany, penalty shoot-outs against Germany. Football is a simple game, Gary Lineker once said. Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans win.  None of this, thankfully, will mean a great deal to Phil Foden, Bukayo Saka and a group of English players who understandably look non-plussed when we middle-aged journalists hit them with references to 1996, let alone any further back. Marcus Rashford, 23, says his first real memory of England at a major tournament was the 4-1 defeat by Germany in 2010 (when Manuel Neuer and Thomas Muller, who will be in the opposition ranks on Tuesday, were part of a brilliant young team that would win the World Cup four years later). In terms of caps, Rashford is the fifth most experienced player in this England squad. Jordan Henderson, the second-oldest member of this squad, was born in the summer of 1990, a couple of weeks before that famous, tear-stained semi-final in Turin. He faintly remembers Euro 96, but he struck the right note on Monday when he dismissed the past as an irrelevance for him and his team-mates ahead. For us as players, we dont really tend to think too much about the history. Its about the here and now, he said. We dont get too caught up on the history and what has happened previously.  And yet history dominates the media and public discourse ahead of Tuesday night: not just 2010, 1996, 1990 and 1966 but, depressingly, 1939-45 and 1914-18. It is as if the country hasnt moved on from the small-minded, nationalistic outlook that the Daily Mail journalist Vincent Mulchrone was trying to satirise, rather than indulge, when he began his column on the morning of the 1966 World Cup final with the spine-chilling words If the Germans beat us at our national game today, we can always console ourselves with the fact that we have twice beaten them at theirs.  Mulchrone felt the World Cup had encroached more deeply into the inward-looking British temperament than any international event since the one we now know as World War Two. Indeed it has been war. And a very valuable little war too, if only because it showed us how nationalism can raise its idiot cry over a cowhide. And Im not thinking about foreigners hanging trainers in effigy, or quaking Latin teachers finding they have urgent business in the Outer Hebrides. I mean us. Germany had the last laugh in 1996 after some questionable media coverage in the build-up (Photo: Getty Images)  Three decades later, though, when the European Championship took place on English soil, the build-up to that dramatic semi-final meeting with Germany was dominated by an infamous Daily Mirror front page: mocked-up pictures of Paul Gascoigne and Stuart Pearce in Brodie helmets under the headline ACHTUNG SURRENDER! For you, Fritz, ze Euro 96 is over. Had it not been for the widespread condemnation that followed, not least from within the England camp, the pulp-magazine stuff would have gone further. Piers Morgan, who at the time was the papers 31-year-old editor, later revealed he had also approved plans for a Mirror-sponsored Spitfire to dive-bomb the German training ground and drop copies of that front page on Jurgen Klinsmanns head  oh, and for a Mirror-sponsored tank to invade the Berlin offices of our German tabloid rival Bild. These plans were abandoned at the last moment, he said, when the rest of the country suffered a catastrophic sense of human failure. A few days later, after the two teams fought out an epic tussle that ended in agony for Southgate and a whole nation, Beckenbauer said, All that stuff about Stukas, Panzers and war doesnt bother us. We leave that to the English.  The war references sounded crass and horribly misjudged by 1996. And yet ten years later there were England fans who took great delight in evoking the war throughout the World Cup in Germany, chanting Two World Wars and one World Cup and that risible Ten German bombers song over and over. It was the same on away days in Berlin in 2008 and 2016, and Dortmund in 2017. Ten German bombers has been heard inside and outside Wembley since Euro 2020 began. To a section of Englands support, it is still 1946, never mind 1966. I read about the old war songs being sung, Dr Rainer Emig, professor of British literature at the University of Regensburg, tells The Athletic. Germans find it very puzzling. Its a nostalgic fixation on a past that never was.  David Goldblatt, the sociologist and author of The Game of Our Lives: The English Premier League and the Making of Modern Britain, says, There is a constituency of the England fanbase which is still wedded to those old narratives. Its all the same stuff that everyone else could see was crap in 1996, but they still lap it up a quarter of a century later. Among my kids generation, Germany is a cool, exciting place with funky techno music. You tell them English football fans are singing about the war and they say really! ?  Rashford and his team-mates would share that sense of disdain. Two of them, Jadon Sancho and Jude Bellingham, moved to Borussia Dortmund at the age of 17 in the belief  entirely correct, it transpires  that Germany offered an opportunity to broaden their horizons and enhance their development. Goldblatt calls this squad the most articulate, autonomous, socially astute group of English players Ive seen, likening them to the multicultural, multitalented group of German footballers who emerged around the start of the last decade. This evenings game is not a meeting of wartime enemies. It is a meeting of two nations who have contrasting claims to be European footballs dominant power. For England, it is about the rich history of the sport here, the depth of the club game and, increasingly over recent decades, the commercial and competitive might of the Premier League. For Germany, it is about the enormous success of their national team, as well as Bayern Munich on the European stage, and the pride they draw from a fan culture which draws heavily from English inspiration. In terms of football culture, we have so much more in common with Germany than with Italy or Spain, Goldblatt says. And not just because its lots of badly dressed men drinking beer and eating lots of pork products. Its the noise and intensity of the crowd, which is similar to what we like to think we have in England, and its also the football they play. Its that mixture of physicality and technique which English fans love.  It is to Germany that English football has looked extensively in trying to bridge the talent deficit that was exposed so glaringly at the 2010 World Cup. Whether directly in the cases of Sancho, Bellingham and those players who have come under Jurgen Klopps or Thomas Tuchels influence, or indirectly in the case of those players benefiting from German-inspired youth development methods, English football has finally begun to look outwards. As Southgate said in 2017, soon after taking charge of England, We have to get off the island and learn from elsewhere.  The next step, that long-awaited next step, is of course to shake off the psychological burden of English footballs past failures on the international stage. Winning a penalty shoot-out en route to the World Cup semi-final in 2018 felt like overcoming a significant hurdle. Beating Germany would be an even bigger one for a nation that has only done so once in a major tournament since 1966  and that was a particularly hollow victory during the Euro 2000 group stage, which ended in elimination for both  and has only won eight knock-out games in major tournaments (against Paraguay, Belgium, Cameroon, Spain, Denmark, Ecuador, Colombia and Sweden) over a period spanning 55 years. Not really. In fact, it sometimes feels as if the biggest mistake England  the manager, the players, the media, the fans  make is to regard themselves as Germanys equal, leading them to swagger into some of these encounters like one of those cocksure boxers who is unprepared for the step up in class when, after a few morale-boosting wins against lesser opponents, he enters the ring against a champion. In Bloemfontein in 2010, Wayne Rooney and his team-mates were certain their experience would give them the edge against a young German side. Instead they were thrashed 4-1. Outthought, outfought, outrun and comprehensively outplayed. It is a step up, particularly for those such as Declan Rice and Kalvin Phillips, who are experiencing an international tournament for the first time. And on this occasion, the English hope will be that these young players approach Germany unburdened by the historical baggage of the past  that they will show the right balance of respect and fearlessness, like a young England team featuring Rio Ferdinand, David Beckham, Paul Scholes, Steven Gerrard and Michael Owen did on a famous night in Munich in September 2001. Famous, yes, but ultimately inconsequential because the thing about that 5-1 victory in a World Cup qualifying match is that it was Germany, rather than England, who reached the final in Japan nine months later. And by that stage German football had already put in place the first foundation stones towards the reboot of their player-development programme. German football has had an impressive knack of ensuring that every cloud has a silver lining. For the England team, the reverse has usually been true. In terms of performance, that night in Munich arguably remains the high watermark of the England team in the 25 years since Euro 96. Even now, England fans sing about it (5-1, even Heskey scored) and, as with much else, their German counterparts chuckle or shrug with indifference. Better that, of course, than some of the jingoistic nonsense that threatens to raise its ugly head once more at Wembley this evening, but it really is high time that England turned the page of history when it comes to this one-sided rivalry  and gave their supporters something that is actually worth singing about. (Top photo: Ross Kinnaird/Getty Images)